Cover photo by Greg Erf

These Flowers Are for My Mother

Michael McGuire

This play is included in the collection:
Plays by Michael McGuire

Play Description

A comedy with tragic overtones, THESE FLOWERS ARE FOR MY MOTHER concerns husband, Adam, and wife, Eden, who are locked in a custody battle for their gifted son, Alan, whom Eden believes is in need of her nurturing to realize his potential. While the boy is the master of ceremonies for much of the play, the action revolves around which parent will get him and whether he will be able to achieve a compromise solution involving boarding school and summer camp. Another driving element is the pursuit of Eden by child psychologist, Dr Wright, who is fascinated by her while being available to either parent as a hired “expert witness.”

Production Info

Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)
Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes

Categories: Full Length in Collection, The Plays Tags: Children, Family: Parents and Son

Reviews
About the Author(s)
About the Book
Special Notes

Press Quotes

“Here are some of the things I admire about Michael McGuire as a playwright:
He takes chances.
He understands that plays should be ‘about’ something.
He understands that playwriting must be a socially responsible act.
He understands that to be truly entertaining a play must involve us deeply.
He understands that each play must have its own identity — its own voice.
I wish all playwrights understood this.”
—Edward Albee

“McGuire’s writing is hauntingly thoughtful, inexorably true.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“As with all of Mr McGuire’s work, these plays are mysterious, lyrical, and full of strange, and often startling surprises.” —Christopher Martin, Founding Director, C S C Repertory

“This is not hit or miss experimentation, but the mature work of an artist with a love for words and a highly developed sensitivity for the theatrical.” —John Schneider, Artistic Director, Theatre X

“As I’ve suggested, what makes his plays special is their literariness. I don’t mean anything like mere rhetoric, but in the theatricality a verbal delicacy of feeling, with nuances of perception that you’d expect to find in more private forms. He was always, in the theater, resistant to those who were dismissing language because they never thought much of it, or even when they did because, in his view of theater, the beginning is the word. That may or may not be true, but if we’re going to have language on stage would that more playwrights had as fine a sense of it as Michael McGuire.” —Herbert Blau, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

“… a tightly controlled imagination … Mr McGuire’s aim is to keep testing the emotional limits of the audience until the last light goes out.” —D J R Bruckner, New York Times

Author(s)

Michael McGuire
"McGuire's writing is hauntingly thoughtful, inexorably true." —Publisher's Weekly Michael McGuire has had plays produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival (with Kevin McCarthy and Bob Balaban) and the Mark Taper Forum (with Ken Mars and Nan Martin) among others, including the American Theatre of Actors in New York, the Source in Washington, DC, The Changing Scene in Denver, the Actor's Workshop of San Francisco and at theatres in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Germany. THE SCOTT FITZGERALD PLAY was published by the University of Missouri Press. BACKPACKER was grand prize winner and produced at the 9th Annual Great Platte River Playwrights' Competition in 1997. There have been many staged readings, including ones at N Y U, the Living Theatre, Lamb's with Tammy Grimes and Bob Stattel, the Public, the Hudson Guild, the Organic in Chicago, the Odyssey in Los Angeles, and two at Lincoln Center with Tammy Grimes, Richard Merrill, and Michael Zaslow. Mr. McGuire's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, New Directions in Prose & Poetry, and the Hudson Review. A collection of his stories, The Ice Forest (Marlboro Press), was named one of the "Best Books of the Year" by Publisher's Weekly. He has been writer-in-residence at several universities and directed a creative writing program; he has had residencies at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, been aided in his work by the National Endowment for the Humanities, named an Individual Artist Fellow by the Oregon Arts Commission, and awarded the Oregon Arts Foundation Theatre Award. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Book Information

Publisher	BPPI
Publication Date	6/1/1999
Pages	198
ISBN	9780881451603

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:

In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:

These Flowers Are for My Mother is produced
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com