Larry Loebell

Comedy
Cast 3m, 2w

World Premiere: March 2005, Theater Catalyst, Philadelphia, Directed by Rebecca Wright, featuring Seth Reichgott, David Raphaely, Kate Bailey, Rob Hargraves, and Martha Kemper

Synopsis
It’s 1971. Abroad, the Vietnam War rages. At home, the country divides. In September, ALAN GILBERT, a smart but impressionable young man arrives in conservative Cantrell, Colorado from back east to begin his first semester as an English major at Colorado Land Grant University, the student of eminent (but alcoholic) scholar and raconteur Solomon Howard. ALAN is immediately befriended by JOHN WESLEY REED, a bona fide anarchist who lives proudly in a derelict 1949 Pontiac Torpedo (though it is on someone else’s property and is in imminent danger of being hauled off.) JOHN knew Jack Kerouac, does a mean Groucho imitation, and can quote everything from the 12th century Art of Courtly Love to the poetry of Quentin Zubeck. ALAN also meets and falls achingly head-over-heals for CYNTHIA ALLISON, a zealous political organizer (and free love advocate) working to bring students and townsfolk in large numbers to an anti-war rally. While ALAN’S widowed landlord GUSSIE HASSON tries to persuade him to watch Bonanza reruns with her, and plots to sell off her farm land for a tract-housing development, ALAN’S new friends engage him in an intellectual and emotional tug of war, alternately seducing and alienating him, and ultimately teaching him vital lessons from the front lines in the struggle against the straight jacket of conventional behavior and conformist thinking.

Press
“It is 1971: Vietnam is in flames, college campuses throb with political outrage, sex is everywhere and anywhere, and the cry of “Freedom!” is accompanied by upraised fists.

But playwright Larry Loebell brings more than nostalgia to this smart new comedy. John Wesley Reed lives in an old, immobilized Citroen on the edge of some gorgeous Colorado property. The owners want desperately to develop it, and they want him off. He lives on beef jerky and washes in the public library. A self-styled guru…Reed sometimes seems deeply damaged, sometimes dangerous, sometimes absurd, sometimes obscene; but always brilliant and seductive, a wild man impervious to conventional rules of behavior. The play…is very clever. Rebecca Wright’s direction is brisk and accomplished, undaunted by the script’s tonal shifts. And you really have to hear the astonishing “Mr. Peenie” song. — Toby Zinman, Philadelphia City Paper

It’s appropriate that the name John Wesley Reed should be in the title. A non-stop talker and manic show off, Reed is very much an in-your-face type. He is engaging company. (The play is) soundly constructed…. poetically eloquent. — Doug Keating, Philadelphia Inquirer

Readings and Development
Reading at Abingdon Theater
Public reading in the NNPN Showcase of New Plays
Public reading at OctoberFest, Ensemble Studio Theatre
Developmental reading New Jersey Repertory Theatre