Program notes

Fuddy Meers was the first of many of David Lindsay- Abaire’s scripts to come to fruition. David Lindsay- Abaire wrote this script at the age of twenty nine while he was attending Juilliard in the Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program. His script then went through a workshop process there at Juilliard in 1998 before its first production at the Manhattan Theatre Club on October 12th of the following year. Next Fuddy Meers moved to Off-Broadway on January 27th of the year 2000 to the Minetta Lane Theatre. Lindsay- Abairehas won many award in his lifetime and his script, Fuddy Meers, has won quite a few awards of its own as well as known many international productions with great success for the bulk of them. There is even a rumor of a screen play for Fuddy Meers in the works that David Lindsay- Abaire is said to be writing.

The current action of the play is never explicitly mentioned in Lindsay- Abaire’s script. This helps raise the themes to the universal level and make a connection with each member of the audience. This could be happening in your city to your family or your neighbor. Remember that this is not a play about a time and a place, however it is about the world around you, the people around you, and your relationship to them. In the Notes from the author, the script says that we are to view the world of the play through Claire’s eyes. And she is a woman that has no concept of date, time, or setting…

Bearing this in mind, we did have to sent these people somewhere in sometime out of necessity for our production team- especially our designers- while staying true to the playwright’s intent and preferred themes. We have chosen to set out current action in the year 2000 in Boston Massachusetts (Claire, Richard, and Kenny’s home) and Piermont New Hampshire (Gertie’s house).

It can be easy for the themes of this dark comedy can be lost in the humor that is innate in Lindsay- Abaire’s outrageous tale. We in this production company hope that this is not the case and that in our production we have found this balance put delicately in place.We want to send you out of this theatre laughing, but also thinking about themes such as identity and loss of identity, Domestic violence and fighting back, and even ethics- what’s the right thing to do. Lindsay- Abaire tells Celia Wren in Lost in the Funhouse AN INTERVIEW WITH THE PLAYWRIGHT BY CELIA WREN “I didn't go into the writing with any sort of agenda. I knew I wanted a play about a bunch of people who were trying to forget who they were and what they'd done, plus one person who needed to remember all those things. The fact that the play's set in a dysfunctional family seems appropriate, but it wasn't something I was commenting on. There's a lot in the script about the difficulty of communicating within a family--how things are squelched and denied and ignored entirely. But people can suffer from that in their work environment or anywhere. It's not exclusive to families.” When she asked Lindsay- Abaire about the use of dark and upbeat views on life that are presented in Fuddy Meers, David talked about the characters’ views of the world being distorted as if observed through funhouse mirrors or Fuddy Meers as Gertie would say. He wanted to juxtapose Claire’s necessity to remember her life and her past with the other characters (that have repulsive histories) and their desire to fail to remember theirs. The Idea that your past will come back to haunt you no matter what you do and that everyone of us is going to have to deal with our short comings, faults, and errors again and again. Lindsay- Abaire implies that we all have amnesia about certain things in our pasts, whether our mind has blocked it out from the pain of the experience (as in Claire’s case) or we have chosen to ignore it so that we won’t have to deal with it in our own consciences.

We hope you enjoy our production of David Lindsay- Abaire's Fuddy Meers!