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JUST WHAT THE GOOD DOCTOR ORDERED 

AT WASHINGTON STAGE GUILD 




Washington Stage Guild has just the thing to cure  whatever may ail you!  The Good Doctor  with its  pokes at the foibles of human nature.


After all laughter  is the best of medicines. 


All sorts of people inhabit Chekhov’s world of short stories which Neil Simon adapted in

this play.


There is the sexton with a toothache  in “Surgery” who visits an overzealous dentist  or desperate situations like  “A Defenseless Creature” where a a nervous woman harasses a banker  with a sore foot to extort money supposedly on behalf of  her injured husband. Special note to fight choreographer John Gurski for the fight scene in that one.


There are accidents that lead to a nervous breakdown like  “The Sneeze”  and there are ordinary life events that escalate like when a mother tries to cheat payment due as in “The Governess.”


Sometimes the setting is a park bench - as in the quiet “Two Late for Happiness” when an

older man and woman meet up  —or not so peaceful  as when  two retirees meet to  argue about what is  the perfect meal in “A Quiet War.”   


There are attempts at success that vary from “The Drowned Man” in which a tramp tries to

scam a man by drowning himself as “maritime entertainment”  to the insistent  actress

who walked four days from Odessa for “The Audition.”


In “The Seduction” a man tries to seduce a married woman using his best friend —her husband— as an accomplice while  in “The Arrangement,” a father takes his 19 year old  son to a brothel.


There is -  in short a smile for everyone at  The Good Doctor  — now at Washington Stage Guild until Oct. 23.


 No appointments necessary!  but get your tickets at  https://stageguild.org/buy-tickets/

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