Amici
During my visit to Middletown, Connecticut in 2004, I was having dinner in the bar of
Ristorante Amici just down the street from my hotel. Also in the bar were three men
and three women, each group sitting separately from the other. I discovered in the
course of overhearing their conversations that they were husbands and wives. The
wives were drinking white wine; the men were drinking beer. They were all very well
dressed and they were waiting to be called into the restaurant for dinner. The women
talked about a broad range of topics, skipping blithely from plastic surgery to
spaghetti sauce. The men appeared to talk about only one thing: the location of
various hotels on the Las Vegas Strip. At first, I wrote two different short plays:
Bellagio Boys about the men and Grappa Girls about the women. Then I
combined the plays into one, moving back and forth between the two trios. Sliding
into the Mafia thing was perhaps too easy and, I confess, very very cheap. But it was
great fun. The play was first performed in the 2007 San Diego Actors Festival with a
cast including: Eric Poppick, Jill Drexler, Bebe Brodie, Paul Bourque, Duane Weekly,
and Christine Eric Poppick directed.
To the play.