SUMMER’S END by Allan Baker
Sunday, October 27th at 6:30 PM
Hyde Park Theatre, 511 W. 43rd St.

On a Labor Day weekend in an ominous near future, a group of friends gather at a beautiful Hamptons estate on Long Island, as they have for many years. Five of the friends are successful, wealthy, and privileged gay men, including a rather flamboyant Broadway producer. Another is a straight woman, who is the lifelong best friend of the host and is reuniting with her friends after a rather scandalous breakup with her boyfriend and with Texas. The seventh guest is the new boyfriend of the host. He is a young, black, gay playwright, who has returned to his family in the Hamptons, leaving Texas, as well. In the long course of an evening, we see their quite evident “bubbles” of progressive comfort burst as the result of a great tragedy. There might be magic. There might be hope.

After retiring and a career as a gay political activist in Austin and Texas, Allan Baker joined ScriptWorks and began writing plays in 2004. His guide was that, although politics wins minds, theatre wins hearts. And a heart won is a better ally than a mind convinced. He has since written eighteen plays; almost all with gay characters and themes. Twelve have had full productions and others staged readings, in theatres from coast to coast and Guam to Ontario. His 9/11 play, …LAST AND ALWAYS has been produced nine times and was published by Smith & Kraus as part of their anthology “Best 10 Minute Plays, 2021”. DEX & ABBY, was produced in Austin in 2019 and Chicago in 2020 and is published by Original Publishing. In 2017 DARE won the Mario Fratti-Fred Newman Political Play Contest, sponsored by the Castillo Theatre in New York City. In 2018 this play was produced by the Desert Rose Playhouse in Palm Springs, CA.

SUMMER’S END is a worry about the future.