“…few writers have Noone’s eye or ear… absorbing…”
–The Boston Globe
The Story
Little Black Dress is about two unemployed young men who set up a gigolo business that exposes all the secrets and frustrated desires of the town.
This is a dark comedy that tries to capture what it feels like living lives of quiet desperation and is set in a household in the rural backwater of Blue River, Kansas, where the dreamer Amy Beaudreaux falls in love with Charly, the local Gigolo.
All she has to do now is tell her boorish husband and her slacker pot-smoking son that she is leaving them because she wants to be free to drink champagne everyday on the beaches of Miami. Little Black Dress is a comedy about the price of freedom.
PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Title of work: Little Black Dress
Produced
Boston Playwrights Theatre, Boston
Orchard Theatre Project, New York
UnPublished
Nice Things
People Said
“…a distinctively dark sense of humor… Little Black Dress provides its fair share of
Orton-esque fun”
—David Barbour, Lighting and Sound America
“…Riveting… just when you think there is nothing left to unravel, Noone pulls on another strand”
— Talking Broadway
Stage Review
The Boston Globe
When the audience trickles into Ronan Noone’s Little Black Dress at Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, the play is already in progress, though nothing much is happening. Which is the point.
A surly-looking man is lounging on a faded couch in front of a TV set while a woman wearily scrubs dishes in a kitchen sink. She wears pink bedroom slippers, also somewhat faded. Occasionally, with a faraway half-smile on her face, she dances to the strains of Frank Sinatra’s “The Best Is Yet to Come.’’ The guy on the couch seems unlikely to deliver on that promise.
The challenge for “Little Black Dress’’ is to feel fresh, given that the dramatic territory Noone is exploring here – broadly speaking, the dark side of the American dream – has gotten a lot of traffic lately. (HBO pretty much livesin that neighborhood).
But few writers have Noone’s eye or ear. He can send storms of language gusting across the stage, and he sometimes does so in “Little Black Dress,’’ but he also demonstrates his understanding that love grows or dies in the small moments: the foot massage that a lover administers without being asked, the flatulence that a husband emits in the middle of a tender interlude, the lie revealed years after it was told.
He understands, too, the power of Hollywood mythology to both feed and distort the imagination (though this particular insight goes back at least as far as Nathanael West).
Set in a small town in Kansas, “Little Black Dress’’ revolves around the attempt by the woman in the pink slippers, Amy Beaudreaux (Marianna Bassham), to break free of her dead-end marriage to Jimmy Sr. (Jeremiah Kissel) and her stultifying life. This could be a risky gambit: Two stuffed deer heads hang on the walls of the Beaudreaux home, testaments to Jimmy Sr.’s prowess with a gun.
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