Michael Shannon and Soho Playhouse
present

EXCUSE MY DUST - “A Dorothy Parker Portfolio”

Written by Jennifer Engstrom
Directed by Darren Lee Cole

Featuring: Jennifer Engstrom

Soho Playhouse
15 VanDam
October 5- November 9, 2014
www.sohoplayhouse.com
212.691.1555

The title of this play is derived from Dorothy Parker’s wish to have her epitaph read “Excuse My Dust”. This one woman show enacts 5 female characters from Ms. Parker’s short stories. Each monologue is of a frustrated woman longing to be loved and accepted, providing us with some of the witticisms Ms. Parker is known for.

In the first vignette, a woman weaves her way through a party where she knows no one, and nervously fidgets with her broken garter. She sits and criticizes people, while feeling left out. In the next vignette, a woman waits obsessively by the phone for her suitor to call as promised. She prays and complains to God for the phone to ring, promising to be a better person, but to no avail. She hates herself for being “bitter, querulous and unkind”. At last, she screams to God: “Do you think your hell is worse than mine?”

In another skit, a woman is at a dancehall and reluctantly agrees to waltz with a partner who has two left feet; and in another, sitting at a bar stool with a man named Fred, a woman drowns her sorrows in alcohol. Through her tears, she utters: “I gotta give up using mascara, Fred. Life’s too sad.” The final story goes back to the broken garter, where she continues to fret and hide behind her sadness and loneliness.

As one of the characters quoted - “sorrow is tranquility remembered in emotion”, the basis of all these short stories. It’s not a subject matter that appeals to most, but Ms. Engstrom does an admirable job projecting these characters’ vulnerability and rage.

- Gloria Talamas -