The hotel room is a perfect springboard for just about any kind of story. It's a generic spae that can be filled with just about any kind of human drama or comedy. Pink Banana stage a production of Stephen Belber's hotel-based one act drama Tape in an actual hotel room. There was kind of a memorable horror film. One of the more memorably surreal horror films of the past few years was 1408--so named after the hotel suite it was based in. My favorite hotel-based fiction piece has to be Thomas M. Disch's Amnesia You wake up naked with complete amnesia in a hotel room with nothing else in it. What are you going to do? Clever stuff . . .
With Do Not Disturb, playwrights Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore seem to be channeling more of a bedroom farce type of comedy for hotel stories. Kind of like the film Four Rooms . . . it's a series of six shorts all taking place in the same hotel suite. Over Our Head Players opens its season with the comedy. Here's a look at what you get for your trip to Racine:
The Pick Up is about a man meeting a woman in a hotel room . . . he gets more than he bargained for in a pretty typical comic premise . . .
Superstar is the story of a woman who finds herself in a hotel with a movie star. He can't quite live-up to his image.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
The Blue Movie sounds like classic hotel-based bedroom farce material complete with bellhop getting trapped in a pornographic film being shot in the suite.
Wedding starts with the idea of a nervous groom becoming attached to the bride-to-be's sister via his fly. Physical comedy, then I guess . . .
Rendezvous is a comedy of a woman, a man, his wife and, evidently an electric drill.
Suicide Ballet sounds by far the most promising short in the set of six. A man tries unsuccessfully to kill himself and accidentally kills half the population of the hotel in the process. With the right . . . um . . . execution, this could be a lot of fun. I remember having an idea for a story like this two years into high school, which would've coincided, oddly enough, with the publication of this script in '92 . . . weird . . .
Over Our Head Players production of Do Not Disturb runs September 24th - October 9th for reservations, call 262-632-6802.
