Laurel Mill Playhouse Hosts Auditions For I NEVER SANG FOR MY FATHER

Laurel Mill Playhouse, 508 Main Street, Laurel, Md. will hold auditions for 7 men and 4 women on Saturday, August 20 at 2:30pm and Monday, August 22 at 7pm. Director Don Neal Williams will have sides available for cold readings from the script. Produced by special arrangement with Dramatists Publishing Company. I Never Sang for my Father will run from September 30 to October 16 on Friday and Saturday evenings with two Sunday matinees.. For more information, please contact Producer Maureen Rogers at maureencrogers@gmail.com or 301-452-2557. Additional information about LMP can be found at www.laurelmillplayhouse.org.

This moving and perceptive work, by one of our most distinguished playwrights, probes into the disquieting alienation that can exist between father and son-and which time and old age can only deepen-despite the best intentions of both. "...written with skill, insight and feeling..." -NY Post. "...a playwright of deep compassion" -NY Newsday. "...an absorbing, touching and-when the right time comes-exciting drama..." -NY Daily News.

THE STORY: This is the story of Gene, a widower, with an elderly mother whom he loves and an eighty-year-old father, whom he has never loved, hard as he tried. The father has been mayor of a small town in Westchester County, self-made and highly respected. Beneath these trappings, however, he is a mean, unloving and ungenerous man, who has driven his daughter away because of her marriage to a Jew and has alienated his son through his possessiveness, his selfishness and his endless reminiscences. Suddenly the mother dies, and Gene is faced with the responsibility of having the father on his hands just at a time when he wants to remarry and move to California. There are a series of dramatic confrontations when Alice, the sister, who has defied her father, pleads with Gene not to take on the burden of the old man and ruin his life; when the penurious father and son have to pick out a coffin for the mother; and the final episode in which Gene tries once again to rouse in himself affection for his father and succeeds, but only for a moment. For it is still not possible for him to "sing" for his father-to understand and be understood, to give the love he so wants to give, and to feel it all will be accepted, and appreciated, by his father, who cannot love.