The Groundling
Opening Night: February 11, 2015
Closing: March 8, 2015
Theater: Axis Theatre
After stumbling upon a small outdoor production of a Shakespeare play in Manhattan, Long Island landscaper Bob Malone is inspired to write a play about his troubled marriage. He hires two reluctant New York theatre professionals to spend a week at his home and stage the play in his garage with a cast of colorful locals. The Groundling is a heartfelt comedy that meditates on the meaning of the final moments of Love’s Labour’s Lost, and the surprising effects a play can have on the most unsuspecting, and perhaps most deserving of us all.
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February 20, 2015
Victoria (Kendall Rileigh), a New York actress, was promised a gig “at a regional theater near the Hamptons.” So what is she doing in a garage just off the Long Island Expressway? “This is a nightmare,” she says. It isn’t. Marc Palmieri’s The Groundling, is half comedy and half tragedy, half verse and half prose. Though it begins as a formulaic showbiz farce, it takes an unexpected swerve toward heartbreak. Last summer, the landscaper Bob Malone (Robert Ierardi) chanced on a free outdoor production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and was immediately rapt. So he decided to write some iambs of his own, immortalizing his courtship of his wife, Karen (Eva Kaminsky). And he has hired a professional director, Dodd (Brian Barnhart), to stage it. In his garage. The play pogoes from an early rehearsal to opening night.
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