The Country Club (play)

Plot

The play is set in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, in the womblike cub room of the local Country Club. Six insular friends (and one outsider) are shown over a year of holiday-themed parties where drinks are bolted and truths are spewed.

Soos, a young, witty and charmingly neurotic 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 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."

Productions

The play was presented Off-Broadway by the Drama Dept. at the Greenwich House Theater, running from September 14, 1999 to December 18, 1999. The production received 2000 Drama Desk Award nominations for Outstanding Costume Design and Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play (Sedaris).

The play had "small productions" at the Dorset Theater Festival (Vermont) and Mojo Ensemble (Los Angeles) prior to the production at the Long Wharf Theatre. The play premiered at the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut in January 1998.

Cast (Off-Broadway)

* 45th Annual Drama Desk Awards nomination (2000)