PATIO/PORCH

by Heifner, Jack

Two short plays by the author of Vanities that can be performed independently or together and which provide endearing studies of small town Texas women. In Patio, Pearl is throwing a going away party for her older sister, a hairdresser who is leaving to make it big in the city. As they bustle about the patio their conversation gradually reveals more and more of their differences and dreams and the emptiness that has pervaded both their lives. Porch is a striking hour in the lives of a mother and daughter in a sleepy town crippled by a Texan heatwave. Through the mother’s dry and often cutting humour we see how her daughter has become trapped by maternal ties and her own inadequacies in a moving portrait of two women, beset by quiet desperation whose only weapons are sarcasm, sublimated passions and, finally, the truth.