Sunday, May 6, 2007

VOYAGE TO THE MOON by Alice Rose





THEATER



In this one-act play the author pays tribute to the great French-Romanian absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco.


This is the fictional story of an idiosyncratic Jewish family, made of three seniors and one ten-year-old grand-daughter, who, during the terrible flood of 1976 try to escape totalitarian Romania. Chased by the regime’s cops and fighting the marks of their repressed memories from both the Holocaust and the communist regime, the four of them end up on a raft, heading for their great dream: America. Will they get there?



The author wishes to thank her father for revealing some incredible adventures her family went through before, during, and after World War Two. The author also wishes to thank Vlad for sharing with her the joke about the rubashka – hereby adapted with a twist.


Many characters and situations in this play draw on the author’s family and childhood back in Bucharest, before 1989. Although hereby transformed, their absurdist/surrealist gist remains unaltered even in 2007.


The flood from 1976 and the 1940 and 1977 earthquakes are true events.


The author wrote this play in the UCLA Writers’ Program workshops in play writing. She studied with playwrights Simon Levy and Leon Martell. In 2005, the actors of the Fountain Theater, in Los Angeles, read a few scenes of VOYAGE TO THE MOON. The audience, made mainly of playwright colleagues and family, would occasionally grin, giving the author a sense that something, good or bad, was happening on the stage.



(Available through orders only from Duende Books.)