The Country Club (play)

The Country Club was originally an Off-Broadway stage play written by Douglas Carter Beane.

The story is set in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, in the womblike "cub room" of the club of the title, as the comedy follows a year in the lives of six insular friends (and one outsider) through a series of holiday-themed parties where drinks are bolted and truths are spewed.

The plot finds Soos, a young, witty and charmingly neurotic, who retreats from a failed marriage to her upper-class hometown. The type of "WASP" domain with the houses "that made Martha Stewart forget she was Polish", she says. As party after party unfolds, the getaway weekend gives way to a year, and ultimately the rest of her life.

Brittle conversation is bandied about, and Soos is reunited with her onetime boyfriend, the ever charming Zip. She also returns to her circles of old friends: the highly strung party planner Froggy and her starchy husband Bri; the wry and sarcastic Pooker; and the alcoholic good ol' boy Hutch. But cracks soon begin to show in the veneer. Zip falls in and out of an easy relationship with Soos, as he starts an affair with Chloe, a working-class Roman Catholic girl from Philadelphia who is engaged to Hutch.

Lives are casually destroyed, lives go on and through it all, tragedies are discussed without being mentioned. As Pooker observes between cocktail sips, "We all have our little stories and nobody brings them up. That's what's known as community spirit."

Credits

Crew

Cast

45th Annual Drama Desk Awards nomination (2000)

Perform

*Presented in 1999 by the Drama Dept. at the Greenwich House Theater, 27 Barrow Street, Greenwich Village.

ources

* [http://www.ibdb.com/advancesearchaward.asp?AwdAliasNo=6700&AwdCatNo=&AwdSxDate=2000&cmd=Award+Search 45th Annual Drama Desk Awards, 2000]
* [http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?_r=1&html_title=&tols_title=COUNTRY%20CLUB,%20THE%20(PLAY)&pdate=19990930&byline=By%20BEN%20BRANTLEY&id=1077011432358&oref=slogin NY Times review]