Playwright Beth Henley is known for creating extraordinary, memorable characters who dare us to reduce them to easy labels. In her refreshingly original plays, like Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, her characters have always surprised audiences. The very things they do that we most expect to find sordid are, instead, grotesquely comic, and just when we feel comfortable laughing at them, we are taught much by their courage and their wisdom. It's Christmas Eve, 1934 and The Lucky Spot is intended to be the first "Dime-A-Dance" hall to open in rural Louisiana. It's a place that seems, for a while, to be a gathering of the unluckiest group of characters in Pigeon, Louisiana. Or is it ?
Director's Notes:
In the theatre, we still insist on saying "Break A Leg" to express our good luck wishes to each other before a performance. Good luck is something we feel we need so desperately that we don't want to jinx ourselves by asking for it. Believing in luck is a form of hope, and hope is something we all need when our lives are visited by more trouble than happiness. But hope for a better future will not neccesarily make a better future. We all fool ourselves into believing that if we have recently suffered a string of losses that, somehow, we are due for our luck to improve. These characters have lost a great deal already, and that's why this place where they will spend their Christmas has been dubbed The Lucky Spot. Are they making themselves magnets for further misfortune by counting on a change of luck ?
Comedies come in many different flavors depending upon the sense of humor of the author and the public for whom that author is writing. Beth Henley's sense of humor is often dark and always contemporary. But Comedies have always been about regenerating hope. In the midst of the Great Depression, her characters are wishing, and they're betting, and, after misfortune remains unabated, they're "dancing on the edge of a cliff." The popular tunes of the Depression era encouraged such dancing and the lyrics spoke of hope — not always hope for luck that would visit us, but hope that we could make better futures for ourselves. We hope we made something good here, and we tried to do it by embracing these characters with great affection. Luckily, the characters find that's the same thing they need to do with each other if they expect to see better times.
- Mark Landis