My award-winning full-length comedy for the stage, Welfarewell, has been published in book form by Samuel French, Inc. of New York City.
Available at www.samuelfrench.com, it costs under $10.00 and comes with a guaranteed laugh! I’d be happy to sign your copy if you buy one!
Esmerelda Quipp is 80, still of sound mind, but her body is beginning to “come unglued”, as she puts it. Having spent her working life as an actress, age pushing her gradually out of the business, she now faces the fact that her meagre government pension is insufficient to support her, even with her minimal needs. When she is arrested for attempting to bury her dead cat in her landlord’s yard, she finds that there is some sense of community, not to mention free room and board, within the prison system. She devises a plan to get herself sent back to jail; she robs a bank. But a well-meaning public defender gets the charges against her dropped. Esmerelda Quipp is undeterred! Using money she gets from selling stolen wine bottles to a recycling depot, she buys a toy gun at the local dollar store, and commits armed robbery. Knowing that she will be convicted because she will plead guilty, she assumes that she can spend the rest of her days living free, hanging out with other women, and being fed decently in a women’s prison. But the system that has failed her also wants to forgive her because of her age and general health, and the public defender wants to use an insanity plea to get her off. How will Esmerelda convince the legal system she should be incarcerated, literally, for life?
This play takes place over a few days during which Esmerelda is mostly in the police holding-cell jail, awaiting transfer to court and then, hopefully, prison. A few scenes occur at her seedy apartment, the banks she robs, and in a courtroom.
Cast of Characters 7F/1M (with doubling)
Esmerelda Quipp, 80, a former actress, pensioner
H.B. (Honey Bunch) Hackett, 35, police officer
Val, 30, a film actress, posing as a hooker
(real name is Rosanna Palermo)
Penelope Farthingale, 45, a hard-drinking hooker, past her
best-before date, and lacking a pension plan
Dottie Ramsbottom, 50, a compulsive shoplifter
Alfred David, 30, lawyer; a weary public defender
Jennifer Doer, 25, a naïve social worker/do-gooder
Gladys Symmington-Bukovitch, 55, a rich woman who shot her
husband, but he failed to die
Judge Julius, 55, a crusty-but-caring female judge
Mildred McGonigle, 60-ish, a bank customer
Landlord, 40, a beer-bellied bully
Three Bank Tellers and one Bank Customer
A Chef
