Asparagus by Jeanne
Drennan
ISBN #1-60513-006-0
JAC
#2008-0003The Cast
- JOE: 44; Emily’s husband, an artist
- MOLLY: 14; Emily’s and Joe’s daughter
- BARB: 48; a story editor and Emily’s old friend
- LOUISE: 27; Roe’s assistant; very pretty
- ART: 45; a security guard
- *LISA: 20; Art’s daughter; she has been murdered
before the play begins
*DINAH: 22; an art student
*JENNIFER: 29; a film actress
* Should be played by the same actress.
Synopsis
Asparagus tells the story of Emily, a novice
screenwriter struggling to satisfy her film company bosses, her teenaged
daughter, her artist husband, both old and new friends, and her own
conscience. Ordered to make huge changes to her script at the last minute,
she begins ransacking the lives of all these people to find exactly the
right details to make her screenplay work. The screenplay thrives on this
rich diet, but Emily’s exploitative task ultimately wears her out and gets
her fired; someone else will do the polish. The drive to create art of
lasting value exacts a pretty high price, and in the end Emily finds she's
stretched her credit past its limit.
The Setting
New York City, in the nineties. The
action takes place in a conference room at Minerva Productions, in the
living room of Emily’s apartment, in a simple artist’s studio, and in a
gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art. A unit set is needed because
the play demands fluidity with virtually no breaks between scenes. The
conference room table, for example, doubles as the apartment’s dining table.
The various locations should be merely suggested, with some, such as the
Whitney gallery, conveyed only through what the actors say and how they
carry themselves.
Buzz
-
Open
Stage Theatre presents Asparagus (2/27/07,
The Tartan Online, Student Newspaper of Carnegie
Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA)
-
Asparagus (by Ted Hoover, Pittsburgh City Paper, 3/1/07)
-
Post-Gazette Magazine (2/6/99, Christopher Rawson,
Post-Gazette Drama Critic, Pittsburg, PA)
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Author Biography
 Jeanne Drennan's produced full-length plays include
Wrong Side Out,
Asparagus,
Limoges, and
Medea at Athens. Her current
projects are three new plays with a political bent: the post-apoctalyptic
drama 12 Dogs, a finalist for the
2006 Timothy Smith Prize sponsored by the National New Play Network, and
developed to date at theatres in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, San Diego, and
New York City; Waxworks, a play
about a novelist caught at the intersection of fame and political chaos
which has had a workshop with the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre;
and the brand-new Atlas of Longing,
the story of a woman who finds herself at the center of religious and
cultural conflict when all she really wants is to become a TV chef. At the
same time, Jeanne is working on a chamber musical set in 18th-Century
London, called Dear Boy.
Besides working on her own plays, Jeanne has helped middle and high school
writers through her work as a teaching artist and dramaturg with City
Theatre's Young Playwrights program since it began in 1999. She has received
a 2008 fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to support her
writing, her seventh such award from the PCA. She is a member of Pittsburgh
PlayWorks, a play development workshop, and the Dramatists Guild.
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