Salt Lake Acting Company to Premiere MR. PERFECT

Salt Lake Acting Company (SLAC) presents the World Premiere of MR. PERFECT by playwright William Missouri Downs, April 8 through May 3, 2015. SLAC is excited to once again premiere Downs' brilliant work in Utah after the successful run of his hit raucous comedy, THE EXIT INTERVIEW, as well as readings of MAD GRAVITY and HOW TO STEAL A PICASSO, as a part of SLAC's New Play Sounding Series.

MR. PERFECT tells the tale of four sort-of love stories and asks, "What are the chances?" This romantic comedy centers on Zooey, a quirky flight attendant and romance novel junkie who is on the search for Mr. Perfect. When Zooey happens to meet Jeffery, the narrator of her favorite romance audio books, they end up in the airplane bathroom 32,000 feet over Dayton, Ohio. This sets Zooey on a quest to connect the random events that make up life, hoping to find the meaning of it all.

In her search she encounters Ralph, a "priest" at the Church of Holy Rules who details his wacky religion to the lost, love-sick girl. Zooey finds the happenstance she was looking for in their meeting and they end up back at her apartment. In the meantime, Jeffery meets Donna, a self-help book author, in a bookstore and falls for her blunt realism. After her failed attempt to seduce him Zooey passes them on the street and asks "What are the chances?" Jeffery however, refuses to believe in chance and urges her to see the truth-life just happens without meaning or design. Despite the odds, Zooey and Jeffery decide that maybe taking the chance could be worth it after all.

In MR. PERFECT, these zany, riotous characters allow the audience to explore their own deeper beliefs of love, life, chance, religion and fate. What is our idea of love? What fantasies do we project on to our own stories? And how much meaning do we take from chance encounters?

Playwright Downs says: "Mr. Perfect is a comedy about four people who are trying to find their story. Through religion, romance novels, self-help books, plagiarism and chance events they struggle down the conveyor-belt of life, desperate to make sense of it all. Dostoyevsky said we humans crave 'miracles, mystery, and authority.' To this I add we also want an itinerary - something to tell us where we are, where we have been, what to do next, and what it all means.

In reality, existence is nothing but superfluous moments. Life hits us with multitudinous indecipherable messages. It comes at us all at once. It has no super objective, and no patience for anyone who tries to find one. In spite of this, we must learn to select and arrange life, as an artist does, in order to find, or better yet, create our life's story."

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