SKIRMISHES (1983)
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ACTORS FOR THEMSELVES
presents



by CATHERINE HAYES
directed by SAM WEISMAN

Producer - JOSEPH STERN

Jean........................................................................................Tyne Daly
Rita............................................................................Carolyn Seymour
Mother..........................................................................Sylvia Meredith

Set and Lighting Design by Gerry Hariton and Vicki Baral
Costumes by Marianna Elliott
Stage Manager - Gilpin Netburn

 


- WINNER, 1984 Drama-Logue Critic's Choices
Direction (Sam Weisman)
Ensemble Performance
Scenic & Lighting Design (Gerry Hariton & Vicki Baral)
Costume Design (Marianna Elliott)


PHOTOS by I.C. Rapoport
Click on the pictures to see them larger


L-R: Tyne Daly, Sylvia Meredith & Carolyn Seymour


L-R: Tyne Daly, Sylvia Meredith & Carolyn Seymour


REVIEWS

Drama-Logue, June 2-8, 1983

Reviewed by David Galligan

"God's garden must be beautiful,
He only takes the best.
He took our dear, dear mother,
and laid her down to rest."
(An epitaph under consideration in Skirmishes)

Home sweet never. These two sisters use their mother's deathbed as if it were a war zone. It's been years since Rita's been home; not since she married that divorced man with the three kids and left dear old mum. Three kids of her own later and Rita returns --just in time for her mother's death. She had to pay her last respects —her sister Jean wouldn't hear any different. Death is difficult to ignore when your sister calls you long-distance and puts your mother's screams to the mouthpiece. These two sisters can really kick it around.

Jean is the resident martyr with corrugated fingertips from washing the sheets after her mother. This mother-dying business has been going on for a while now and Jean has had to bear the brunt of it. It's turned her life sour. Her husband is constantly on the road selling waxes and industrial cleansers and nagging at Jean to pop out a baby. Life's cheats tend to fester in close quarters.

Tyne Daly's performance as Jean is mean and angry as a running sore. Ms. Daly is serpent-tongued and glowering in the part, smoking endless chains of cigarettes the female counterpart to Simon Grays Butley, bemused and stricken by the irony of it all. She wields playwright Catherine Hayes' words like whiplashes of truth. And out of that almighty truth comes the excruciating pain of the woman. Tyne Daly is monumental in her delineation — making you cringe from the reality of her. The enemy here is Rita, the prodigal daughter, who has returned for the kill with a trunkload of excuses and a virtuoso display of good deeds. Rita's colors are about as true as a henna rinse. Carolyn Seymour puts on a good show as Rita. She makes her hard to decipher, hard to realize that beneath that victimized, put upon demeanor lies a heart as cold as an ice floe. Seymour is absolutely chilling in her realization of the role. The few moments of consciousness for Sylvia Meredith as the mother are considerable —with accusatory stares as scathing as varnish remover. She makes her point perfectly clear.

Sam Weisman has directed Skirmishes as though he were performing surgery. He makes a careful incision, examines the problem and holds it up for a diagnosis. He is fearless about a stage wait, content to let us smother in the dusty confines of Gerry Hariton and Vicki Baral's perfectly executed Liverpool, England sickroom. It is in those silences that our horror mounts as Weisman transforms the stage into a malignant cancer. This is startling, courageous, masterful direction that ultimately increases the voltage to Catherine Hayes" already highly charged piece. Hariton and Baral are also responsible for the grim lighting design, Marianna Elliott for the drab costuming, and Joseph Stern and Actors For Themselves for a devastating evening in the theatre.
 

Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Friday, May 27, 1983

Sisters battle it out in 'Skirmishes'
by Jack Viertel,
Herald theater critic

When the lights come up on the musty Liverpool bed chamber that is the setting for Catherine Hayes' "Skirmishes," the hostility flashing through the room is palpable — although no one is moving. Jean (Tyne Daly) is sitting in a chair, disheveled, exhausted and silent. Her dying mother (Sylvia Meredith) is asleep in bed or, for all we know, already dead. Yet what takes place is a silence so full of implied betrayals, of lost opportunities and of futile expectations that we can feel it. When Jean's sister Rita (Carolyn Seymour) enters, the energy redoubles. Before a single word is spoken, we become terribly afraid of what these people will do to each other

"Skirmishes" charts the battle of two sisters who are living moment-by-moment at the bedside of a woman who has been everything to them and is about to be nothing. True, they are married, and one of them has children, but at the deathbed of a parent, those can seem like recent, even trivial developments. Mother has shaped their characters, mother, by preferring one, and then rejecting her, has laid out a battlefield of anger and recrimination between them that has extrapolated through the years as their own characters have taken hold. Mother is no longer responsible, of course. Life has dealt each sister enough disappointments so that things have gone well beyond blaming mother: "By the time "Skirmishes" has run its grim, intricate course, Rita and Jean have been forced to confront the fact that mother isn't the answer for their anger any more — and that her death won't make that anger vanish.

