About The Book

Tony Award–winning Terrence McNally returns with a powerful play of conflict between disillusionment and fresh dreams.

The New Yorker has called Terrence McNally “one of our most original and audacious dramatists and one of our funniest.” Now the four-time Tony Award–winning author of such classics as Love! Valor! Compassion!, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, and Master Class returns with a powerful new play about how far one will go for one’s love of the theater.

In a small upstate New York town, Lou, a speech and drama teacher, and Jessie, a dog groomer at The Dapper Dog, bring joy to their community through running an amateur theater company. They become obsessed with buying a derelict movie theater and turning it into Captain Lou and Miss Jessie’s Magic Theater for Children of All Ages. The only obstacle in reaching their dream is Annabelle Willard–a terminally ill and manipulative widow who owns half the town. Will these naive dreamers be able to grasp the brass ring, and at what cost?

Praise

“The show is Terrence McNally at his most impudently hilarious and shrewdly satirical. See it an weep for joy.” –John Simon, Bloomberg News

“McNally’s most substantial play in years.” –David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer

“A wistful and potent new play by Terrence McNally. . . . Mr. McNally gives new proof of the vitality of his chosen art form by showing that there is room on the stage for theater past, theater present, and theater future; and that if you are as good as he is, they can all be brought together behind one curtain.” –Liesl Schillinger, The New York Sun

“McNally’s bittersweet valentine to an art form that has the power to change lives on both sides of the footlights. . . . We should all be grateful to Terrence McNally for reminding us just how important theatre (and plays about the theater) can be.” –Brian Scott Lipton, Theatermania