Plays By Laura Shaine Cunningham [Paperback]

Laura Shaine Cunningham (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 31, 2004

this collection contains two full-length plays: BANG, BEAUTIFUL BODIES, and one long one-act: CRUISING CLOSE TO CRAZY

Editorial Reviews

Review

on BANG: Cunningham came up with the idea for this play while researching a story for the New York Times on survivalists, those people who are training and preparing so they can survive the end of the world. BANG is far from a documentary, however. Cunningham uses survivalists as the raw material for a preposterous black comedy that highlights one manifestation of our modern madness. --Tom Valeo, Chicago Herald

on BEAUTIFUL BODIES: Cunningham displays a knack for smart, catty chatter...the sophisticated and often funny repartee contribute to the play's swiftness and appeal. The parts very nearly play themselves, needing only some seasoned pros to add the right dash of pepper and spice. --Variety

on CRUISING CLOSE TO CRAZY: The play is set on the bus of a country music star, Carolee Crockett, a heartbroken, pill-popping crooner. Her bus is parked in the lot of a Grand Ole Opry kind of place, where she is about to be honored, in concert, along with...the singer and love of her life, who some months earlier had left her without a word in a motel in Albuquerque. If the plot has the feel of a country song--`You're no better than you ought to be, but you're good enough for me,' to quote a song from the script well, that's on purpose. It was gleefully played by a gleefully miscast ensemble, which included Sigourney Weaver, as the whiny, weak Carolee; Kevin Kline as...the pot-smoking, libidinous and self-justifying Lothario, and the lithe, soft-spoken Phoebe Cates as Carolee's bawdy, bosomy confidante --Bruce Weber, The New York Times

Product Details

• Paperback: 167 pages
• Publisher: Broadway Play Pub (December 31, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0881452106
• ISBN-13: 978-0881452105
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,175,179 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of eight books, including the acclaimed memoirs, Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country which were first excerpted in The New Yorker magazine. She has also published the novels Sweet Nothings, Third Parties,Tamara (as L.C.Shaine), Beautiful Bodies, Dreams of Rescue and the YA novel The Midnight Diary of Zoya Blume. Her books have been published in ten foreign countries. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly and many literary quarterlies. She is also a playwright and her plays have been produced on the main stage at Steppenwolf Theater, on Theater Row in New York,also staged in Manhattan at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theater Club and Ensemble Studio Theatre and are extremely popular in Europe- she has many current international theater productions, in Russia, Bulgaria, Argentina, London, Estonia, Finland. Her plays are often anthologized and appear in many Best Plays of...including Best Plays of 2009-2010,Best Plays of 2007-8, and most preceding years' collections. In addition, her plays have been published in many Vintage collections, including Plays for Women, Leading Ladies, Take Ten, Take Ten II, Laugh Lines, Shorter, Faster, Funnier...and several of her plays are published by Broadway Play Publishing- Beautiful Bodies, Bang, and Cruising Close to Crazy.
In addition, she is a journalist and has written many columns for The New York Times, The New York Observer, the London Times and magazine articles for Esquire, the Ladies Home Journal, Organic Living and other periodicals.She is also Artistic Director of the Memoir Institute ([e-mail], and lectures often on memoir and theater at universities and at literary festivals. She has won many awards for her writing, including two NEA Fellowships, in literature and theatre, and two NYFA awards in creative writing and play-writing. She is a member of HB Playwrights Foundation, and The Actors Studio Playwright Unit; she is also an alumna of New Dramatists. and Actors and Writers.