Duets: Love Is Strange

Arnold Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy

isbn 1-59661-095-6
102 pages/$15

In Duets: Love Is Strange, Johnston and Percy use rhythm and language expertly: their couples speak volumes with a brevity of words. Well-drawn characters and dynamic relationships allow actors of any age to sink their teeth into the roles, and the plays' imaginative settings (stage a play at the top of a tree, anyone?) create a challenge any director will relish. Read them! Enjoy them! Stage them!
--Melanie Sutherland, Director, producer, artistic director, AAI Productions

Duets uses sharp, economical strokes to cut right to the hilarious and often wrenching core of marital and extramarital relationships. Yet, for me, the single greatest achievement of this remarkably rich collection of one-act plays is that what emerges from the characters’ wrangling, witty wordplay, and searing banter, is a profound and welcome sense of hope.
--Lisa Dillman, Author of the plays Flung and Rock Shore

This duet that Arnold Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy sing is a song of love enduring life's perpetual tribulations of desperation, uncertainty, absurdity, contention, guilt, and grief. It is a song that dramatically explores aspects of the ultimate human bond, love between two people.
--Charles (OyamO) Gordon, Playwright in Residence, University of Michigan

Duets: Love Is Strange by Arnold Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy could be dubbed a collection of honesty. In these six plays, the authors provide us, one minute, with gut-wrenching tragedy, and in the next minute, with the comedy of life. If it is possible to combine Chekhov and Pinter, this is what you get in Duets: Love Is Strange: a highly intelligent and insightful evening of theatre--a sophisticated analysis of relationships that never takes itself too seriously.
--Le Wilhelm, Playwright and Artistic Director, Love Creek Productions

In Duets, Arnold Johnston and Deborah Ann Percy share six of their widely produced and prize-winning shorts. Significantly, all are two-character plays featuring a man and a woman, intimate encounters with no place to hide. Beneath the smart banter and consistent energy runs a melancholic current of sadness, anger, disappointment. These couples inevitably fall short in frustrated efforts at understanding, but they keep coming back for more, climbing together, probing, and cataloging the vagaries of human love and need. These tight, well-crafted plays form a moving whole.
--Gaylord Brewer, Editor, Poems & Plays

In this age of cynicism, it was refreshing to direct Johnston's and Percy's collection of touching, witty, smart, and yet hopeful plays. Love Is Strange, but with the right partner, love is once again wonderful.
--Tucker Rafferty, Artistic Director, Whole Art Theatre

Set in intriguing settings and filled with passionate characters, these smart and stylish one-acts capture the banter and byplay of couples who often know each other way too well. Johnston and Percy, both a playwriting team and a married couple, prove over and over that they understand both the challenges and pleasures of intimate relationships.
--Rich Orloff, Author of the plays Advanced Chemistry and Shedding Light

Delightful and diverse in style and tone, these two-handers are straightforward and easy to produce. Individually, they are delectable appetizers. Together, they constitute a good meal.
--Charles Smith, Author of Freefall, The Sutherland, and Pudd'nhead Wilson; Head of the Professional Playwriting Program, Ohio University

Arnold Johnston's plays, and others written in collaboration with his wife, Deborah Ann Percy, have won awards, production, and publication across the country. His poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translations have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. His books include What the Earth Taught Us, The Witching Voice: A Play About Robert Burns, and Of Earth and Darkness: The Novels of William Golding. His novel about Robert Burns, The Witching Voice, is forthcoming from Wings Press in 2009. Johnston is also a member of the Dramatists Guild, a resident playwright with NYC’s AAI Productions, and an artistic Associate with Chicago’s Theo Ubique Theatre Company. He taught creative writing for many years at Western Michigan University and was chairman of WMU’s English Department from 1997 to 2007. He is now a full-time writer.

Deborah Ann Percy earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Western Michigan University. Her plays, and others written in collaboration with her husband, Arnold Johnston, have won awards, publication, and production nationwide. Their books include a play, Rasputin in New York, and (with Dona Rosu) translations of Romanian playwright Hristache Popescu’s Night of the Passions and Sons of Cain and the forthcoming Epilogue. Their edited collection, The Art of the One Act, appeared in 2007 from New Issues Press. Winner of major playwriting grants from the Michigan Council for Arts & Cultural Affairs and the Gilmore Foundation, Percy is a member of the Dramatists Guild and a resident playwright with AAI Productions.