LONELY PLANET
By Steven Dietz
OCT.20- NOV. 12, 1995
Arline Greer's Gainesville Sun Review. A few pages from the Lonely Planet Playbill.
Winner of Pen USA West Award in Drama and selected as One of the Best Off-Broadway plays of 1995. Lonely Planet is a compassionate comedy that tells the story of friendship and fear in the age of AIDS.
Jody is an agoraphobic owner of a map store who refuses to leave his business and venture into the outside world. His best friend Carl is a jack-of-all-trades who does everything from writing for tabloids to restoring famous painting to replacing auto glass. Carl discusses the distorted world of maps, creates, fictitious stories for his tabloid and fills the shop with chairs. Jody reads Ionesco, explains his evolution to "map-geek," and tries to recall all the most important moments, objects and places in his life.
Through his clever language, humor and absurdity (reminiscent of Ionesco and Beckett), Dietz's work resonates with the importance of lasting friendship.
Deitz says it best: "We are, each of us, a living testament to our friends' compassion and tolerance, humor and wisdom, patience and grit. Friendship, not technology, is the only thing capable of showing us the enormity of the world."
