Cast Requirements:

• SAM KLEIN: 40-something Jewish poet and intellectual who is a retired publisher / entrepreneur, and is self-analytical and critical to a fault
• JACKIE HUMPHREY: Attractive 30-something advertising executive, smart, usually gentle, sincere, loyal, can tend to drink a little much sometimes, but not an alcoholic
• TERI MORELLI: 30-something, attractive, earthy, sexy, playful, impulsive with a major wild side and a temper
• RUTHIE MEYERS: 30-something Jewish doctor and ex-wife to Sam, smart, reasonably worldly-wise, warm and a little lacking in self-confidence
• KIM PORTER: Experienced, extroverted psychic who completely trusts in her visions and intuitions, feels a calling to help people, and enjoys convincing non-believers
• MRS. ALICE HUMPHREY: Matronly, old-fashioned, status-conscious mother of Jackie obsessed with her toy poodle Toto and focused on doing right by her dying husband
• MR. RALPH HUMPHREY: Conservative, devoutly Catholic, intolerant, loving father to Jackie and husband to Alice
• DICKIE DUNWAT / PETIE DUNWAT: Wacky twins always happy to shake a hand and be center of attention
• NURSE JANE: Has that world-weary, nothing-phases-me, howsabout-a-few-laughs-to-pass-the-time thing going
• WAITRESS: Loves to eavesdrop and tries, not quite successfully, to be cool about it
• LION: Party-starter dancer at Cool Cats who likes to flaunt being gay
• ANDROCLES: Lion’s partner who quietly digs Lion’s flaunting
• COOL CATS DANCERS: Out for a good time
• TIME DANCER(S): In charge of the scene change signs, conveying the lyrical “dance of time”

Synopsis

It may be a long off-season for poet Sam Klein. He just can't seem to hit Fate's change-ups, and now he's whiffed in the game of marriage -- again. Third divorce. The good news? At a chance meeting in a shrink's office, a psychic senses that Sam and the lovely young woman in the next seat have loved and lost each other countless times over myriad lifetimes. Jackie's her name. Sure enough some months later, Sam and Jackie meet again -- for the first time they think. Soon he's in love anew. And we know love is grand! But -- wouldn't you know it -- she's involved with someone. Teri's her name. Figures. But down is not out. Sam and Jackie become fast friends, and discover they both have desperately wanted to parent a child. “Tick tick tick,” says the biological clock. What follows are angst, laughs, poetry and complications.

The Setting

Time and timelessness. Those are the themes of the set decor. Misty colors fading into shadows, soft whirlwinds of clouds, suggestions of clocks, of ghosts.... The play is to be played on a virtually open stage, with the minimum necessary furniture moved in or out as each scene requires. An easel is set at one downstage corner on which signs will indicate the settings. The Time Dancer(s) pirouette(s) on stage as scenes are transitioning to make visible the appropriate sign. The opening sign says simply, “PHILOSOPHICAL DIFFERENCES.”

Author Biography
Philosophical Differences was Bob’s second Honorable Mention for a script in the Writers Digest competition, along with Enemy Within. It was also selected as part of Stageloft Repertory Theater’s New Plays Festival and produced there in 1997. Other plays he has written include Super Cooper; All For One; The Lunatic, The Lover and the Poet and a variety of one-acts. His works in progress include Star Bright and Empty Sky. As a director, Bob has helmed The Miracle Worker twice, at Arlington Friends of the Drama and at the theater group he founded in Medfield, MA, The Gazebo Players. Other directorial efforts have included The Night of the Iguana, Murder Has Been Arranged, The Cocktail Hour, The Most Dangerous Woman (written by his late father Ted Eiland, published and produced Off-Broadway) and the children’s version of Androcles and the Lion.As an actor in both repertory and community theater, Bob has performed as Charly in Flowers For Algernon, John Proctor in The Crucible, Ford in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, Biff in Death of a Salesman, Mortimer in Arsenic and Old Lace, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Zach in A Chorus Line, Applegate the Devil in Damn Yankees, Jud in Oklahoma, Bill Sikes in Oliver, and both Dick Christie and Bogart in different productions of Play It Again Sam. He played John Hammond, P.I., based on Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade, in Big City Blues, a United Way film, and has acted in several independent films produced and directed by Michael Legge. Bob lives with his wife Sharlotte, daughter Thea and son Charlie in Harvard, and runs an executive search business focusing on high tech executives and top software engineering talent. His business website is www.egselite.com, where there will soon be a link for his playwriting and personal home page.

BUZZ: JAC Playwright Robert Eiland Featured in the Harvard Post

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