Production History 2

Production History 2
1. Producing Organization : Jay H. Fuchs
2. Theater/Venu : Lambs Theater
3. City/State : New York, NY
4. Director : Josephine R Abady
5. Designers : Set , David Potts . Sound , Lia Vollack. Costume, C.L. Hundley .
6. Run Dates : November 23 1987- April 17th 1988

"None of it seemed very funny so this viewer bowed out at the intermission after watching Sheila (Deborah Gilmour Smyth), a deaf and retarded girl, call herself a geranium and dance with Norman (Robert Smyth), a chubby, slow man who called himself a doughnut. A little choreographed routine and a spotlight transformed their clunky, real-life efforts at dancing into their fantasy of "normal" or "perfect" movement. All around, people cried and commented how sweet that was, implying that the characters are "just like us," which of course they are in some ways. It's their differences from "us" that make the developmentally disabled the subject of this show, however. Griffin never lets them speak for themselves; what a show that might have been, created from real life, not the dictates of dramatic form. And though other San Diego directors have used handicapped actors, director Kerry Meads settled for traditional casting of mainstream actors pretending to be disabled."

- Anne Marie Welch San Dieago Union April 6th 1988 (newsbank)

Review 2

"The best time I've had in the theater recently came a couple of weeks ago in a third-floor, walk-up space on West 44th Street, New York. It's a show called ""The Boys Next Door ,'' a modest and disarming story that draws its audience into a household of mentally disabled men, first by laughing at them, then laughing with them and finally by tangling us up in their lives, and in that of the social worker who cares for them. What threatens to be an alarming indulgence in us-and-them humor grows before the audience's eyes into a conspiracy of understanding. It's an extraordinarily effective work, so please excuse the cliche when I report that I laughed a lot and cried almost as much."

- Peter Haugen Sacramento Bee April 20th 1988 (newsbank)