Red Tulips
Characters
Nine elderly women. two elderly men, one nurse
Setting
An old age care facility— a multi-leveled warren of cubicles, each cubicle just large enough to frame an old person and his/her distinct wooden chair.
Production history
- Finalist, 2002 Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference.
- Staged reading, Lincoln Center Theatre, directed by Mark Lamos, with Myra Carter, Anne Pitoniak, Helen Stenberg
- Produced, Seasoned Theater Company, Dallas
The Story
The Tennyson brothers, Sydney, 85, and Robert, 83, have just moved into The Manor, where their mother, Winona, soon to be 105, has lived for almost twenty years. Suddenly surrounded (and pursued) by elderly women, the brothers fend off the amorous Maxine Dewey and her friend Ramona Dumeyer, the confused Mrs. Dornbusch, the suffering Mrs. DelMonte, and the lovely Miss Eloise Bliss, who’s looking for her friend, Charlene Dalloway who has recently died, even though a number of the residents still see her wandering the hallways at night.
The play is structured as a tapestry of voices, and explores with little sentiment, but with humor (dark and light), the issues of aging and friendship, the frailties and fears of old age, the denial of death, and the extraordinary way we construct meanings and mechanisms to survive. The Manor is a hermetic world in which life meets afterlife, the boundaries of which are remarkably porous.