Lemonade & The Autograph Hound

The play, at the Off-Broadway Jan Hus Theatre, is funny in a comfortable way. It bases its humor on human and domestic foibles. The playwright's views seem to be that some faults are completely ridiculous and in no way admitting of praise and yet, reassuringly, they spring from an unquenchable human spirit to be celebrated rather than censured

The wife in the three-character play is a full-blown eccentric who stands for hours outside every possible celebrity gathering place to get autographs

One night when she's out, standing in the snow, her husband tears up the treasured collection housed in three living room filing cabinets, bests her in a strangling contest when she gets home, sends their daughter out to find her own apartment, and declares a turning point

But what way will they turn? She's the one, after all, with the 'thrill of the chase' as she expresses it. They find their togetherness - he joins her hobby" ~ Associated Press

Cast of 1 man and 2 women

The Off-Broadway debut of the author (in tandem with Lemonade)

A sharply humorous and inventive play which takes a scratching and revealing look at the obsessive celebrity-chasers who find their meaning in life through collecting autographs

" a frequently funny, if slanderous analysis of the types who haunt stagedoors, hotel entrances and Sardi's doorway in search of celebrities signatures" ~ Variety

"There's a nice feel of boldness to the writing; a good sense of structures; and a genuinely funny wit to the dialogue" ~ Cue Magazine

"Lemonade features Jan Miner and Nancy Coleman as a pair of Peoria matrons who seek respite from the doldrums of middle age by selling spiked lemonade to highway travelers

The dialogue is hilarious as the two trade drinks and the fantasies they have concocted to brighten their dull lives. But the two strong performances really emerge when we find there is no sale

Miss Miner's Mabel has not raised a crippled son; Miss Coleman's Edith has not seen her children burn to death. Their lemonade grows tepid; their fantasies lose lustre

Prideaux's theme is the desperation with which we seek to evade the mundane, the illusions small people live by, and the emptiness which can exist beneath the veneer of supposed well-being" ~ Show Business

Cast of 2 women

First presented by New York's famed Playwrights Unit, this perceptive and funny study of two frustrated and lonely middle-class matrons went on to Off-Broadway success on a double bill with The Autograph Hound, by the same author

"The dialogue is bright, witty and to the point an evening of dark humor" ~ WABC-TV

"Prideaux's plays are light as a souffle, his lines sparkle like prisms and his wit is derived from sharp observations of oh, grateful surprise normal people" ~ Long Island Press