Invitation to a March

by Arthur Laurents

George Oppenheimer's brief "It skirts about the fairy story of , but never settles for long in one mold. There is social comment on conformity and other failings of our modern civilization; there is satire of the mores of the rich and the not so rich; there is also pure, unadulterated, old-fashioned romance, a commodity too rarely hawked from our contemporary stage. The story deals largely with the conflict between summer visitors to the South Shore of Long Island and two of the permanent residents who become entangled in their lives. The visitors, rich, sophisticated, conventional (although they would bridle at the word), have come for the wedding of a lovely young girl and a highly eligible young man. There is, however, one deterrent to this eminently suitable alliance. The bride-to-be keeps falling asleep, especially on those occasions when her intended discusses their secure and predictable future. During one of these naps another young man, poor, unambitious and unshackled, kisses the girl and wakes her up with a vengeance. From then on, there is a battle between the kissing boy's mother, as free a soul as her son, and the two mothers of the prospective bride and groom. And in the middle is caught an attractive man, who is inextricably involved with both camps."

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, librettist, stage director, and screenwriter. His credits included the stage musicals West Side Story and Gypsy and the film The Way We Were.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am sure back in 1960 when this made its debut it was thought quite avant-garde and provocative, but it just wouldn't play at all today, even as a curiosity. It's a rather silly affair about a bohemian woman beaching it on Long Island with her illegitimate boy, who becomes involved with a rather conventional girl (Jane Fonda in the original production, in her second Broadway outing) who has come there to get married to her even more conventional boyfriend - who turns out to be the half-brother of the other boy. The girl keeps falling asleep, so there is a fairy tale quality, along with a lot about class consciousness with the two impending mothers-in-law.

Amongst the oddities of the script is that characters often turn and address the audience directly - and that Stephen Sondheim composed the incidental music for it early in his career: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4i1Bc.... Laurents would go on to write the librettos to the classics West Side Story and Gypsy, but this is just an embarrassment.