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Cast
(in order of appearance)

Fiona Foster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Carolyn Redding
Teresa Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..Vicki Blair
Frank Foster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Dave Bremer
Bob Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Cunningham
William Detweiler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Kevin Slattery
Mary Detweiler . . . . . . . . . . . . .Nell Fisher-Agnew*
*new to our stage

Production Credits
Director, Denny Wise
Technical Director, Thad Hallstein
Stage Manager, Greg Maurer
Assistant Stage Manager, Katie Pecis
Costume Co-Designers, Linda Bremer, Dorothy Tressler
Costume Crew, Cindy Blaszak, Linda Lee Cunningham, Marilyn Darnall, Adele Davis, Andrea Imes, Debby Mills, Ginny Richardson
Dramaturg, Marion J. Reis
Hospitality Chair, Carol Clarke
Hospitality Crew, Bob Baker, Jan Benedict, Hedy Bosch, Megan Bourke, Brian Centers, Philip Conway, Angelee and Mark Favoino, Stacie Heintze, Bonnie Hilton, Karen Holbert, Ann Marie and Elyse Hultgren, Mike and Pat Huth, Andrea Imes, Patti and Spence Jeka, Donna, Eleanor, and Rich Kanak, Heinz Karplus, Laura Leonardo Ownby, Cassandra Johnson Locke, Jason and Stacy McCargo, Diane Oppenheim, Sandra Rasnak, Joan Roeder, Donna Sauers, Nancy Schifo, Mary Smith, Jackie Snyder, Carol Suda, Gregg Valek, Dave and Sue Valenta, Lynn Workman
Lighting Designer, Cal Turner
Lighting Crew, Kathy Cawthon, Tom Frohnapfel, Karla Hudson, Betsy Stiles, Cathy Van Horne
Makeup Designer, Mary Pavia
Properties Co-Designers, Jim Hannigan, Arlene Page
Properties Crew, Karen Bellovich, Susan Cardamone, William FitzGerald, Peter Hilton, Dennis Hudson, Mary Van Nest, Tom Viskocil
Set Construction Chair, Heinz Karplus
Set Construction Crew, John Allen, Bob Baker, Anne Cahill, Philip Conway, Mary Ellen Druyan, Robert Erck, Mike Huth, Hank Miller, Jon Mills, Paul Roach, Gonzo Schexnayder
Set Designer, Thad Hallstein
Set Painting Chair, Bonnie Hilton
Set Painting Crew, Megan Bourke, Kathy Cawthon, Carol Clarke, Julie Knoch, Jan Mahlstedt, Sandy and Jenna Squillo, Charron and Jennifer Traut
Sound Designers, Jack Calvert, Betsy Stiles
Sound Crew, Darla Goudeau
Box Office Chair, Mary Ellen Schutt
Box Office Crew, Karen Arnold, Ed Barrow, Kelli Kopp, Rick Pavia, Marilyn Wilson
House Manager Chair, Bill Wilson
House Managers, Penny Choice, George Dempsey, Karla Hudson, Roland Imes, Mike Janke, Heinz Karplus, Jon Mills, Bill Rotz, Don Strueber
Front Row Center Flyer, Joe Petrolis
Group Sales Chair, Betsy Stiles
Poster Distribution, Kathleen Kusper
Production Coordinator, Jon Mills
Program Advertising, Peggy Carlson
Program Production, Ed Barrow, Marion J. Reis
Publicity Chairs, Liz and Charlie Egan
Actives Website, Judy DiVita

Director’s Corner
By Denny Wise

Alan Ayckbourn wrote How the Other Half Loves to explore and play around with stage time and space. When the cast and crew and I began traveling down the rehearsal road last November in our endeavor to prepare this play, it became obvious that “playing” was a good description of the whole piece. In an early program note, Ayckbourn suggests that the play is a game which he hopes the audience enjoys playing as much as the actors enjoy playing it! I hope so, too!

Originally written for theatre in the round, and for a British audience in 1969, How the Other Half Loves opened in London in 1970 with Robert Morley in the role of Frank Foster. Although it was Ayckbourn’s first play to transfer to Broadway, the New York production, which starred Phil Silvers, used a script in which the language was “Americanized,” and the playwright believed some of the charm of the original script had been lost.

