Stark Raving Mad by Don Cummings
In this modern farce, the Kendoos, a media family, live in Westchester County. Like their neighbors, each day they read the New York Times and watch the evening news. The world is growing more violent. Things are spinning out of control. In the middle of their Independence Day barbecue gunshots are heard. Murder has taken place right next door. All the guests disburse except for Stark, an ambitious reporter....
In this modern farce, the Kendoos, a media family, live in Westchester County. Like their neighbors, each day they read the New York Times and watch the evening news. The world is growing more violent. Things are spinning out of control. In the middle of their Independence Day barbecue gunshots are heard. Murder has taken place right next door. All the guests disburse except for Stark, an ambitious reporter. Bob Kendoo and his three grown Kendoo children would like to find out who committed these murders, but they have problems of their own. Loyalty Kendoo, escaping her abusive husband, has just flown in from Oregon to celebrate with her family only to be covered with barbecue sauce. Discipline Kendoo pines to give up being a pro football player. He wants to let the world know that he is bisexual and needs to be free and whimsical. Patience Kendoo has to eat, and she doesn't know why. Bob Kendoo is answering phone calls. Someone is offering him bribe money to keep his mouth shut about a heinous crime.
Detective Kechejian shows up to solve the murders. She is Armenian and wants the world to know the horror and the suffering of the Armenian people. While Discipline tries to make it with Stark, and Loyalty complains about her bad marriage, and Patience decides to hide in the upstairs closet for fear of murder, things reach a fevered pitch until Loyalty passes out, Discipline is completely rejected by Stark, and as a total surprise to Patience, she gives birth to a baby.
In act two Paul shows up, a statistician who is trying to change his life from math to love.
He desires Loyalty and wants to bring her up to his house in New Hampshire. Patience overhears the phone calls to her father. She discovers he is being offered bribes as hush money to keep him quiet. Patience has been raped by a very powerful man who silenced the media with cash, and now her own father may be part of a male dominated cover-up. She sets out to kill her father and confronts her whole family as she pines for her frozen placenta. During all this, Stark is collecting information and sending it to the magazine office through his virtual reality mask. Patience is finally let in on the game that has been played once the reporter has left. The murders weren't real. They were invented to keep the reporter around snooping. The phone calls were a ruse to expose the man who raped Patience. Discipline is exposing his bisexuality in order to get good coverage in the press, thereby increasing his trading price and giving him the money for the family's move to a new place. Loyalty realizes that, "Maybe the things that are unattractive about me really are unattractive," and decides to leave her husband and run North with Paul. It turns out that Detective Kechejian is not really a detective at all, "I can't find my shoes in the middle of the living room with the lights on." She is Bob Kendoo's girlfriend, Reneé, who has a passion for truth and old world humor. Everyone gets what they need and they all move to New Hampshire where things will be better. As soon as Patience files a police report about her rape, they will move to New Hampshire and raise this new baby in a new world. Discipline declares as they prepare to leave, "Oh how they’ll fear the feminization of America--when all conflict is over and your only worry is to decide what beautiful thing you are going to create." A calmness settles over this modern family.