We Hate the World!

Categories: Full-Length Plays

“Playwright Mark Guarino has constructed these scenarios in order to create a wonderfully skewed backdrop for what is essentially a debate about the role of art in a society deadened by banality …. What Guarino has had the good sense to do is pepper his obvious dissatisfaction with the modern world with great chunks of humor and much-needed compassion.” – Windy City Times

WE HATE THE WORLD! is a black comedy about finding your own voice– literally and figuratively– In a world that finds such behavior trouble.  Emily, a college poet drops of out school and returns home to discover that her mother has sold Emily and her childhood home to Mama, a frantic phone sex peddler who desperately wants to be a mother.  Because the “real world” has no need for a poet, Emily is forced to work writing greeting card slogans for a charlatan and his company mascot, Bartholomew Bear, a naive soul who, after years at the company, is conditioned to believe he really is a bear.  Meanwhile, Mama’s son Mel, an anarchist-on-the-run who has long-since traded his artistic ideals in for becoming a renegade graffiti artist, propels Emily to escape to her own vision of harmonious life—Wyoming.  When a trip reveals that Wyoming is anything but idyllic, she returns home determined to prove that a world of poetic ideals can exist anywhere—only if one is confident enough in their own voice to re-invent the world, making their ideals reality.

In two acts.
One woman and one man, forties. One woman and three men, early twenties. One offstage voice. One set.

download an excerpt (pdf)


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