Genre:
Dark Comedy
Runtime:
120 - 120 mins
Cast:
3 male(s), 2 female(s), gender-flexible
Synopsis:
Playwright's are magicians bringing magic and illusion to the stage. Sometimes these stories get confused between what is real and what is illusion. Matthew is writing a play about wine barons in California during the early 1900's. He is
writing a mystery that concerns the death and the division of the will of a hugely successful winery owner in the Napa, Sonoma and Mendacino Valleys.
Matthew's family is in fact living in the house of an old orchard once owned by one of the relatives he is writing about. Matthew spends his day writing and taking care of his four year old daughter Ariel. Ariel is very young but has deep insight
into many of Matthew's play problems. She also offers a different prospective about the life then and now.
Matthew's wife Sheila is a working mother only trying to do what is best for her modern day family. Between her trying to get work for her husband, and Ariel's constant commentary from the other room (we never see her) the play begins to turn into the play that Matthew is writing. Characters who he creates
in his mind begin to live on the stage as real entities.
In the end, Matthew almost finishes the play but the household weirdness that his wife sees is too much and she forces him to abandon the project and the house. In the final moments of the play, Ariel ends up in the family car driving away without either parent who are now chasing the car down the gravel driveway. A glass drops in the kitchen and that is the end.
“Ariel†is a play in a play in a play.
Notes:
Contact: