Synopsis
A Limb of Snow & The Meeting
Published by Dramatists Play Service
1 Male 1 Female
It takes place in a cabin in the High Sierras in the 1890s, just as the gold strikes are petering out. A girl has run away from home at 16, cutting herself off from her family forever, to marry a young man who hopes to make his fortune gambling in the mining camps
Now they are 21, she is pregnant, has already lost two infants, also a house that was washed away; the snow is piling upon a limb over the roof; it is time for something more stable
Her husband, a perpetual and likable optimist ('Don't think I ever have bad luck, just sometimes I don't have good luck') can't see it, can't stand the idea of giving up, being shrunk down to drab normality
All I can say is that the 40 minutes (or so) are absolutely alive and true, not just true but subtly, persuasively true" ~ The New York Post
Presented by New York's renowned ANTA Matinee Series (with The Meeting) as a two-part program entitled Double Play, this affecting and skillfully written play finds a young couple facing a crucial decision in their life together
" we were introduced to some beautiful work by a new playwright" ~ NY Post
"The Meeting ~ At a picnic in an open field, is between an award-winning scientist at a New England college and his mistress, formerly his assistant, formerly his student, 18 years his junior, now head of her own department at another college perhaps a day's drive away
They meet and sleep from time to time, but it's been grating on the girl. We arrive at the situation at a familiar point; ditch your hateful wife, and marry me. The girl has also lately had a brief encounter with the scientist's nineteen-year-old son
It's what Miss Barlow does with this situation, in which the grating mounts from one to the other, that is alive and true and attention gripping from first to last" ~ Jerry Tallmer
Part of a double bill (with A Limb of Snow) presented by New York's ANTA Matinee Series under the omnibus title Double Play. An honest, compassionate study of two embittered lovers, infused with a sense of life rarely encountered in the theatre
"She knows people; she knows character; she knows how people think and talk; how they reveal, conceal; in short she knows how to write" ~ NY Post