| Before You Go | |
|---|---|
| Written by | Lawrence Holofcener |
| Characters | Boy Girl Dog |
| Date premiered | 11 January 1968 |
| Place premiered | Henry Miller Theatre |
| Original language | English |
| Subject | romance |
| Genre | comedy-drama |
| Setting | Greenwich Village |
Before You Go is a 1968 comedy play by Lawrence Holofcener about the relationship between an actress and a sculptor.[1]
The original Broadway production starred Marian Seldes and Gene Troobnick.
The critic from Time magazine praised the play, saying that :
The two character man-woman play is now a Broadway staple. Lawrence Holofcener's Before You Go ranks with Two for the Seesaw and The Owl and the Pussycat as the best of the genre. Wry, perceptive, honest, sad, funny and tender, it is compassionately discerning about two people who are not quite wise to themselves.[2]
|The critic from the New York Times was less enthusiastic but said the play "unwinds pleasantly enough."[3]
The play only ran for 29 performances. It was profiled in the William Goldman book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. Goldman said the play "arrived to mixed notices, aroused no public interest whatsoever (it grossed less in five weeks on Broadway than Fiddler on the Roof does on Saturday), and closed with a loss of $150,000, remarkable for a one-set, two-character play."[4] He felt "Marian Seldes was so touching, so sad, so vulnerable as the homely girl that she made the whole thing true" but believed that, because Seldes was "homely... a tall, gawky graceless thing" that "the laughter in Before You Go, much of it caused by Miss Seldes’ brilliant performance, never came easily or wholeheartedly because it was too true, and because it was true, too painful."[5]
The play was produced in London in 1969[6] and Washington in 1970.[7]