Book details

Comic Potential

A Play

Author: Alan Ayckbourn

Comic Potential

Comic Potential

$16.00

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About This Book

A sci-fi comedy thriller, Comic Potential is a play set in the foreseeable future, when everything has changed--except human nature

Comic Potential is set in a television...

Page Count
96
On Sale
05/29/2000

Book Details

A sci-fi comedy thriller, Comic Potential is a play set in the foreseeable future, when everything has changed--except human nature

Comic Potential is set in a television studio in the near future, where the director--an alcoholic has-been--and two assistants are making a daytime soap opera of the usual appalling sort. However, the difference here is that they are using actoids--robots programmed to act--and there are no scriptwriters. Into this situation comes the idealistic Adam, the nephew of the millionaire station owner, who wants to write comedy of the quality that Chaplin and Keaton once embodied. But when Adam falls in love with Jaycee Triplethree (JC333), one of the actoids on the show, everything is turned upside down as she grows more human and the line between actoid and human diminishes. When in anguish Jaycee finally cries that she can't say anything she hasn't been programmed to say, Adam points out that no one ever says anything original anyway.

Imprint Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

ISBN

9780571197873

In The News

“As with all Ayckbourn's best plays you are watching a comedy-farce and suddenly find that tragedy comes out of the woodwork and grins at you...Like all serious comedies, Comic Potential hurts you with the sheer exuberance of its laughter and liberates you with its seriousness...The master of Scarborough is still on top form.” —Sunday Times

“He is a profoundly moral writer and . . . has reached a new synthesis between the comic and the serious-the painfully funny . . . We are a fortunate age to have had our own Molière.” —Sir Peter Hall

About the Creators

Comic Potential

Comic Potential

$16.00

Trade Paperback