Written 2010
One act play. Movable or extremely simple sets.
Two males, two females
Modern day Manhattan

Synopsis:

Thirty years ago, four ambitious, struggling, young professionals began meeting at each of their birthdays to have an expensive haute cuisine meal. Their meetings ended when their relationships became too complicated to handle. Now that all of them are in their sixties, one suggests they revive the long forgotten tradition, for one last celebratory meal.

Roy is a successful painter; openly, even extravagantly gay, and something of a public figure. But for all his strengths, he’s also got weaknesses. One of them is for another Birthday Club member Jake, a successful businessman, straight, married too often, alone again, and for the first time in his life on a psychiatrist’s couch. Another weakness of Roy’s is Candida, his best friend, another unmarried Birthday Club member who is editor in chief of a successful New York publisher and who never wed.

The fourth member of their old group, the once very glamorous Stacey, is now on her own again, and feeling her age with a vengeance. Her various careers ended too, she’s now a self employed publicist.

She and Jake have history too. And she and Candida never saw eye to eye on anything of importance and that hasn’t changed.

The one act comedy is devised as a series of scenes of ever increasing complexity: first a quartet of monologues; then four duets; followed by trios, and then the final quartet, as at last, and despite everything, they do manage to come together. It’s a play about how we change and are changed by life and by others; and how we probably always remains the same.