Election Year and So When You Get Married.... Two Short Plays.

by Ellen Byron

Election Year ~ Set during the final months of the Reagan-Mondale presidential campaign, the action of the play is comprised of a series of lunchtime get-togethers between two young, unattached "yuppies". Looking for something to do, Wendy offers her services to the Mondale campaign, whereas Rachel, the supposedly committed Democrat, finds herself sounding more and more like a doctrinaire Republican. In the end their friendship survives even this jolt, and does so with a delightful blend of wit and high spirits (M1,F2) So When You Get Married ~ The place is a ladies powder room, where three members of an Italian-American family, a grandmother, her daughter, and her granddaughter, retreat to discuss family business away from the distractions of a noisy wedding reception. The generations clash uproariously and with much Italian "brio" as the flinty grandmother refuses to budge an inch — no money until her granddaughter agrees to find herself a husband; the granddaughter makes it very clear that marriage is the farthest thing from her mind; and the mother, caught in the middle, tries to calm things by plying the others with staggering amounts of food and drink carted in from the groaning buffet. A lively, warmly humorous, yet very revealing study of the relationship between three generations — grandmother, daughter and granddaughter — which reaches an hilarious crisis point amid the lively hubbub of an Italian wedding.

72 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Ellen is the bestselling, Agatha Award-winning author of the Cajun Country Mysteries, the Vintage Cookbook Mysteries, and the Catering Hall Mystery series, which she writes under the name Maria DiRico.

Ellen is also award-winning playwright, and non-award-winning TV writer of comedies like WINGS, JUST SHOOT ME, and FAIRLY ODD PARENTS. She has written over two hundred articles for national magazines but considers her most impressive credit working as a cater-waiter for Martha Stewart.

She is a lifetime member of the Writers Guild of America.