A delightful play, both hilarious and sad, about two teenage girls discovering a confusing mixture of sex and religion is the promise from Arundel's Drip Action Theatre Company as their contribution to this year's Arundel Festival.
The play is Crooked by Catherine Trieschmann, to be performed at the Victoria Club, Tarrant Street, Arundel from Monday August 25-Saturday 30 at 8pm.
Drip Action founder and artistic director Bill Brennan said: "Catherine Trieschmann is quite a yo
ung American writer. I hadn't heard of her before. I just spotted the reviews in the papers about this play. It was performed at the Bush Theatre in London, so this is hot off the press.
"We were able to get hold of the rights to it. It was just a question of finding the agents who are in fact in New York. They were very supportive and helpful."
The piece centres on a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl and the mother of the 14-year-old.
"It's a lovely story - a really lovely observation of the mother-daughter relationship. The daughter is difficulty in that she has a slight deformity, probably psychosomatic that she might grow out of - the deformity mentioned in the title.
"She is obviously going to be a very gifted writer. What happens is that she becomes friends with a 16-year-old girl who is another outsider. The 16-year-old is remedial, she says. She is in the lower classes. They meet at school and they strike up a friendship.
"The 16-year-old's father is the preacher at the Church of the Redeemer and the 14-year-old gets really into this religious business and escapes into it. She weaves this new world into her stories and her relationship with the girl.
"The mother is an atheist. With her daughter meeting up with this fervent religious girl, she is a bit shocked, but she is very gentle with her daughter.
"It's very believably written. You can see the mother trying to get the daughter not to get carried away, to realise that this is all real life and not a story. She is a single mother in that she has divorced the father for reasons that become clear - quite dramatic reasons.
"It's just such a nice story and it just flows as a piece. Nothing seems wrong about it - and that's why I like it."
Tickets £9 (£8 Victoria Club members, £5 students) available from the Zimmer Stewart Gallery in Arundel.
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