Kitchen Sink Drama

A collection of one hundred illustrated vignettes from the much-loved Kitchen Sink Drama series, as seen in Good Weekend

Elaine Wavering has become inured to a life of stagnant middle-class routine. On one particular morning, however, a bizarre confession from her upright, regimented husband throws her neat and tidy existence into complete disarray. Simultaneously, a rupture in the waste-disposal unit of their kitchen sink inadvertently leads to a shocking encounter that upends her quiet existence in ways that would have previously seemed unimaginable. As she seeks solace and guidance from her semi-estranged sister, Elaine must now look beyond her world of petit bourgeois respectability and contend with real-life events that are rapidly engulfing her in a vortex of existential crisis. A one-act version of Kitchen Sink Drama premiered at New York's Manhattan Theatre Source in 2009.

From 1918’s Tickless Time through Waiting for Lefty, Death of a Salesman, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Raisin in the Sun, and The Prisoner of Second Avenue to 2005’s The Clean House, domestic labor has figured largely on American stages. No dramatic genre has done more than the one often dismissively dubbed “kitchen sink realism” to both support and contest the idea that the home is naturally women’s sphere. But there is more to the genre than even its supporters suggest. In analyzing kitchen sink realisms, Dorothy Chansky reveals the ways that food preparation, domestic labor, dining, serving, entertaining, and cleanup saturate the lives of dramatic characters and situations even when they do not take center stage. Offering resistant readings that rely on close attention to the particular cultural and semiotic environments in which plays and their audiences operated, she sheds compelling light on the changing debates about women’s roles and the importance of their household labor across lines of class and race in the twentieth century. The story begins just after World War I, as more households were electrified and fewer middle-class housewives could afford to hire maids. In the 1920s, popular mainstream plays staged the plight of women seeking escape from the daily grind; African American playwrights, meanwhile, argued that housework was the least of women’s worries. Plays of the 1930s recognized housework as work to a greater degree than ever before, while during the war years domestic labor was predictably recruited to the war effort—sometimes with gender-bending results. In the famously quiescent and anxious 1950s, critiques of domestic normalcy became common, and African American maids gained a complexity previously reserved for white leading ladies. These critiques proliferated with the re-emergence of feminism as a political movement from the 1960s on. After the turn of the century, the problems and comforts of domestic labor in black and white took center stage. In highlighting these shifts, Chansky brings the real home.

It's 1958. Beatie Bryant has been to London and fallen in love with Ronnie, a young socialist. As she anxiously awaits his arrival to meet her family at their Norfolk farm, her head is swimming with new ideas. Ideas of a bolder, freer world which promise to clash with their rural way of life. Roots is the remarkable centrepiece of Wesker's seminal post-war trilogy. It was first performed in 1959 at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, before transferring to the Royal Court. It is the second play in a trilogy comprising Chicken Soup with Barley and I'm Talking About Jerusalem. It went on to transfer to the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End. A true classic, Roots is an affecting portrait of a young woman finding her voice at a time of unprecedented social change. This Modern Classic edition features an introduction by Glenda Leeming.

An irresistibly funny and tender play about big dreams and small changes, chosen to open the Bush Theatre's new venue.

The classic play about the complex, conflict ridden relationship between a teenage girl and her mother - Includes notes and assignments suggestions.

Home is where the heart is, or, in the case of The Sink House, home is what the heart is. Sequestered on a sleepy street in a dry Calgary suburb, our heroine, the House, finds herself embroiled in a stalled love affair with an elusive and alluring Oxfordshire riverbank. In a series of self-contained poems both prosy and lyrical, we follow this curious and engaging affair, which mysteriously coincides with a slow and gradual flood. Everything succumbs to the persistent rise of water: the street becomes a creek bed, wallpaper comes away in the night, sandbags melt, kitchen utensils become silt. Here, the furniture floats, flowers become fish that feed in the garden on vegetables that explode with damp. Through it all, our lovers persist, salvaging soap boats and flushing toilets for amusement. Intelligent, enigmatic, sometimes humorous, and always enticing, The Sink House is a long, eccentric love poem that will immerse you in the flood of its own desire. 'If only the imagination were real. Story seems to think so. And so does Julia Williams. Here, image (hear the image) beautifully choreographs the story into a readable imagination that is a measure of syllabic and rhythmic particulars, a language, thankfully, balanced, open and with surprise. In other words, a poetry that makes seeming so.' - Fred Wah