We Hate the World!
“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.