An Evening for Merlin Finch

The characters are, and are meant to be, types. When the play opens, Mother is sitting with a hair dryer wrapped around her head, loudly singing a show tune and stopping occasionally to weep over a heart render in a ladies' magazine

Father, a businessman - at one point, he gives us an extremely savage and funny rundown of his humdrum working day - cannot stand his son. Merlin, the son, is a teenager who prefers books and band practice to team sports, and whose dislike of his father is just as overt

Mother spends most of her time trying to make peace between father and son. 'That must be Fanny and Jack,' she says when the doorbell rings in the midst of a row. 'Calm down, and be more typical'

The play has no plot to speak of, which doesn't matter a bit. There is a lot of nutty stage business, all of which pays off, but it is Mr Dizenzo's stylish humor and control of language that are so encouraging"

Cast also requires 1 boy

Presented at Lincoln Center's Forum Theatre (on a double bill with A Great Career), this enormously funny and imaginative play offers an incisive and lethal caricature of family life in suburbia

" a wonderfully gifted comic sense" ~ NY Times

" the best written play by a new playwright this season" ~ Jersey Journal

" true comedy funny in a wholly original way" ~ The New Yorker