Those who enjoy live entertainment will want to check out this upcoming sage play December 1,2,3 & 7,8,9,10 as the West End Players Guild’s 112th season launches December 1st with Joe Calarco’s Walter Cronkite is Dead, directed by Anna Blair and featuring Kate Durbin and Leslie Wobbe.
The play is getting great reviews from the media:
“Calarco demonstrates impressive maturity with his lively and insightful dialogue. The play’s sermon against demonizing those with whom we disagree couldn’t be more relevant. And with its disarming approach to the topic, this inexpensive play should have strong appeal for regionals and beyond.” —Variety.
“…in a time as politically fractious as this, the mere idea of two women sitting and absorbing viewpoints they normally wouldn’t abide counts as revolutionary.” —Washington Post.
As the show opens, a fierce thunderstorm has shut down airports up and down the East Coast. Two women, who appear to have nothing in common, are stuck in a cocktail lounge at Reagan National Airport. Patty, played by Wobbe, is a chatty southerner—a blue-collar woman from a red state—who is almost physically unable to tolerate silence. Margaret, played by Durbin, is a Washingtonian, reserved, educated, liberal and not interested in sharing her thoughts, or her table, with Patty. Forced together for a long night in a public place, the two strangers have no choice but to share a bottle of wine and begin to talk…and to listen.
Their conversation is funny, difficult, deeply revealing and astonishingly frank. Patty and Margaret share details of their lives that lead them to a place of kinship neither of them could have imagined. Yes, Walter Cronkite is dead, but his wisdom and compassion lives on in this insightful comedy about what might be possible if people from opposite sides of the political aisle would stop shouting and take even one night to listen.
One theater that did the show described it as” Joe Calarco, the Helen Hayes Award-winning director of Side Show and Assassins, and a Signature Artistic Associate, has written a charming and intimate new comedy that explores the choices we all make, the regrets with which we burden ourselves, and at the losses we suffer as we age, mature, and stride through an incomprehensible world.
