Previews: QUIET! THREE LADIES LAUGHING! at Crystal Theatre

Robert Hawkins’s Quiet! Three Ladies Laughing! is here again! Three years ago, the play was produced as a rehearsed concert-reading at New Canaan Town Players Stage II and it’s back by popular demand as a full production in the 232-seat Crystal Theatre in Norwalk from April 30th to May 3rd.

Quiet! Three Ladies Laughing takes place (on a sleeping-porch) during the long, hot summer of 1943 in the small Alabama town of Sulligent. Mama Nolan lays dying in her bed. Ada Lou (Chelsea Carpenter), her youngest daughter, summons Lottie (Shelley Lepetich), the older sister in Chicago, and Eva (Kimberley Lowden) the middle sister in Mobile, to rally at Mama’s bedside. Mama’s cantankerous sister, Edna (Janice Rudolph), along with Miss White (Karen Heck), a family-retainer who hails from the Appalachian Mountains, and Deidre (Laura Osadchy), Ada Lou’s ten year old daughter, come to be with Mama Nolan as she spends her final moments on earth. Lottie, Eva, and Ada Lou gather on the porch to spend the evening waiting for their brother Earle (Nick Fetherston) to return from an Army boot camp. The play, written is a bitter-sweet, semi-biographical story rooted in sentiment, humor, and pathos that speaks to a contemporary audience and their sensibilities. And if you think this is a play that will conjure up some of the South’s best known authors and playwrights, you are correct.

If you never heard of the play, it’s unique and has an interesting history. Frank S. Petrilli, who co-founded with Gil Kaufman of Acme Stage Company in New York City, is based in Southwest Fairfield County, where he has directed a myriad of plays and teaches playwrighting in the Stamford Public Schools Continuing Education program for adults. In the beginning of one class, he held up his copy of Lajos Egri’s book, The Art of Dramatic Writing. Robert Hawkins showed up and pulled out of an old leather valise his own copy of The Art of Dramatic Writing. Perilli says that book “is one of the most important books on playwriting and screenwriting in the old days….I knew right away that we would get along.”

It gets better. Hawkins resembled Ernest Hemingway, but had a drawl similar to Tennesee Williams, and sounded like Truman Capote. You can’t make up this stuff. A graduate of Ole Miss (the University of Mississippi), Hawkins loved William Faulkner. He served in the Navy and then worked for a Chicago newspaper. He wrote The Jackdaw’s Nest” about his experiences on the dark side of The Front Page. When he retired from the newspaper, he worked as a tech writer for IBM. Then, because Hawkins had “always wanted to be a natural writer,” he took Petrilli’s class and took a stab at writing a play. He called Petrilli at 4:00 in the morning. He sounded drunk, and he insisted that they meet at 5:30 at the Stamford Diner. “Can I call you Frankie?” Hawkins asked. He explained that he’d “been kicking around a couple of stories for the past 40 plus years” and that he “wrote his first play in one night.”

Petrilli inwardly groaned. It was way too early in the morning and he agreed to meet a man who sounded drunk and who wrote his first play in one night. All Petrilli could think is that the play would be absolutely dreadful. When he read it, he thought it was perfect, but he thought that just one word should be changed. He gave a copy to John Rogers of the Town Players of New Canaan. Rogers immediately gave him the green light to do the play during a Town Players’ dark weekend as long as it had a breakaway set and simple lighting. The play premiered there in January 1994 with a mixed cast of Actors Equity performers and area semi-professionals. Petrilli proudly recalls that the cast was completely off-book by the time they performed it, even though it was meant to be a concert reading. Subsequently, Petrilli did three other rehearsed concert-readings of Quiet! Three Ladies Laughing at the Diamond Hill Theater Company in Cos Cob, at Curtain Call in Stamford, and The New Canaan Town Players Stage II.

Crystal Theatre has earned a solid reputation as a place where young aspiring actors learn their skills. One of its best known students, Robin de Jesús, won the Drama Desk Award for his performance in In The Heights and was nominated for the Tony Award, Satellite Award, Hollywood Critics Association Film Award, and Greater Western New York Film Critics Association Award.

More on Crystal Theatre

Upcoming Shows

Quiet! Three Ladies Laughing

4/30 - 5/3/2026