The Friendly Hour
Play Description
Based on the actual minutes of a women’s club formed in rural South Dakota in 1934, this poignant comedy charts 70 years of personal and national history, from skinning skunks and julebukking in the ’30s to restoring native prairie in the new millennium.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (5 female)Full Length Comedy (about 140 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“Tom Jacobson has paid exemplary homage to real-life American heroes from a less jaded period in our history, using transcripts of minutes from a rural South Dakotan women’s club that gathered monthly from 1934 through 2004, when the last two survivors begin to fade. As with other of Jacobson’s plays (BUNBURY, SPERM, OUROBOROS), the playwright assigns himself intricate narrative challenges that would have sent Williams back to the loony bin … These powerful Midwestern survivors are the stoic Americans to celebrate and honor, something Jacobson has accomplished with his lyrical, sweetly bucolic text.” —Backstage
“Playwright Tom Jacobson seems to challenge himself with each new project, from the ambitious interconnectivity of the two parts of OUROBOROS to the giddy rewrite of famous literature in BUNBURY. On the surface, his latest play, THE FRIENDLY HOUR, may not seem stylistically in line with his other work, but it is — its audacity is simply more quiet. It is a moving and funny piece … Jacobson’s intriguing play structure, which tells the story entirely through meetings of a club, seeks to let the passage of life over seven decades provide the drama …” —Variety
“Tom Jacobson’s lovely new play chronicles the rituals of a women’s club in rural South Dakota from the late ’30s to 2007, and we watch the women with whom we grow increasingly familiar age and engage in theological disputes that are really at the heart of the matter. God’s purpose, and the purpose of community, interweave and clash through the decades … an impressionistic landscape that straddles the literary worlds of Anton Chekhov and Thornton Wilder.” —L A Weekly
Author(s)
Tom JacobsonTom Jacobson has had more than 80 productions of his plays, including SPERM at Circle X Theatre Company, THE ORANGE GROVE at Playwrights Arena, and the award-winning BUNBURY, TAINTED BLOOD, OUROBOROS and THE FRIENDLY HOUR at The Road Theatre Company. THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WAY premiered at The Theatre @ Boston Court and the New York International Fringe Festival (five Ovation Award nominations, four Los Angeles Drama Critics' Circle nominations, one GLAAD Award nomination, Fringe Festival Award for Outstanding Production of a Play, PEN Center Award for Drama) and moved Off Broadway to Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. MAKING PARADISE: THE WEST HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL was produced by Cornerstone Theater Company (Critic's Choice in Back Stage West). He has been a co-literary manager of The Theatre @ Boston Court, a founding member of Playwrights Ink, and a board member of Cornerstone Theater Company and The Theatre @ Boston Court. Most recent productions include the world premieres of THE CHINESE MASSACRE (ANNOTATED) at Circle X and HOUSE OF THE RISING SON at Ensemble Studio Theatre-LA (Critic's Choice in Back Stage West and Los Angeles Times, nominated for a GLAAD Award and winner of two Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards). Film: PRAIRIE SONATA (based on THE FRIENDLY HOUR). Opera: HOPSCOTCH, commissioned by The Industry.
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
World premiere by The Road Theater Company, Los Angeles
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Among the most imaginative works of the 20th century, Eric Overmyer's ON THE VERGE OR THE GEOGRAPHY OF LEARNING captivates with its abundant invention. Three Victorian lady travelers take it upon themselves to discover the mystery of things as they set out for Terra Incognita and discover the future.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (3 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.95 Play Description
The Left is personified in Richard Nelson’s idealistic and intellectual characters, whose fascinating friendships are as fraught as the political history through which they’ve lived.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Twenty-one-year-old it-girl Abby and her plucky best friend, Clea, embark on a spur-of-the-moment revenge trip to London — Abby, in pursuit of the young novelist who has cannibalized her in his literary debut and Clea desperately seeking Madonna.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
KRAKEN explores the true-life encounter between legendary American novelists Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1856. Melville, in the midst of a spiritual journey to the Holy Land, stops to visit with his old friend Hawthorne, now the American consul in Liverpool. As they spend the evening together, they discuss and confront their, fears, failures, things of this world and the next, books and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
The story covers more than fifty years of the life and love of two artists in New York City, living in adjoining apartments. Their life and times constitute a small and memorable model of America from the victory years after World War II, down to the dubious battles of the twenty-first century.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
GIRLS IN TROUBLE is a striking and ferocious play which dares to explore the controversial history of abortion, through its life-changing affect on women across several generations. This darkly humorous, shocking work is sure to inspire spirited debate.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
A disillusioned young woman traveling with her hippie mother’s ashes. A disillusioned TV star hitch-hiking across America. A Russian dissident turned motel owner. A lovesick farmer and a kidnapped beauty queen. Conjoined twins escaping a cult once led by a dead Senator reincarnated as a real-estate developer. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TULSA LOVECHILD is a freeway fantasia about love and hope.
Production Info
Cast: 13 total (6 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
Three years ago, Sarah Kennedy thought she was hired as a translator for a corporate military prison in Baghdad, only to discover that she would be acting as an interrogator instead, retrieving information from prisoners of war — by any means necessary. Now, Lily Strauss, a disgraced reporter in the waning days of newspaper journalism, must uncover Sarah's story, cutting through webs of corporate lies and government deception until finally faced with the choice between her own journalistic ideals and the devastating consequences of telling the truth. A political thriller, ON THE HEAD OF A PIN is an exploration of who watches the watchers and what happens when they look away.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (5 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 170 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
TEATIME AT GOLGOTHA is “a heady, wittily self-effacing drama” about the unenviable search for meaning in what is — in all likelihood — a cold, cold world. Following the stories of Longinus after the crucifixion, the last hours in the life of astronomer Tycho Brahe, and a modern day hostage situation, TEATIME leaps back and forth through the millennia, drawing meanings, parallels, and conclusions that the characters themselves characteristically fail to notice.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (1 female, 8 male)Full Length Drama (about 80 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
The true story of two actors who hired themselves out to the Long Beach Police Department in 1914 to entrap “social vagrants” in public restrooms. Thirty-one men were arrested, and the ensuing scandal led to an ordinance against “oral sodomy” in California.
Production Info
Cast: 2 total (2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Virginia is getting married. As her wedding day approaches, unwanted ghosts of her mother’s past appear, unearthing a shocking past she never knew — nor wanted to. A comic nightmare about the mysterious hollows between parents and children and things that may be better left unsaid.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
A factual dramatic account of the advancing history of the Brown v. Board of Ed Supreme Court decision in counterpoint with the personal drama of Senator Strom Thurmond's unacknowledged mixed race daughter, Essie Mae Williams Washington.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 85 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes