The Quality of Life

Dramatic Comedy / 2m, 2f Winner! 2007 Ted Schmitt Award for the world premiere of an Outstanding New Play - Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Winner! 2008 Ovation Award for Best New Play From award-winning writer Jane Anderson (The Baby Dance, Looking for Normal) comes this "magnetic work of theater" (The San Francisco Chronicle) filled with compassion, honesty and humor. Dinah and Bill, a devout, church-going couple from the Midwest are struggling to keep their lives intact after the loss of their daughter. Dinah is compelled to reconnect with her left-leaning cousins in Northern California who're going through their own trials. Jeannette and Neil have lost their home to a wildfire and Neil has cancer. However they seem to have accepted their situation with astounding good humor, living in a yurt on their burn site and celebrating life with hits of pot and glasses of good red wine. Bill and Dinah are both moved and perplexed by their cousins' remarkable equanimity. But their sympathy turns to rage when they find out that Jeannette is planning to take her own life to avoid a life of grief without her beloved Neil. "Set in the Berkeley hills after a major fire, Quality of Life introduces Jeannette, an earthy, high-spirited woman. Jeannette's husband, Neil , is dying of cancer. When her cousin Dinah from Ohio comes for a visit with her husband, Bill, the two couples - one solidly on the left, the other resolute in their conservative Christian beliefs - are made to confront their huge dissimilarities-" - Edward Guthman, The San Francisco Chronicle. "Playwright Jane Anderson explores a myriad of ethical, religious, and moral beliefs, as well as (some would say) personal rights issues concerning life and death in her remarkable and completely engrossing new play, The Quality of Life." -Terri Roberts, Theater Mania