The Friendly Hour

Based on the actual minutes of a women's club formed in rural South Dakota in 1934, this poignant comedy charts 70 years of personal and national history, from skinning skunks and julebukking in the '30s to restoring native prairie in the new millennium. "Tom Jacobson has paid exemplary homage to real-life American heroes from a less jaded period in our history, using transcripts of minutes from a rural South Dakotan women's club that gathered monthly from 1934 through 2004, when the last two survivors begin to fade. As with other of Jacobson's plays (BUNBURY, SPERM, OUROBOROS), the playwright assigns himself intricate narrative challenges that would have sent Williams back to the loony bin ... These powerful Midwestern survivors are the stoic Americans to celebrate and honor, something Jacobson has accomplished with his lyrical, sweetly bucolic text." -Backstage "Playwright Tom Jacobson seems to challenge himself with each new project, from the ambitious interconnectivity of the two parts of OUROBOROS to the giddy rewrite of famous literature in BUNBURY. On the surface, his latest play, THE FRIENDLY HOUR, may not seem stylistically in line with his other work, but it is - its audacity is simply more quiet. It is a moving and funny piece ... Jacobson's intriguing play structure, which tells the story entirely through meetings of a club, seeks to let the passage of life over seven decades provide the drama ..." -Variety "Tom Jacobson's lovely new play chronicles the rituals of a women's club in rural South Dakota from the late '30s to 2007, and we watch the women with whom we grow increasingly familiar age and engage in theological disputes that are really at the heart of the matter. God's purpose, and the purpose of community, interweave and clash through the decades ... an impressionistic landscape that straddles the literary worlds of Anton Chekhov and Thornton Wilder." -L A Weekly