Synopsis
Pterodactyls
Published by Dramatists Play Service
3 Male 2 Female
As the wedding approaches, Tommy falls in love with Todd and when confronted with this news, Emma goes quite spontaneously deaf. It is only during a frenzied wedding rehearsal, after Tommy is informed he's HIV positive and Emma shoots herself with a gun given to her by her brother as a wedding gift, does the possibility that Todd is destroying his family rear its head
As winter descends, the bottom falls out of the farce and the tone is replaced with a more ironic one. Tommy has died (although he's not been buried as "the ground is too hard"), Grace's glamour has been replaced with an alcoholic haze, and Arthur cannot remember that Emma has died. Only Todd remains unchanged
In a final manipulation, Todd accuses Arthur of being responsible for Emma's death, and provokes his father into attacking him. Grace has no choice but to banish Arthur from the house and into what now seems a lifeless tundra outdoors. Left alone with his mother, Todd pours her drink after drink as the months pass, until she too, at last, is dead
Finally, as Todd embraces his sister's ghost, we see the dinosaur skeleton, now complete. No one knows why the dinosaurs lived, or died, Todd told his mother. He suggests the possibility that their end was the natural order of things "and no tragedy. Or disease. Or God."
"There are times-not all that many, admittedly-when a critic wishes he had never used the word 'brilliant' before, so he could offer it fresh minded and glittering to something new. And different" ~ NY Post
"Clever is the word for Pterodactylsclever, sharp, witty-it's a play that takes aim at the main-streamed, moneyed, conventional American family and buries it under one satiric jibe after another" ~ TheaterWeek