LIVE: The Lady and the Clarinet

The Two Of Us Productions, the award winning theater company based in Copake NY, is pleased to open their 2023 season of live in-person theater with The Lady And The Clarinet, by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Michael Cristofer.  Presented in collaboration with The Copake Grange in the intimate theater at the historic Grange Hall in Copake NY., you don’t want to miss this exploration of aspects of love from a tantalizingly abstract perspective. Cristofer doesn’t provide any easy answers concerning questions of the heart, but instead demonstrates love’s ability to manipulate human behavior.

The scene is the cozy New York apartment of Luba, a woman successful in business but less fortunate in her private life. She is awaiting a male dinner guest and has engaged a clarinet player to provide romantic background music. Falling into a reverie, Luba begins to reminisce about the three men who have meant the most to her in her life, which leads to a series of intriguing flashbacks. In the first Luba is sixteen and meets Paul, a young employee of her father’s, who initiates her into the mysteries of sex, but bores her otherwise. Then comes Jack, a high-powered television producer who is successful, exciting and funny, but also married to someone else. Finally there is George, a rich widower who keeps the house for her but looks elsewhere for love. As the play ends the unanswered question is whether her new dinner companion will, at last, be “the man” she has been searching for, but as the nonspeaking clarinet player so eloquently suggests with smiles, shrugs & instrumental trills, the prospects (measured by Luba’s past) are not too promising.