The superimposition of the two apartments, the simultaneous dinner parties, and the complexities of the plot due to the invention of wild stories to cover up marital infidelities, all serve to keep the actors, the director, and the audience on their respective toes! Ayckbourn has taken three couples from different social levels and intertwined their lives in a wickedly complex series of lies and misunderstandings. The lines from Scott’s Marmion were never more apt: “Oh what a tangled web we weave, /When first we practice to deceive!”

Trying to keep the plot situations and times realistic and the characters believable was both challenging and frustrating — in one scene, there are three sets of people on stage, two of them living at different time levels and one pair living at both time levels. I decided to keep the play set in the time period in which it was written because the sexual revolution was in its infancy in the early seventies and brief affairs such as that of Fiona and Bob were often not taken very seriously. Likewise, our modern use of cell phones, answering machines, and computers just didn’t seem appropriate.

Once the actors and the audience accept Ayckbourn’s very sophisticated use of time and space, his delightfully witty dialog serves up a rich and varied description of How the Other Half Loves. Please enjoy the experience!

Setting: The action of the play takes place in the living rooms of the Fosters and the Phillipses
Time: 1971

Dramaturg’s Diary
By Marion J. Reis

About the Play and
Ayckbourn’s Play Writing

Not that it’s a lusty play, but How the Other Half Loves asserts the persistence of lust in our lives to carry us into deeds, relationships and lies that we’d rather not have others know about, if only to preserve a modicum of civil decorum and not to violate the trust of our commitments, however shaky.

How the Other Half Loves, commissioned in 1969, surfaced during a wave of hippies, bell-bottom trousers, go-go girls, the psychedelic mod craze in London, and the Beatles. It was a time when a new sexual openness was exploding — what hitherto had been publicly covert, hidden, implied, insinuated was being outed, blatant, in-your-face — the generation gap, women’s lib, racial equality, and anti-war demonstrations were culturally current.

These were the times of guru Marshal McLuhan, who explored the impact of mass-media and media awareness and who explained the self-consciousness, innovative explosive effect the media had on the arts which demanded more than traditional linear, logical development. Rather, he maintained, the persistent pervasive massaging of our electronic technology and the networking of our mass communications systems conditioned artists and audiences to yearn for an aesthetically cool sense of being in all-places-at-once simultaneously. So, Ayckbourn, the finely tuned avant-garde artist that he was, yielded to these emerging cultural promptings and wrote a play about swingers that included an overlay of scene-settings, a dual-time on a dual-place.

How the Other Half Loves, his second popular play, confirmed his success as a playwright. It contains the characteristics of his later comedies — the form presented complex situations, class awareness, ingenious plotting, and inventive staging; and the content flooded by the totally incongruous behavior and outrageous dialogue of odd-ball characters who rather unbelievably see themselves as normal was ironic, satiric, comic. All of this flowed over barely noticeable tragic undercurrents (loneliness, unintentional and intentional cruelty, self-interest, adultery, emotional torment, generally unhappiness of married couples) perhaps deep traces left by Ayckbourn’s own unhappy home-life as a child.

Ayckbourn’s life-long ambition was to write a tragedy in such a way that the audience would never stop laughing throughout the play, from beginning to end. This ideal shows the depth and xtent of his dedication to innovative drama, his utter unflappable breath-taking willingness to unite the centuries-tested modal split between comedy and tragedy, firmly founded underpinnings of play writing dating back to the classics of ancient Greece.

About the Author

Alan Ayckbourn, born in 1939 in Hampstead, London, is one of the most prolific and popular English playwrights of our times, rivaling Shakespeare in sheer number of plays, over 70, including plays for children, young people, radio drama, television scripts, a musical, articles, and books, one on stagecraft. His home port is the Steven Joseph Theatre in Scarborough where he has anchored on and off since 1957 as stage manager, actor, writer, director, and eventually as its artistic director. The eddying by-ways of his professional main stream have taken him to the National Theatre in London to direct his own plays with his own company and to university professorships, one of note in 1992 at Oxford University where he was Professor Contemporary Theatre. The recipient of well over 25 major honors and awards, he was knighted by the Queen in 1997 for his “services to the theatre.”

Acknowledgments

Produced with special permission from Samuel French, Inc.

Special thanks to:
The Fruit Store, Western Springs and Hinsdale, for providing apple cider at cost with free delivery.

Starbucks, Western Springs, for providing decaf coffee for the Thursday performances.

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