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Parallel Lives Returns
Written By: Luke Osteen | Issue: 2021/10 – October | Photograph By: Susan Renfro
Highlands Cashiers Players brings the biting and hilarious Parallel Lives to Highlands Performing Arts Center, November 2-19.
The cast of Parallel Lives
Pictured L-R, Seated : Robin Phillips, Jennifer Royce, Julie Harris,
Julie Best, Lorine Spencer
Standing: Marlene Fairchild, Marsha Moxley, Mary Adiar Trumbly (director),
Julie Crook, Leah Grace Craig
The bewildering daily choices that all women must make as they navigate this unsettled world are explored with incisive scrutiny and sublime comic timing when Highlands Cashiers Players brings Parallel Lives to Highlands Performing Arts Center, November 2-19.
Parallel Lives, written by Mo Gaffney and Kathy Najimy, is a series of sketches that are performed by a handful of women in multiple roles. The various characters range from a pair of order planning angels working to ensure that Creation is logical and fair to a couple in a honky-tonk bar. Full of laughs and energy, the sketches serve as a mirror for women to recognize the absurdities that they must contend with, and an invitation to the men in the audience to pay more attention to the hopes and dreams and fears of 50 percent of the planet.
There’s Hank and Karen Sue, a pair of middle-aged bar flies from the Deep South. Madeline and Sylvia are two elderly New Yorkers who are enlightened by a Women’s Studies class. There are also those Supreme Beings planning the fate of the sexes at the beginning of the world.
It’s a script that demands talented actresses who are skilled in wry delivery and arch commentary, and Director Mary Adair Trumbly has assembled a superb cast of veterans and at least one-newcomer.
“Though it was first performed in 1987, it’s still just as funny and relevant here in the 21st century,” says Trumbly. “That humor is important because Parallel Lives has some important, thoughtful things to say about women and men.
“We also wanted to stage this so that we could tell the Plateau that Highlands Cashiers Players is ready to shake off the remnants of the Covid Shutdown and once again fulfill our mission to bring fun local theater by local performers to the stage.”
Parallel Lives will be performed November 2-5 and 16-19 at Highlands Performing Arts Center’s Martin-Lipscomb Theater. There will be cabaret seating. Visit highlandsperformingarts.com for tickets or more information.
Highlands-Cashiers Players Presents Parallel Lines at Highlands PAC
With boundless humor, Parallel Lives reexamines the ongoing quest to find parity and love in a contest handicapped by capricious gods, or in this case, goddesses.
