Bang & Beautiful Bodies & Cruising Close to Crazy

Bang - M2,F2 ...

"Cunningham came up with the idea for this play while researching a story for the New York Times on survivalists, those people who are training and preparing so they can survive the end of the world. Bang is far from a documentary, however. Cunningham uses survivalists as the raw material for a preposterous black comedy that highlights one manifestation of our modern madness" - Tom Valeo, Chicago Herald

"Laura Cunningham's script tells how a couple of east-coast, neurasthenic, miserable, impotent, boom-generation failures named Len and Sheila Calendar visit their old friend Bev and her new husband Roy in Roy's underground, nuke-resistant condo in Utah... Naturally Len and Sheila and Roy and Bev get stuck down there together ... Cunningham gives us all the predictable reversals, but Bang remains a hilarious analysis of who's going to join the cockroaches at the end of the world and why. Hilarity: it's in the lines, of which I wrote down a great many that I'm not going to read back to you here. Suffice to say that Cunningham maintains a laugh-per-line radio about equal to Neil Simon's while remaining true to her situation and her considerable intelligence" - Anthony Alder, Reader

Beautiful Bodies - F6

"Cunningham displays a knack for smart, catty chatter... the sophisticated and often funny repartee contribute to the play's swiftness and appeal. The parts very nearly play themselves, needing only some seasoned pros to add the right dash of pepper and spice" - Variety

"So Claire is pregnant, and they all know that, but none of her five friends have spoken to her in six months. This is her baby shower. The six guests met in college and are the women of playwright Laura Cunningham's engaging and witty dramatic comedy Beautiful Bodies ... Real women -- and the men in their lives - certainly talk about this stuff and playwright Laura Shaine Cunningham isn't afraid to write it down. She gives her characters honest lines, lines that reveal the 'secret life' , the essence of our most intimate moments" - Dufflyn Lammers, Savannah Morning News

Cruising Close to Crazy - one-act - M3,F3 ...

"The play is set on the bus of a country music star, Carolee Crockett, a heartbroken, pill-popping crooner. Her bus is parked in the lot of a Grand Ole Opry kind of place, where she is about to be honored, in concert, along with...the singer and love of her life, who some months earlier had left her without a word in a motel in Albuquerque. If the plot has the feel of a country song - "You're no better than you ought to be, but you're good enough for me," to quote a song from the script - well, that's on purpose. It was gleefully played by a gleefully miscast ensemble, which included Sigourney Weaver, as the whiny, weak Carolee; Kevin Kline as ... the pot-smoking, libidinous and self-justifying Lothario, and the lithe, soft-spoken Phoebe Cates as Carolee's bawdy, bosomy confidante" - Bruce Weber, The New York Times

Authentic country music background (the playwright traveled with Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson, Tammy Wynette and George Jones). Lends itself to cabaret format.