Girls We have Known and Other One-Act Plays
by Ralph Pape

THE STORIES: The first play, Girls We Have Known , was initially presented by Playwrights Horizons, in New York City, and was a finalist in the “Great American Play Festival” of the Actors Theatre of Louisville.

The action centers on two young buddies, a Hollywood screenwriter and a hip pool hustler, who are driving cross-country from Los Angeles to New York.

Their conversation, which is bright, funny and most revealing, is concerned largely with their amorous exploits over the many years of their acquaintance—and some “double-dealing” which only now comes to light as road-weariness (and scotch) loosen their tongues.

(2 men.) The second play, Warm and Tender Love , (commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville) is set in the sauna of a New York City health club, where a streetwise young Manhattanite tries to work his charms on an attractive young girl—who happens to be Russian.

While both speak English, there is an obvious “culture gap” to be surmounted, which leads to some very fast, funny and ultimately touching developments.

(1 man, 1 woman.) The third play, Soap Opera (again commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville), is a deft and dramatically arresting interweaving of monologues, as a secretary, a mechanic and a painter separately reveal the sometimes bizarre details of their romantic triangle.

By turns lyrical, terrifying and comic, the play is both a heightened melodrama and a dreamlike allegory of sexual confusion.

(1 man, 2 women.)