Hayes has written an absorbing, sometimes lacerating drama that is -- strangely, given its subject matter — never moving, and only rarely emotionally involving. That's only partially a criticism, for "Skirmishes" is an expertly observed analysis of one family's poisons interacting. Unlike Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize-winning and somewhat similar " 'night Mother," it never breaks your heart -- but it is just as relentless and just as intelligent.

And it has the good fortune to be receiving a sensitive reading here, anchored by Tyne Daly's stunning portrayal of Jean, the ungainly, hostile sister who has stayed home and cared for mother over the years. It is Daly who makes the opening moments of "Skirmishes" bristle, with her eyes alternating between the downcast look of defeat and the hard glare of defiance. Looking ungainly and plain in an old pair of trousers and an oversize cardigan, the actress seems to have collected the misery of this room inside herself, and to be spitting it out in bits and pieces.  When she cracks, it is grudgingly, without a hint of willingness to show her emotional side. Tears for her are a failure of will, not a release. It's a performance of sustained bravery and sensational control — a better one will be hard to find for seasons to come.

As her more civilized, more cowardly sister Rita, Carolyn Seymour holds her own. Rita is a less perfectly observed role, a somewhat too-typical wife and mother whose loyalty to her children and husband are, we know well in advance, going to prove to be masks of a sort. Seymour keeps up the illusion of placidity expertly, and comes undone pitiably. Oddly, although she is the less-sympathetic of the two characters, it is her for whom we feel whatever emotional twinges the playwright eventually allows us.

Sylvia Meredith is a tremendous presence as the sleeping mother. Although she has only a few lines - and those are all but incoherent — the sudden coming alive of her face, the blinding accusation and piercing lack of charity in her eyes is actually terrifying. It's a performance that makes much out of almost nothing.

Director Sam Weisman has meshed these three actors into a seamless ensemble, and given the action a hard-edged, unsentimental tone. There are a few extraneous mannerisms and some of the long pauses go on so long that we are jettisoned right out of the playwright's world and back into our own (sitting in the theater, waiting for an entrance). But despite these lapses and the generally monochromatic pace that he has imposed on the evening, "Skirmishes" conveys a consistent atmosphere, and a bleakness of tone for which the director must in some measure take credit. The room itself is a triumph of grim color and threadbare fabric (the redoubtable Vicki Baral and Gerry Hariton have provided the setting and woeful shut-in lighting to match) and the drama that is played out there is equally dark, brutal and unrelenting. "Skirmishes" may fail to ignite the emotions, but it keeps rubbing our noses in the facts of family failure in a way that is as fascinating as it is repugnant. And if one has any doubts about the material, Daly's performance all but eradicates them. The opportunity of seeing this actress in the intimate surroundings of the Matrix Theatre pretty much outweighs any other considerations.
 

Daily Breeze, Sunday, May 29, 1983

'Skirmishes' is serious business
by Sanra Krieswirth, Entertainment writer

Catharine Hayes' British drama 'Skirmishes" at the Matrix Theater in West Hollywood is a slow study of anger, hostility and frustration.

It's a hurling back and forth of accusations by two daughters who sit by the bedside of their dying mother.

And although the show only lasts 90 minutes, much of it is filled with bitter silence. When that silence is broken, the dialogue is acerbic and caustic.

Produced by Joseph Stern's Actors For Themselves and directed by Sam Weisman, the drama stars Tyne Daly in a masterful performance aided ably by Carolyn Seymour and Sylvia Meredith.

"Skirmishes'' is the cynical story of two sisters and their relationship to their mother and each other. It's also an honest, but often uncomfortable look at how differently the sisters wait for their mother to die. And what laughs there are, come out of the side of your mouth.

Tyne Daly is Jean, the feisty one — the sister who's been at the bedside constantly. She made the decision years earlier that she and her husband would live in her mother's house. The inference is she did it to inherit the house. Yet she blames her mother and sister for trapping her. The fact is she could have left at any time, and she could have hired a nurse to care for her mother.

