Wishing Aces

COMEDY. This comedy concerns the emotional problems of married adults, both with their peers and with their children. In spite of a warning, Kitten, a runaway housewife, joins her Tulane professor, Beau, on a train trip through the Louisiana swamp. They manage successfully until her son, Bunky, in an effort to punish her, shows up a stowaway on the train. As Kitten and Beau try to find themselves, a hurricane rages and the sadness of their false sophistication reaches them. This is a play about second love, about parents and teens, about blatant decency in the midst of struggle. Kitten and her professor work their way through their disappointments, and the futility of their lives, as the build-up of tension from the hurricane explodes.

CAST OF CHARACTERS (2M, 2W): Kitten Legere, about thirty-six, college student, married to new money; James Beauregard (Beau) Ellis, about thirty-eight, professor of English Literature; Bunky Legere, Kitten's son, fifteen; Hetty Williams, the porter, late twenties to early fifties.

SETTING: A waiting room in a train depot in the Pearl River Swamp, Louisiana. THE TIME: The not-too-distant present.

Performance History: Published by Rain City Projects, Seattle Playwright's Unit, selected as one of the top twenty plays in the U.S. for 1992. Commissioned for translation and a lecture in French at the Cartoucherie Theatre, Paris, July 1991 and for translation and performance in Moscow by the People's Friendship Exchange, Nov. 1992. Performed at Southern Rep, New Orleans and the Theatre du Marais, Paris, May-June 1996. Cover story of Southern Theatre Journal, Fall, 1997. Invited stage reading, The National Arts Club, 2004

NOTE: A French Translation of WISHING ACES (Les Cartes de la Chance) by Christel Coulon and a Russian translation by Marina Andreyev are available. Contact Tonda Marton, The Marton Agency, Inc., 1 Union Square W., Suite 815, New York, NY 10003 Phone: 212-255-1908.