Behind the Scenes: Two One-Act plays. Two playwrights

Dialogue, exits, scene structure, plot devices. Perhaps these are tools you’d like to better understand. Tonight the Guild Complex gives you the chance to not only preview two brand new one act plays by a few of Chicago’s favorites, you get to talk to them about it. What are the tricks of the playwrightlng trade? What choices do you make?

Joe Meno and James Vickery tell all. College professor and director Carey Friedman moderates. Joe Meno is a lucky man living an outer Space dream. His novels, Tender as Hellfire, [St. Martin’s Press,1999) and How the Hula GirI Sings (HarperCollins,2001) were widely reviewed and acclaimed. He has vvritten four plays produced throughout Chicago. Tonight’s play, Haunted Trails, follows Gretchen, a punk rock glrl attending high school on the south side of a racially-segregated Chicago, as she struggles with issues of race, class, and sex, in developing an identity.

In James Vickery’s Astronomy For Losers follows a clueless, star loving high school kid. The kid has to turn to his older, not much wiser brother to learn how to woo a Jehovah’s Witness girl, while at home the guys have another strange dilemma to deal with.