Carolyn Seymour is Rita — the one her mother prefers. But she ran away with a married man and virtually never looked back. She may be forceful and independent in her own home, but back at this one, she's no match for Jean. Her only effective method of attacking Jean is through her inability to have children. Jean has been going to fertility clinics for years to combat her "egg-lessness." Rita never had any trouble.

The contrasts continue. Jean looks disheveled. Who's she got to dress up for? Her husband's away on business. He's not much interested in her anyway. And people stopped coming to the house to see her mother long ago. So she wears baggy pants and a non-descript cardigan. And for entertainment, she eats a lot to interrupt the incredible boredom.

Rita is impeccably groomed. But she's choking on the silence. But Jean seems to thrives in her own kind of misery, sitting in a worn, stuffed chair in a cloud of her own cigarette smoke. She sneers looking straight ahead — hardly ever looking directly at her sister.

And all the time, the mother (Sylvia Meredith) lies there, her skin so white, it's almost transparent She occasionally opens her eyes and screams out Rita's name, at the same time fighting the uncontrollable; twitching of her right arm.

It all sounds depressing, and it is. But somehow director Weisman keeps our attention because we're waiting for something to happen in this house — something more than just the mother dying. So we watch and listen, rather than feel. Ironically, the play is almost stronger in its silence, than in its dialogue.

The only time Rita is left alone in the room with her mother, she sits there waiting for her to wake up. When she doesn't and there's absolutely nothing to do, she begins to inspect her surroundings. She stares at the bottles on the dresser, picks up a photograph and opens a small box. Eventually she sits in Jean's chair immediately sinking into it just like her sister. The scene takes about about 10 minutes, but it feels like hours. The feeling of the monotony is vivid.

As Ms. Hayes' writes, "There's no end to this silence. It hammers you down." And when Jean makes eye contact with her mother, that gesture says more than all the shouting that went before.

Yes, "Skirmishes" is hard to take, but not because of its performances, especially Ms. Daly's. She brings detail to any character she plays. When she scratches her hands irritated by the soap she uses to wash her mother's sheets, you can feel the rawness. And; when she sits in that, old chair, it becomes an extension of her body.

Ms. Seymour is a good contrast to Ms. Daly, and Ms. Meredith exudes tremendous power as she waits to die.

Gerry Hariton and Vicki Baral have captured the gloom and mustiness of the dying woman's bedroom with their sets and lights. Costumes are by Marianna Elliott.


FEATURE ARTICLES

Drama-Logue, June 16-22, 1983

Minor 'Skirmishes' in a Major Drama
A Four-Handed Juggling Act at the Matrix
by T.H. McCulloh

In a dim and forbidding bedroom in an old house in Liverpool an aged woman lies silently, eyes closed, waiting to slip away from this life. Her guardian, daughter Jean, stares absently into space until she is jolted into awareness by the arrival of sister Rita.

"Any change?" asks Rita.

Jean's eyes flash with recognition but there is a wry wariness as she stretches her composure to include the errant Rita. "She's gone out for a bag of chips," she barks.

Catherine Hayes' hour-and-a-half sojourn with the sisters and their dying mother, now playing at the Matrix Theatre, is most definitely not a play about death. It is a play about survival. And it is riddled with that odd humor with which all people defend themselves in catastrophe.

One of the definitions of the word "skirmish" is "contest," and Skirmishes most certainly is a contest of wills among three women. The three actresses who engage in these skirmishes engage in a different kind of heart-to-heart with their director Sam Weisman and Drama-Loguc in their dressing room before a recent performance. There is that same locker room badinage as between boxers before they go out to pummel one another.

Tyne Daly, who wrenches the soul out of put-upon sister Jean and lays it before her audience, smiles, "They've told us the trouble with this play is that we like each other too well to play these two broads." She lightly tosses a crumpled tissue into a shopping bag beside Carolyn Seymour, the coathanger-in-the-blouse sister Rita.

Seymour tilts her head curiously. "Why did you throw that in my makeup kit?"

"I thought it was the garbahge." Sylvia Meredith pats her face with a sponge and watches with twinkling eyes; eyes that become steel and anger as the suffering mother.

"The thing I like about the play," says Seymour, "is that when I first read it I found it funny enough to be valuable. Having been in that situation myself with various members of my family dying within the home there are always moments of extreme humor. And it's not hysterical humor. It's genuine. But there's absolutely no communication between any of them; then suddenly that one moment when Jean and I look as though we're going to make it and have a relationship is blown by mother's interruption. It's just agonizing.  I like that aspect; the play's a three-hander and I couldn't think of a better person to do it with.  Tyne got me going with it."

