Photo courtesy of Lucy Pollak
By SARAH SHMERLING | Managing Editor
Palisades Charter High School alum Wendy Graf is a local playwright whose works include “Please Don’t Ask About Becket,” All American Girl” and “No Word In Guyanese for Me”—all serious plays, some of which have earned her awards.
Graf’s newest play, “Unemployed Elephants – A Love Story,” is something new: a romantic comedy.
The play was inspired by a trip Graf took to Myanmar in 2015, which she said was “nothing like the brochures.”
“We couldn’t help but have this feeling, there was some unrest going on beneath the surface,” Graf told the Palisadian-Post. She tried speaking with her guides, who were all very reluctant to speak out against the government.
“By the end of the trip, we got this feeling that something really kind of ominous was going on beneath the surface.”
Graf wrote the play almost two years prior to the flight of more than 400,000 Rohingya people to Bangladesh to escape a military counter-insurgency.
But at the time of her trip, Graf said people still had great hope that things might change for the country—similar to the hope that she felt back in America in February 2016.
“Unemployed Elephants” follows the story of two strangers, Jane (Brea Bee) and Alex (Marshall McCabe), who are both on the run from loneliness and the truth.
“I think that people will see a lot of themselves in these people, which is really what I hope for,” she explained. “I have two people … who are lost and looking for love.”
“Unemployed Elephants” opened at the Victory Theatre Center on March 9 and will continue through April 15.
To purchase tickets to an upcoming performance, click here or call 818-841-5422.
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