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Girl Talk

"Feminist, funny and powerful."

Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon

More information

Description

  • Full Length Play
  • Comedy
  • 105 minutes

  • Time Period: 1950s, 19th Century, Contemporary
  • Target Audience: Adult
  • Set Requirements: Unit Set/Multiple Settings
  • Cautions: No Special Cautions

  • Performance Group:
  • Community Theatre, Shoestring Budget, Reader's Theatre, Blackbox / Second Stage /Fringe Groups, College Theatre / Student
Quandaries, surprises, intimate revelations -- and above all, friendship between women throughout their lives. These seven funny, sometimes poignant episodes begin with two twelve year old girls confronting puberty and end with a pair of feisty socialist octogenarians plotting their escape from a convalescent home.

In other scenes, women listen to the ominous ticking of their biological clocks, a jilted wife discovers that she misses her husband less than the best friend he left her for, a woman struggles with changes in her closest friendships, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas invite the audience to a private tête a tête in their famous salon, and a pair of Philadelphia ladies at the turn of the twentieth century leave their orderly lives for adventure in the wild west. 

This play is replete with strong, lively monologue and scene material, can be staged very simply -- and because of it's flexible structure, may be adjusted to suit particular needs regarding length of performance.
REVIEWS:

"For women a journey of recognition, for men a journey of discovery."

Daily Tidings, Ashland, Oregon

"Feminist, funny and powerful."

Southern Oregon University, Ashland, Oregon

"Women friends at different periods in their lives -- from young adolescence to mid-adulthood to old age, with each step as hilarious, invigorating and touching as the last."

Mills College, Oakland, California

Premiere Production: Mixed Company Productions, Ashland, Oregon, 1989.

Characters

  • Casting: 2F
  • Casting Attributes: Reduced casting (Doubling Possible), All Female, Local Celebrity Cameo, Flexible casting, Non-Traditional casting, Expandable casting
  • Casting Notes: 2 or more actors to play 12 characters

  • JENNY - A twelve year-old girl. She is energetic, self-absorbed, and very focused on her budding physical development.

  • GEORGIE - Jenny's best friend, also twelve. She appears younger than Jenny, and is somewhat tomboyish in manner. She is conspicuously less than delighted by Jenny's important news.

  • GRACE - A slightly disheveled, agitated, well-read feminist, around thirty years-old. She has a sense of humor.

  • MABEL REED - An unmarried Philadelphia lady, about twenty-four years-old. Mabel is sturdy, adventurous, and chaffing at the bond which she feels Philadelphia society places upon her.

  • MARY ENDICOTT ARNOLD - Mabel's best friend, also in her mid-twenties. Mary is a young society matron. She is a wife, a mother of young children, an artist, and an embracer of life, both past and present.

  • JUDY - A woman thirty-six years-old. She seems depressed and has a "space-y," distracted manner. She is given to self-dramatizing and fanciful imagery.

  • LIZ - Judy's best friend, a little older. She is sensible and practical in manner, and obviously used to being Judy's helpful support, though we can imagine their roles being reversed on another day.

  • LEILA - A woman almost forty-seven years-old. She is graceful, intelligent, and humorous, and her present concerns should be presented as an unusual disruption to a generally confident and secure sense of self.

  • GERTRUDE STEIN - In her sixties. She is confident, expansive and optimistic, and clearly used to leaving all practical details to Alice, whom she clearly adores.

  • ALICE B. TOKLAS - Also in her sixties. She is considerably smaller in stature than Gertrude, somewhat fussy, quietly vigilant, and has a slightly acerbic wit. She clearly adores Gertrude.

  • ROSA LOWENSTEIN - In her eighties, a widow, and determined to achieve peaceful senility, Rosa has just this very day signed into the senior home. Rosa works hard to maintain her thin veneer of sweet-little-old-ladyhood, but right beneath the surface she is a feisty, sarcastic, and clever New Yorker with decades of radical political action behind her.

  • EMMA VANDEVERE - Rosa's comrade and sometimes leader, Emma, is at least eighty, blind, a longtime widow, and always a schemer. She has been in the senior home for some time, and is very discontented. Emma combined her political views with a love of risk-taking and a ribald sense of humor.

    • Available Material

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    Girl Talk Script This is optional. Order Now

    Quandaries, surprises, intimate revelations -- and above all, friendship between women throughout their lives. These seven funny, sometimes poignant episodes begin with two twelve year old girls confronting puberty and end with a pair of feisty socialist octogenarians plotting their escape from a convalescent home.

    In other scenes, women listen to the ominous ticking of their biological clocks, a jilted wife discovers that she misses her husband less than the best friend he left her for, a woman struggles with changes in her closest friendships, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas invite the audience to a private tête a tête in their famous salon, and a pair of Philadelphia ladies at the turn of the twentieth century leave their orderly lives for adventure in the wild west. 

    This play is replete with strong, lively monologue and scene material, can be staged very simply -- and because of it's flexible structure, may be adjusted to suit particular needs regarding length of performance.

    		$24.95

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