"So it's my fault."

Tyne Daly and Sylvia Merdith were the first choices for their roles but "we auditioned for Carolyn's part," Weisman says. "She beat out several heavyweight actresses."

Daly whips out. "Does that mean she was thinner than everybody?"

Actually, producer Joe Stern had seen the play and asked Weisman to direct it for the Matrix. "It's difficult," the director admits. "It's the most difficult play I've ever been involved with as an actor or director, I thought the only way to make the play work was to go for an hour-and-a-half of absolute reality. There's nothing imposed upon, it. The thing people get involved in, the red herring about the play, is that it's not about death. Because it's not, I think the people who don't get it insist upon thinking about it that way."

Seymour squints into her mirror as she applies an eye line. "Audiences love the fact that they're drawn into that room."

"The play affords an opportunity," Daly adds, "for the audience to just observe these three human beings in this space of time which is exactly the amount of time it takes everything to happen. There's no relief in this play. That's part of its purpose. It's very important to the telling of the story that all the people in the room going through the play, the players and the people witnessing it, take this trip of time. It's one of the interesting things about being in the theatre.

There is one long moment when Jean leaves the room to fix something to eat. Rita, for the first time is left alone with her mother. In approximately the time it takes to prepare a quick breakfast Rita has to acquaint herself with the world in which Jean has been living for the years of her mother's illness.

"It's amazing, doing that moment," Seymour explains. "The commitment to really being focused and in that room at that time has to be really heightened because I have nothing else to play off except the energy I give."

Daly agrees. "It takes an enormous amount of concentration to be alone in that room with people looking at you, the building of the fourth wall and the making of that place as a very private place, particularly those times when one of the sisters is out of the room. It's a very interesting thing for an actress to do. I've had a lot of fun with it."

Leaning back in her chair limply, Seymour sighs. "I have worked hard to be so simple. All she can do is react. She doesn't have an original thought in her body, this woman. It's been difficult to get out of my own way and shut up and listen and react to that. I've learned an enormous amount doing this play."

Skirmishes is an actor's play. Well, maybe a director's play. Daly holds up a hand at the categorizing. "Yes, the play is an interesting play for actors but you need a very strong hand, which is precisely what we had with Sam, to let the story go off the way it goes. You do the play right and the work of the writer is served by the director and, on another level, served by the actors and it all happens. We're making a balance. We're doing a juggling act in serving the play. For instance my impulse to begin with was just to lay it all onto Rita. Sam had to guide me away from looking at her because Jean is someone who is dying to talk to anybody.  But she's so angry the minute there's anybody to talk to she's constipated with rage. It's been a very interesting trip."

Weisman's interest in the play was piqued by the opening lines: "Any change?" "She's gone out for a bag of chips."

"I thought any play that began that way, there's got to be something to it. I thought it was a great acting play and I like to do acting plays. That's where my strength is."

"It's almost unactable, of course," Daly laughs.

"That's true. But it plays better than it reads and the minute I read it I knew I wanted to do it."

So it is an actor's play and a director's play. It is also an audience play, providing the catharsis which all theatre is supposed to be about. We know that Rita and Jean will survive because they are real people dealing with real problems. And the religious event, which theatre is often called, occurs in Skirmishes.

"All good plays," Tyne Daly mumbles as she slowly pulls on one of the newly-laundered tatty socks which hang limply about Jean's ankles, "are about the mysteries, the big stuff, right? Birth and death and relationships on some level or another. All good plays are about that. I like it because it's beautifully written. It's wrought with a lot of care. The balance point of humor is really interesting."

"And we have this great ensemble feeling," Seymour enthuses, "which is lovely."

Truly an ensemble piece, Skirmishes forces the actresses to dig deeply. Sylvia Meredith, who spends most of the evening asleep in a most difficult assignment, says, "I had a very hard time finding out what the old lady was really about." But the characterization is fully realized, helped perhaps by the vibrations she gets from her nightgown. It belonged to Carolyn Seymour's great-grandmother, Moura, who was mistress to both Maxim Gorky and H.G. Wells.

A play about death? Not really. But a difficult play which must find its audience. It is an important play in the panoply of theatre growth in Los Angeles and, as Tyne Daly says with a laugh, "on any given Monday night you can go across town and see Carolyn in The Ruling Class, you can see me on television in Cagney and Lacey or on HBO in some picture that's seven or eight years old."

