Free Playreading-Craig Lucas' RECKLESS-in Miami Beach

I always wanted to do something reckless  . . . .
   A playreading of Craig Lucas' "Reckless"
  
 
  Date: February 6, Monday, 7:30 pm
  
  Info: 305-613-2325 or artsatstjohns@bellsouth.net
   
   Arts at St. Johns, St. John's Church, 4760 Pinetree Dr,
                Miami Beach, 33140
  
  "I always wanted to do something reckless. . . " comments Rachel, the
heroine of the play "Reckless" by playwright Craig Lucas. A reading of
the play is presented on Monday, Feb. 6, 7:30 pm at the Arts at St.
Johns, as part of the PlayMonday series directed by Heather Gallagher and
Fantasy Theatre Factory. The playreading is free and open to the
public.
  
  At home on Christmas Eve, Rachel is informed by her guilty husband
that he has hired a hitman to kill her, and she must flee for her life,
which she does by scrambling out the kitchen window and into the snowy
night. She meets and joins up with Lloyd Bophtelophti, who has changed
his name to avoid alimony payments and who now lives with a paraplegic
named Pootie (who also pretends to be deaf in order to get double
disability). 
  
  Rachel is led more and more to ponder whether the modern world might
not be a vast conspiracy designed to systematically undermine her
increasingly shaky sanity.  These surreal chain of events sends Rachel to a
succession of shrinks who keep trying to saddle her with what are
clearly their own fixations -- parental loss, psychosomatic illness, birth
trauma, and lack of self-esteem.
   ------
  (Craig Lucas)
  
  Craig Lucas is known for his plays Blue Window and Three Postcards,
which are comedies about yuppie-ish friends chatting together about
nothing, but revealing disturbing social truths about life, intimacy, and
the lack of real communication between friends. Reckless manages to
retain a comic lightness while dealing with dark subjects of pain, loss,
alienation, middle-of-the-night fears, and the chaos of the universe.
 
  (See more information below for more details of "Reckless.")
  Future Playreadings include the following (check the website for
updates):
  ·         March 6, Monday, 7:30 pm  -Elaine Romero's "Catalina
DeErauso: The Man Inside of Me" 
  ·         April 3, Monday, 7:30  pm - Readings from the poetry of
"When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone" and "The Book of Nightmares" by
Galway Kinnell.
  ·         May 1, Monday, 7:30 pm - "The Bald Soprano" and "The
Lesson" by Ionesco.
  
  Info: 305-613-2325 or artsatstjohns@bellsouth.net
  
  Arts at St. Johns, St. John's Church, 4760 Pinetree Dr, Miami Beach,
33140
  Free on-site parking
  
  http://www.artsatstjohns.com
  
  
  The play "Reckless": Rachel Fitzsimons loves Christmas -- Bing Crosby
on the radio, giving gifts, the reminders of childhood, the way snow
quiets the landscape, and all the happy news on TV broadcasts. She's so
euphoric that she's prepared to forgive her remote husband, Tom, for not
buying the Christmas present she wants most, a puppy. But he has a more
expensive surprise for her, which he remorsefully confesses in the nick
of time: he's taken out a contract on her life.

Next thing you know, Rachel has accepted a ride and is speeding down
the freeway, leaving behind her kids, her clothes, her friends, her name,
even her wedding ring, which she throws out the window. "I always
wanted to do something reckless, you know? Run away in the middle of the
night in your slip and your slippers with some strange man who would ruin
your reputation and disappoint your parents terribly and disappoint
your friends and just make you really happy. Well," she burbles, "I think
we get these ideas from rock 'n' roll songs."

The purposely loony, coincidence-laden plot of Reckless and its bright
comic surface are a mask, however, for the essentially philosophical
questions at the heart of the play -- questions about time and identity,
how things change and how they stay the same, the randomness of things
and yet their interconnectedness. "Things happen for a reason," Rachel
keeps saying in her sensible-mom way, until she is forced to ask, "Or
do they?" One of the things that makes the play so satisfying and
psychologically truthful is -- paradoxically -- its send-up of conventional
psychology.

In Reckless, the surreal chain of events sends Rachel to a succession
of shrinks who keep trying to saddle her with what are clearly their own
fixations -- parental loss, psychosomatic illness, birth trauma, lack
of self-esteem. It's a hilarious and savage comment on the kind of
trendy therapy deemed successful when the patient embraces some pathological
identity ("I am an anorexic," "I am a child of an alcoholic") at the
expense of all other experience.

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