Three Viewings - January 30 – February 2 - Comedy/Drama

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 Three comic/dramatic monologues set in a Midwestern funeral parlor over a three-day Christmas weekend.

“Tell-Tale” is the story of Emil, the mild-mannered undertaker whose unspoken passion for a local real-estate woman who comes to all his funerals leads him to commit crimes and plot a way to confess his true feelings before time—and bodies—run out.

“The Thief of Tears” is Mac, a beautiful Los Angeles drifter, who makes her living stealing jewelry from corpses. When her wealthy grandmother dies, leaving her nothing, Mac returns to her hometown and attempts to pry loose her inheritance, a diamond ring her grandmother promised Mac when she was a child. Her attempt leads Mac to find there are more obstacles to getting the ring off grandma’s finger than she had imagined, and more revelations about her own past than she had bargained for.

“Thirteen Things about Ed Carpolotti” is the story of Virginia, the widow of a wheeler-dealer contractor, who discovers that her husband has left her in debt to the banks, her family and the mob. As Virginia struggles to escape her creditors and understand how her husband could have left her in such pain and doubt, a mysterious list of “thirteen things” embarrassing to Ed is offered to her if she can come up with one million dollars in three days. Virginia doesn't have the money, but she does have hidden resources.

 Old City Performing Arts Center  111 State Street, Knoxville, TN 

 A mother from New Jersey roams the hills of Lockerbie, Scotland, looking for her son’s remains that were lost in the crash of Pan Am 103. She meets the women of Lockerbie, who are fighting the U.S. government to obtain the clothing of the victims found in the plane’s wreckage. The women, determined to convert an act of hatred into an act of love, want to wash the clothes of the dead and return them to the victim’s families. Loosely inspired by a true story, the characters and situations in the play are purely fictional. Written in the structure of a Greek tragedy, it is a poetic drama about the triumph of love over hate. 

St. Gregory the Great Auditorium – Knoxville Catholic High School

9245 Fox Lonas Road, Knoxville, TN

 In the winter of 1984, two private eyes are staked out in an unoccupied condominium under construction, watching a beach house. A routine domestic assignment on a rainy southern California night turns topsy-turvy, when their employer, stripper-turned-private-eye Lena Masterson, shows up, and the neighbors become alerted to their presence. The night goes from bad to worse. Their friendship begins to unravel. Secrets are exposed. And they are unable to avoid the snare of being good guys doing bad things. 

St. Gregory the Great Auditorium – Knoxville Catholic High School

9245 Fox Lonas Road, Knoxville, TN

 In December, 1968, the life of a self-contented, intensely private millionaire, Aileen Craigmore, is turned upside down when her obsessive secretary accuses her of being Amelia Earhart, the famous aviatrix who disappeared over the Pacific Ocean in July, 1937. Obsessed by Earhart, the secretary, who’s been a fan of the aviatrix and, to Craigmore’s increasing horror, like a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat, produces more and more “evidence” that Craigmore is really the living, breathing Earhart. A tense, manic game of cat-and-mouse follows as the increasingly determined secretary seeks to corner the increasingly desperate Craigmore into admitting her “real” identity… whatever that may be. This is an exciting, even haunting play, about the nature of identity – who we truly are and who we choose to be – and, indeed, the extent to which there is any difference between the two.

The Grove Theatre

123 Randolph Road, Oak Ridge, TN