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"Highest Standard of Living"
Opening Date: November 13, 1986
Playwrights Horizons, New York, NY
| Playwright by Keith Reddin |
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Bob |
- Steven Culp |
| Directed by Don Scardino |
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Vlad and Jack |
- Timothy Carhart |
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Man on Ferry, Gary, Yuri |
- Kevin Skousen |
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Ludmilla |
- Leslie Lyles |
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Tom and Larry |
- James Murtaugh |
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Tatiana, Lonnie, Jean, Adele |
- Lola Pashalinski |
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Mother and Helen |
- Sloane Shelton |
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Sergei and Don |
- Clement Fowler |
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Dmitri and Doug |
- Peter Crombie |
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Rodger, Waiter, Man at Bus Stop |
- Robert Stanton |
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Photo by Gerry Goodstein
Steven Culp with Leslie Lyles |
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Photo by Martha Swope
(c) New York Magazin Nov 24, 1986
Steven Culp with Leslie Lyles |
| New York Times Review |
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THE STORY:
Bob (Steven), an American student of Russian literature, travels to Moscow to study with Mikhail Bulgakov but suffers from food poisoning so ends up in a Russian hospital, where his fellow patients are (or look like) his mother and other relatives. His nurse Ludmilla (Leslie Lyles) turns out to be a KGB agent, but Bob falls in love with her anyway. Before you know it, seven little boys enter his hospital room and start to beat Bob with little hammers.
In the second act, Bob, having been kicked out of Russia, is back in America, bandaged and bruised. Yet he has Ludmilla with him and is glad to be back in New York. But soon CIA agents approach him and start harassing him in a very KGB-like manner. Eventually Bob and Ludmilla jump off the Staten Island Ferry together, either to freedom or to their deaths. (c) American theatre: a chronicle of comedy and drama, 1969-2000, by Thomas S. Hischak, Gerald Martin Bordman - 2001, page 269 |
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