by Forrest Stone

Studio Theatre, Performing Arts Center
University at Albany, Uptown Campus
Call 442-3997 for Tickets

February 27 & 28 - 8 p.m.
March 1 - 3 p.m.
March 4, 5, 6 & 7 - 8 p.m.

An Offer She Couldn't Refuse, a new play by Forrest Stone, is based on John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore as well as Shakespeare's misidentity plays. This comedy, with original music, presents two star-crossed lovers whose union is threatened. Forrest Stone teaches playwriting and screenwriting at Yale University and is Executive Editor of The Weekly Reader. This production, directed by Langdon Brown, is a collaboration between the NYS Writers Institute and the University at Albany's Theatre Department designed to premier new works of contemporary drama commissioned by the Institute.

A rollicking musical play that draws inspiration from contemporary tunes (country, reggae, rock, rap, among others), musical theatre, and the drama of seventeenth-century England. It is the story of Joe and Nell, a pair of young lovers who are under the false impression that they are brother and sister. Complicating their dilemma is their murderous father, a mafioso pretending to be a candy manufacturer who has left a trail of dead bodies and live enemies in his wake, who pursue him in an escalating series of near catastrophes.

Until the final curtain turns certain disaster into a a happy ending for all, a bald cowboy and a football hero vie for Nell's hand in marriage, a sumo wrestler looks for the happiness he lost when his childhood pet kitten was taken from him, mothers seek lost children, a failed gangster and his lost love rediscover one another, a bald cowboy and Joe's mother find true love on the ballroom dance floor, and unlikely priest attempt to provide a framework of order in a world gone mad.