This Thing of Darkness (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

Synopsis

Abbey and Donald, best friends, have just graduated college. Sharing a birth date, Donald travels to visit Abbey and his parents at a remote country house to celebrate their twenty-second birthdays together as an uncertain future looms ahead of them. The birthday celebration on the heels of their graduation seems to have rendered Abbey into an unstable emotional state. Donald, less sensi-tive, is suffering too, but Abbey was the one who, during graduation, chewed his nails off and kept going until he hit bone. After all, in an ever dangerous and violent world, what is one to feel secure about? Does friendship even stand a chance? As Abbey and Donald try to strike a deal to ensure their friendship for life, the birthday cake appears, and the candles are blown out, but the lights go out as well, and a new holocaust has hit. As the play goes on, we wonder if we're being treated to a seriously eerie vision of the future or if we're being invited to witness a beautiful, painful exploration of what it's like to become an adult as the twenty-first century enters its infancy. With a tip of the hat to Prospero in his acknowledgment of Caliban, life itself seems to have become "this thing of darkness" that Abbey and Donald must accept as their own.