Comedy

Characters: 11 male, 6 female

Various sets.

Art Carney and Phyllis Thaxter played the Broadway roles of parents of two typical American girls enroute to college. The story is based on the wild and wooly experiences the authors had with their daughters, Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron, themselves now well known writers. The phases of a girl's life are cause for enjoyment except to fearful fathers. Through the first two years, the authors tell us, college girls are frightfully sophisticated about all departments of human life. Then they pass into the "liberal" period of causes and humanitarianism, and some into the intellectual lethargy of beatniksville. Finally, they start to think seriously of their lives as grown ups. It's an experience in growing up, as much for the parents as for the girls. "A warming comedy. A delightful play about parents vs kids. It's loaded with laughs. It's going to be a smash hit." N.Y. Mirror .

Millions of adult Americans will fondly remember such entertaining movies as Carousel, The Jackpot, and There's No Business Like Show Business. Phoebe and Henry Ephron, who wrote the screenplays for these and other films, were a unique team in that they used their special talents, working with dozens of great names of screen and stage, to create everything from the comic to the somber under circumstances both humorous and quite the opposite. Whether they were working on a Carousel, starring Shirley Jones and Gordon MacRae or a new What Price Glory, or Fred Astaire's Daddy Long Legs, the Ephrons were always learning something new and exciting about a magical assortment of people (Henry remembers the famous director John Ford the day he was faulted by his producer for being two days behind in shooting a film. He tore up six pages and said: "Tell the SOB I'm six days ahead!") This is also a story of the thirty-seven-year marriage of two people who started out with very little, realized their dreams of having a play produced on Broadway, and then went to Hollywood, where they wrote major scripts for some of the biggest stars. Woven throughout the story is the family element of raising four daughters in the make-believe atmosphere of Southern California. As the two Ephrons worried about the work they'd done on one major script, the make-believe turning into a glorious reprieve when it was reported to them that Darryl Zanuck had just told a friend, "I'll never know how the Ephrons took that old chestnut and turned it into this great screenplay." Here, a professional storyteller is at his best in a personal narrative which also brings onstage a fascinating supporting cast.