HOW TO ORDER A READING COPY OF SHINING SEA

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ABOUT THE PLAY

Ironic/tragicomedy. 2 males, 3 females. 90 minutes. Suggested settings. Suitable for college and older.

Workshopped at UCLA and developed by Ensemble Studio Theatre-LA.


Pac (Adam Downs) tends to the injured Candy (Tristan Butler) in the UCLA workshop production.

Pac, Violet and Candy squeegee car windows for their daily bread and live on the streets of a New York City that is being torn apart as two mayors fight it out for control after a disputed election. Candy, the patriarch of this makeshift family, comes back with the missing part for their television (which he guards like a child). He turns it on, and they see the Second Mayor, the “people’s mayor,” issue a call for her supporters to fight. Part-time hustler Pac, obsessed with both his pet rats and making his way to the Pacific Ocean, tells Candy and Violet, Candy’s “wife” who wants nothing more than to marry Candy for real and live in a nice clean little house, that he has discovered an abandoned Winnebago: it’s their opportunity to get to California.

But it turns out that the Second Mayor is a fugitive, and the First Mayor’s forces have sealed off New York until they find her. In the meantime, Candy seduces both Pac and Violet, playing one against the other over and over again. As the city descends into anarchy and riots, the order of the day becomes finding gas for the Winnebago before the parking authority, running amok as the First Mayor’s deputies, finds it and tows it, or before the fires that have started burning across the city reach them.

As conditions deteriorate, Candy, Pac and Violet seem trapped in their own little battles, but when Pac’s rats die, seemingly at Violet’s hands, Pac breaks free, taking the Winnebago. Candy tears up Violet’s precious wedding invitations, telling Violet that there never will be a wedding. The TV turns itself on, and as Candy and Violet descend into their own personal darkness, the First Mayor reassures them, over the television, that she’ll do whatever it takes—including the scorching the entire landscape—to capture and punish the fugitive Second Mayor and restore their beautiful city.

A GLIMMER OF SHINING SEA

Read the opening of SHINING SEA as a PDF file using the free Adobe Acrobat reader.