The Road to Aracea
A sci-fi/fantasy domestic serio-comedy
OR
a fantasia on supernatural suburban themes
OR
a murderless mystery-romance that really isn’t at all concerned with your time-travel paradox nit-picking
OR
Arcadia, as written by the undocumented and biologically improbable love child of Kurt Vonnegut and Neil Gaiman
Performance Dates:
January 24, 25, 31 2020 at 8:00PM
February 1, 7, 8, 14, & 15 2020 at 8:00PM
February 2nd at 2:00PM
Auditions for The Road to Aracea will be held Sunday Nov. 10 from 12-3pm and Nov. 11 from 6-9pm at the WPAA-TV and Community Media Center 28 So. Orchard St. Wallingford, CT 06492.
In lieu of a monologue all actors are asked to come prepared to tell a good story. Actors will also be asked to read sides from the script.
Rehearsals will run Monday – Thursday evenings beginning Dec. 9th. Rehearsals will pause the weeks of 12/23 and 12/30, resuming Jan 6th until opening night.
Questions should be addressed to director Francis Daley 203-733-2762 or shagbargh@gmail.com
Synopsis: The play opens on one of our couples – a woman listening to a man who is preparing dinner and telling the story of a classmate who went mysteriously missing when he was in middle school. The woman affectionately informs him that she’s heard this story before, though the man does not recall when this might have been, at which point we discover that she claims to be “from the future.” Whatever the truth of this, she’s prescient enough to disappear right before his wife shows up.
Over the course of five scenes the couples find themselves paired in varying iterations, telling sci-fi and fantasy-inflected tales stacked like nesting dolls to reveal unexpected relationships, each one having something increasingly unreliable to say about the immutably protean nature of love, the necessity of uncertainty, and how each of us is haunted by both the living and the dead.
Setting: A kitchen Time: Now – followed immediately by forever
Characters:
Molly, 20s-30s Hard-drinking, hilarious, and occasionally terrifying. Think the Wife of Bath as portrayed by Melissa McCarthy, or Death from The Sandman comics in the hands of Amy Schumer. Whatever a manic pixie dream girl is, Molly probably just handed her her own skinny ass in a fistfight at a tapas bar. Then bought her a shot of Jager to help patch things up.
Michael, 30s-40s Estranged husband, raconteur, once and future fantasy novelist: in short, a terminal day-dreamer. Smitten with Molly. Smote by Carol. A cautionary study of the “everyman” as the “everyboy” who never grew up.
Carol, 30s-40s Business woman, yoga enthusiast, and potentially traumatized to discover that the two are not synonymous. A woman of means who was not justified by the end. She was destined for a silver spoon that her husband managed to part with over a game of cards. Yet again. Dear God, something has to give here eventually. When it does, she would prefer a Lexus.
Eric, 50s+ Tall, dark, and blandsome. A chronic inhabiter of suits. The everyboy that did grow up and then found “self-actualization” in the wilds of middle-management and beyond. Hobbies include golf, lawn-care, venture capitalism, and board meetings. Also, opiate addiction while battling early onset dementia, and dying half-starved, naked and suppurating under a causeway on the south side of the financial district. Because Eric, it turns out, is not who we think he is. At all.
None of them are.