Comedy

Joseph Fields and Peter de Vries, adapted from the novel by Mr. de Vries

Characters: 2 male, 4 female

Interior Set

Tom Ewell played the Broadway part of a suburban husband in a 5 year childless marriage. He and his wife decide to adopt a baby, but a loud mouth neighbor upsets the apple cart when the adoption investigator comes to call. However, not to be outdone, Ewell finds himself in the clutches of the investigator, who has suddenly turned color. Later she announces that she is pregnant and is going off to have the baby. She will see that the man and his wife receive the child in due time through the agency. Shortly after the baby arrives, however, the wife learns of the matter and starts packing to go home to Mother. But it turns out that the adopted baby was not fathered by the husband, and also that the wife is now herself pregnant; and matters are mended.

"It offers laugh after laugh." N.Y. World Telegram & Sun.

With a new Foreword by Derek De Vries It is 1963 in an unnamed town in North Dakota, and Anthony Thrasher is languishing for a second year in eighth grade. Prematurely sophisticated, young Anthony spends too much time reading Joyce, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas but not enough time studying the War of 1812 or obtuse triangles. A tutor is hired, and this "modern Hester Prynne" offers Anthony lessons that ultimately free him from eighth grade and situate her on the cusp of the American sexual revolution. Anthony's restless adolescent voice is perfectly suited to De Vries's blend of erudite wit and silliness - not to mention his fascination with both language and female anatomy - and it propels Slouching Towards Kalamazoo through theological debates and quandaries both dermatological and ethical to soar on the De Vriesian hallmark of scrambling conventional wisdom for comic effect.

Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia - the school of John Updike and Cheever - these three works from the great American humorist Peter De Vries look with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. De Vries' classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pig - all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one another's private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of marital quibbles. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries' well-read suburbanites. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries' nervous wit: the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world.

Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia - the school of John Updike and Cheever - these three works from the great American humorist Peter De Vries look with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. De Vries' classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pig - all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one another's private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of marital quibbles. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries' well-read suburbanites. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries' nervous wit: the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world.

Harking from the golden age of fiction set in American suburbia - the school of John Updike and Cheever - these three works from the great American humorist Peter De Vries look with laughter upon its lawns, its cocktails, and its slightly unreal feeling of comfort. De Vries' classic situation comedy The Tunnel of Love follows the interactions of a socially insecure, pun-loving family man, an officious lady caseworker from an adoption agency, and a chauvinist pig - all suburban neighbors who know far too much about one another's private lives in this goofy and gently hilarious tale of marital quibbles. A manic epic, Reuben, Reuben is really three books in one, tied together by a 1950s suburban Connecticut setting and hyper-literate cast of characters. A corruptible chicken farmer fearful for the fate of his beloved town, a womanizing poet from Wales (Dylan Thomas in disguise), and a hapless British poet-cum-actor-and-agent all take turns as narrator, revealing different, even conflicting views. But alcoholism, sexism, small-mindedness, and calamity challenge the high spirits of De Vries' well-read suburbanites. Without a Stitch in Time, a selection of forty-six articles and stories written for the New Yorker between 1943 and 1973, offers pun-filled autobiographical vignettes that reveal the source of De Vries' nervous wit: the cognitive dissonance between his Calvinist upbringing in 1920s Chicago and the all-too-perfect postwar world.

With a new Foreword by Jeffrey Frank The most poignant of all De Vries's novels, The Blood of the Lamb is also the most autobiographical. It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter - a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries's own life. Despite its foundation in misfortune, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Engaging directly with the reader in a manner that buttresses the personal intimacy of the story, De Vries writes with a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury.