Study Guide

Study Guide

1. Basic Facts
“The Boys Next Door” is a play that takes the audience upon a rollercoaster of emotions, from silly and fun to heartbreak but joyful. The intensive weaving of the characters emotions done by the play write Tom Griffin is simply genius when productions can correctly identify the strengths and weaknesses of each character. The show depicts four mentally challenged men who show the audience daily struggles with added kinks, and shows the tender side of Jack, their care taker. Tom Griffin didn't do anything spectacular when he wrote his dramatic comedy "The Boys Next Door," but he did give us a light-hearted play that takes a risk in its premise: It is about mentally retarded adults. That the play dares to let them be funny is admirable; the temptation among over-reactionary types would be to assert that a comedy involving the mentally handicapped is automatically mocking those people. This study guide will be used to help the audience of incoming freshmen at a University.
The setting is a group home supervised by Jack, a gaunt, graying man who loves the men he cares for but is feeling burnt out by his responsibility to them. First there is Arnold ,whom Jack tells us is "marginal" as far as being retarded, but who is most definitely a nervous, obsessive sort of fellow. Norman high-functioning, works at a doughnut shop and has a sweet crush on Sheila, who is also mentally challenged. Lucien is somewhat less able to function in society, a fact that comes into play when the government mistakenly concludes otherwise and discontinues his Social Security payments.
Griffin clearly did not intend for the humor to be at the expense of the retarded characters, but it does stem naturally from the fact that they are retarded. That is to say, much of what's funny -- their reaction to a mouse in their apartment, Norman's obsession with keys, and so on -- would play out much differently if they were not mentally challenged. These characters happen to be, and the play honestly examines their particular foibles in a manner that is funny and at times even hilarious. The play is little more than a series of vignettes, with only minor plot threads connecting them, and as such there is a feeling of fragmentation about it. But the acting is extremely well done, with each of the actors carefully -- and usually successfully -- balancing the line between portraying real people and becoming stereotypes.
It reaches its emotional peak in the scene between Barry and his father, a difficult conversation that plays out with the right mix of awkwardness and sensitivity. The comic zenith, meanwhile, is Norman's completely unhinged behavior while on a date with Sheila -- a date that consists of sitting in the apartment and discussing keys.
All in all “The Boys Next Door” are exactly that, they are charming, sweet, and sometimes misunderstood in the most comedic ways. To really enjoy this show you must know the struggles and temptations that these men go through on a day in and day out basis but even then, what’s not to love about four grown men who just enjoy being kids?
To give you more an inside on the Playwright himself I’ll explain some interesting facts about the man who created this heart filled play. Tom Griffin is an American playwright who began his writing in Vermont in the early 1960s as a struggling actor and director. He originally planned to name the show “The Boys Next Door” as “Damaged Hearts and Broken Flowers” but decided the show then sounded too deep. He wrote the show to me a comical but influencial reflection on societies view of the critical life of disabled men and their care taker. He won several awards and went on to also write other plays including Amateurs, Einstein and The Polar Bear, Pasta, and Mrs. Sedgewick's head.

Reviews :
1. Producing Organization : Jay H. Fuchs2. Theater/Venu : Lambs Theater3. City/State : New York, NY4. Director : Josephine R Abady5. 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)


“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)



2. Things to think about.
A. How do you convey the realistic feel of the main characters without exaggerating but still having the comedic relief?
B. What sort of important events took place in this time period in which directly involved the status of the mentally challenged, I.E. why are they living where they are living now as adults?
C. What prompts the emotions during the dance scene where you the audience first sees the love between two of the mentally challenged characters? What’s the initial spark?
D. How do you decide what to do with the set? How to keep the audience engaged with such a simple set while keeping the ideas and mindset of the playwright still in mind?
E. In the end, with the lights, sound and set, how can you convey the most powerful moment in the show, the most powerful idea in the show, and the most powerful scenes in the show and what are they and how do they take place?



3. Helpful Links
A. Library of Congress http://catalog.loc.gov/ . Library of Congress provides any type of book of any kind you could be interested in finding, different versions, different writers . This is a very good tool when trying to find a specific copy.
B. Wikipedia http://wikipedia.com Although this should only be used for helpful facts this site proved to be quite useful in generating specific facts to lead me to find other interesting show details along with facts from the time period.
C. News Bank http(://infoweb.newsbank.com/iwsearch/we/Homepage?p_action=doc&p_theme=current&p_nbid=K61H4CNFMTMwOTE5MjAzMi42NzQ5Mzc6MToxNDoxNTguMTM1LjUyLjE3Mw )
A must use for researching Production Histories and all the facts needed for them, this website proved to be very useful when trying to find the specifics about productions.
D. Internet Broadway Database http://www.ibdb.com/index.php This website proved to be very helpful in finding different productions done on Broadway. I used this to find different ways the show has been produced and who different actors and directors were of the shows.
E. Lortel (http://www.lortel.org/lla_archive/index.cfm) Lortel provided me with a great amount of information for all of the shows done off Broadway. This provided me with the information needed to look deeper into how the shows were produced and designed, a very useful tool for dramaturgy.