*Selected for 2023-24 Salon Reading Series - Angels Theatre Co.
The starting point for Emma Goldman-Sherman’s play is the top of a wedding cake. We begin full of hope, unconcerned about the road ahead. But, too quickly, the rough patches heat up and the allegory of Man & Wife starts to resemble something larger and more tenuous - The story of a marriage or a country? Goldman-Sherman is known for packing her plays with an unabashed spotlight on controversy. But their humane approach to their characters ensures that we digest the controversy humanely, with a deepened understanding.

Full of brilliant satire and piercing truth, MAN AND WIFE picks up where Edward Albee and Thornton Wilder left off, telling the story of our struggling country through the parable of a struggling marriage (we even get a direct Skin Of Our Teeth shoutout, in case we were unsure of the playwright’s influences). Goldman-Sherman’s characters begin as archetypes, but over the course of 100 pages and 25 years, we begin to see the contradictions, the complexities, the cracks where humanness breaks through the molds the world has told them to fill.

This imaginative, astute two-hander has such a high level of pure theatricality that I'd designed half the play in my head before I'd finished reading - and yet the possibilities remain endless! It's absurd, it's smart, and it says so much with such simplicity - there are audiences who will see this performed and come out changed. The characterization is incredibly consistent, and yet when we finally watch these two people become "real" everything snaps together like magic - which is what a play should do and be. This play accomplishes so much my head is spinning! Fantastic!