Fables for Friends - Acting Edition

by Mark O'Donnell

Consisting of nine related sketches, with each performer playing a variety of roles, the play highlights the trials and tribulations of growing up in modern America. The episodes range from a hilarious "secret society" ritual where two teenage boys initiate another (somewhat reluctant) boy into their select number, to a gently humorous examination of college students being very adult about things intellectual while fumbling a bit in their relations with the opposite sex; to a young bride panicked by the thought of actually going off to live with her new husband; to a marvelously perceptive study of young couples who periodically "freeze" in mid-conversation to tell the audience how secretly miserable they really are. Each scene is, in fact, a self-contained, complete playlet (perfect for scene work) but, taken together, they blend into a rich and dramatically vivid mosaic in which the whole is a great deal more than the sum of its parts.

72 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1984

About the author

Mark O’Donnell was an American writer and humorist. O’Donnell and Thomas Meehan shared the 2003 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical for their work on Hairspray, and they wrote the 2007 film adaptation. The pair also worked on another John Waters musical adaptation, Cry-Baby, for which they received a 2008 Tony nomination.

O’Donnell’s novels include Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay. Along with Bill Irwin, he wrote Scapin, a 1997 play adapted from the original by Molière.

A 1980 article he wrote for Esquire, "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion," was both widely quoted ("1. Any body suspended in space will remain suspended in space until made aware of its situation") and widely circulated by fans of cartoon physics.