Or you can see their acclaimed performances in Catherine Hayes' Skirmishes. "Where we are now is here, telling our stories."
 

L.A. Times, Thursday, May 5, 1983

'Skirmishes': A Dying Mother's Battle
by Sylvie Drake

Mothers and daughters. Fascinating accomplices or adversaries or merely competitors, but interesting, always. Marsha Norman's Pulitzer Prize-winning play "'night, Mother" offers the most fevered case in point, but a new drama—or at least new to us—is again about to plunge us into the whole sticky business.

It is British playwright Catherine Hayes' "Skirmishes," an Actors for Themselves production destined to run in repertory with producer Joe Stern's distinguished mounting of "Eminent Domain" at the Matrix. It is officially described as "a drama of two daughters and their relationship to their dying mother," with the mother on stage and very much a part of the action.

Sylvia Meredith, recently nominated by the Los Angeles Drama Critics circle for her performance in "Going to See the Elephant," tackles that mother, while Carolyn Seymour and Tyne Daly (everyone's Mary Beth in TV's "Cagney and Lacy") play the two daughters.

How does Tyne Daly find time for Equity Waiver?

"Joe Stern came down and seduced me with the play," she said Tuesday. "Equity Waiver? What do you mean? I've always done Equity Waiver. After nine months of having my picture taken, I couldn't wait to get back on stage. I'm foolishly fond of doing theater. When I left New York City, I thought I had left theater forever, but, of course, I hadn't."

Of course, she hadn't. The rushing words tumbled, one after the other, in that uniquely breathless Daly style:

"I had been approached about doing 'Sister Mary' in New York, taking over the role, but the dates didn't, work out. So here I am in this play, in real time. I used to think I knew what it's about, but I don't know. I'm at that point where I don't understand anything. I ask myself, what are we doing here? Why am I in it? Who are these people? It always happens to me about two weeks into rehearsal. Well, it's about sisters at a very desperate time in their lives. I hope it's very funny and grueling and strange."

Earlier forays into Equity Waiver aside, Daly also did a notable run of shows at the Mark Taper and the Forum Lab. Memorably, she played an 80-year-old matriarch in Harvey Perr's "Gethsemane Springs," but wives seem to be her specialty—the wife in "Ashes," with Michael Cristofer playing her husband, and the wife in Cristofer's own "Black Angel," with its stunning final monologue.

"Another laugh riot," she quipped. "That monologue was Michael's revenge for his monologue in 'Ashes.' "

Not quite television, is it?

"Whaddayamean? TV's like doing the Play pf the Week, like stock." This was Mary Beth speaking. "It's a different way of finding your energy. When I do 'Skirmishes,' I'll be watching my mother die every night for two months. If I played 'Medea,' I'd be killing my children every night. But with Mary Beth, I know her in many different situations. With her brother—that's a new character—with her husband, I love that relationship with her husband.

"I've done 22 shows. That's probably the longest time I've worked on any project, including rep. It's a very good job. I hope it continues. If it doesn't, I hope I'll get another good job. The real prize is I've gotten to act every day for nine months. Not many American actors get to do that.

"What could be bad?"

What, indeed. "Skirmishes" opens May 24.
 

L.A. Times, 1983

Sylvia Meredith Plays it as it Lays in 'Skirmishes'
by Janice Arkatov

It's 8 p.m. center stage at the Matrix Theatre: time for Sylvia Meredith to go to work. She climbs into the large wood-frame bed, fluffs up her pillows, pulls up the blankets and closes her eyes. The play, Catherine Hayes' "Skirmishes," unfolds, with two sisters (Tyne Daly and Carolyn Seymour) railing at each other over their elderly mother's deathbed.

Through it all, Meredith lies mute and unmoving (with the exception of a few twitches, grimaces and one shrieked line), a hard and bitter object—almost a piece of human scenery. Could any actress ask for an easier time?

"Oh yes!" gasps the tiny, gray-pigtailed Meredith. "Let me tell you, lying there is such a trap. I have never kept such an absolute blank in my entire life—'cause if I even start thinking about what's happening on the front steps of Melrose, I begin to float. . . and I mean float. I have to stop myself; I have to listen all the time.

"In the beginning, our director, Sam Weisman, was actually thinking of installing an electrical device to prod me if I fell asleep. I didn't tell him that once during rehearsal I really did fall asleep. That was quite frightening, 'cause when I woke up, it was during one of those long silences in the play—and I didn't know where we were."

Keeping awake onstage isn't Meredith's only theatrical chore. Since last August, she's been performing alternate nights at Pasadena's De Lacey St. Theatre in "Coming to See the Elephant"—a role which recently earned her an L.A. Drama Critics' nomination (and the play a Dramalogue Award).

Of her dual roles in "Elephant" and "Skirmishes", Meredith says: "It is a bit like doing my own private repertory. But I've had it worse. Last Christmas time, I was playing at South Coast Rep in Jim Leonard's The Diviners.' I was driving to Costa Mesa in all the traffic for rehearsals and then coming back—in all the traffic—to Pasadena and doing 'Elephant' four times a week. So this is kind of a cinch.

"Of course," she continues reflectively, "it is a little shift of gears. 'Elephant* is a very dramatic role—but I know her. She's part of me. With 'Skirmishes,' I'm just beginning to know this old gal.

"At first, on paper, the character was such a bare skeleton. So I had to create a life outside the script. But now—I'm really full of her by the time that curtain goes up. I don't know what's conveyed to the audience, but I'm there and I feel her."

Meredith has been "feeling" characters since age 10, from professional stock performances in her native Minneapolis, through her teens: joining Chautauqua (a prestigious traveling company of actors and musicians during the 1920s), and later as a puppeteer—touring 11 years with the Sue Hastings Marionette Theatre.

At the beginning of World War II, she joined the U.S. Nurse Cadet Corps. It's one more role than she holds onto today.

"All this time," she explains proudly, "going back and forth, I maintain a part-time nursing job, working at a home health agency and supervising the aides. With four hours minimum each day, it doesn't leave me a lot of time to be bored. My bosses are very understanding; they know I'm an actress."

Meredith wears the title with relish. After her early nursing training, she returned to Broadway and regional theater—playing with Walter Matthau in "Season in the Sun," with Bert Lahr in "Harvey," and with Zero Mostel in "My Three Angels."

But her 1962 California move segued into social service work: at a boys' probation camp in the Lakeside Mountains, then 12 years as a supervising nurse at Juvenile Hall. In 1978 she retired and returned to the local stage, in her own "Days of the Life of Queen Victoria." Now she plays it as it comes.

"Well, you certainly can't plan ahead. What I'd really like to do is take about four months and work on my house; it's been neglected. When a nice role comes along, I think 'My house will always be here.' But it's slowly disappearing, 'cause I'm giving it no time at all."

"It's gotten to the point where utilities that need to be fixed I don't fix, 'cause I'm embarrassed to have someone come into the house. And I live in terror that my sister might come over to visit someday; I just don't want her to open that door!"

All major fears aside, Meredith shows no signs of regret—or slowing down.

"I would love to do a Shakespeare play , but there's really almost nothing for an older woman in Shakespeare. The thing I don't like about the nurse in 'Romeo and Juliet' is that everyone thinks she's supposed to be funny—and I don't think she's written funny."

Neither, of course, is her character in "Skirmishes".

"Joe Stern (the producer) had seen it performed in New York, where apparently the woman was an absolute horror. And he came to me and said, 'I just can't imagine you doing a part like that: You seem like such a nice lady.'"

Meredith pauses, eyes twinkling. She's pleased with the compliment, but that's not where it ends.

"Well—I didn't say this to him—I am a nice lady. But I'm also an actress!" It's one job Sylvia Meredith won't fall asleep on.
 

Drama-Logue, June 9-15, 1983

Joe Stern Offers Free Tickets to 'Skirmishes'
by Polly Warfield

Joe Stern of the Matrix Theatre and Actors For Themselves is offering a "free ticket" rush for the balance of the Skirmishes performances at the Matrix.  One hour before the 8 pm curtain, all unsold seats will be given away free at the box office to first comers.  Paid reserved seating is still in effect and donations will be accepted before and after the performance.

Stern explains, "We have an unusual situation with this play.  The ticket-buying public has not responded as we had hoped and Skirmishes has too much going for it to let it die."

The play by Catherine Hayes offers critically acclaimed performances by Tyne Daly, Carolyn Seymour and Sylvia Meredith and is directed by L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award recipient (for AFT's production of Betrayal last year) Sam Weisman.

Playgoers may present themselves at the box office, 7657 Melrose Ave. in West Hollywood, between 7 and 8 pm, Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, through July 5.

 

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