Cover art L’Egoïsme personnifié (Selfishness Personified)

Me, Me, Me

Eugène Labiche and Èdouard Martin, translated by Laurence Senelick

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Description

A sardonic comedy about Dutrecy, a man of the most unbridled selfishness, who arranges his life to provide himself maximum comfort. With a similar friend De la Porcheraie he hopes to acquire land where a new street is to be built, cheating the owner before news gets out. He also intends to marry his teen-aged niece Therese in hopes she'll be his nurse in his old age. Meanwhile his nephew Armand has saved the banker's son Georges; bosom friends, each assumes the other loves Therese. Eventually, everything works out to the satisfaction of the young people and the discomfiture of Dutrecy.

Production Info

Cast: 11 total (2 female, 9 male)
Full Length Comedy (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
Categories: , Tags: ,
Reviews

Press Quotes

“I cannot take human beings seriously. They seem to me to have been created solely to amuse those who regard them in a certain way.” —Eugène Labiche

“We love these tremendous farces of a formidable joviality and an absurd comic spirit … They constitute an original, spontaneous and profoundly French art.” —Théophile Gautier

“The characters of Labiche, like those of classic comedy, are men of forever, as well as the permanent reflection of their era, their milieu … He doesn’t lose his temper; he laughs with precision and intelligence.” —Jacques Crépineau

“With a force, an insistence, an exactitude which shows the care Labiche took in tracing this portrait, the author of ME, ME, ME succeeds in pinning down his man … ME, ME, ME is one of the best things Labiche ever wrote, one of those in which he shows his true strength …” —Philippe Soupault

“A universe in which everything is computations, calculations and frantic cynicism. ME, ME, ME scratches where it itches most: happiness, immoral but ineffable, is to be selfish to one’s fingertips. Fie on innocence, fine feelings are to be mocked … This is a celebration of uncompromising selfishness. Cruel. Abominable. But ever so delightful …” —Didier Mereuze

About the Author

Author

  • Eugène Labiche

    Eugène Labiche was born on May 5, 1815. Labiche was a French dramatist who wrote about 175 plays, the majority of which were light comedies or vaudevilles, and the remaining plays were comedies of manners. Labiche died in 1883.

  • Édouard Martin

    Édouard Martin was a 19th-century French playwright known for the comedies he wrote in collaboration with Eugène Labiche, Albert Monnier, and Paul Siraudin, during the Second French Empire.

  • Laurence Senelick

    Laurence Senelick is Fletcher Professor Emeritus of Drama and Oratory at Tufts University. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard. His expertise is in Russian theatre and drama, history of popular entertainment, gender and performance, history of directing, classical theory. Prof. Senelick is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, the most recent being, The Final Curtain: The Art of Dying on Stage; The Crooked Mirror: Plays of a Modernist Russian Cabaret; Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History; Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters; The American Stage: Writing on the American Theatre (Library of America) and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre. Others books include: The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, as well as over a hundred articles in learned journals. He is a former Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin. Prof. Senelick was named Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Prof. Senelick has been named a Distinguished Scholar by both the American Society of Theatre Research and the Faculty Research Awards Council of Tufts University. He is the recipient of grants and awards from, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has received the Barnard Hewitt Award of the American Society for Theatre Research for The Chekhov Theatre; the George Freedley Award of the Theatre Library Association for The Age and Stage of George L. Fox and The Changing Room; and the George Jean Nathan Award for best dramatic criticism of 2000. He holds the St. George medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture for services to Russian art and scholarship, and is honorary curator of Russian theatre at the Harvard Theatre Collection. He was also awarded a stipend from the TranScript/Mikhail Prokhorov Fund for Translation from the Russian. In 2008 he won the Graduate Teaching award (doctoral level) of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools and in 2012 the Betty Jean Jones Prize of American Theatre and Drama Society for Distinguished Teaching. He is a widely produced translator of plays from such authors as Chekhov and Feydeau, and director at Tufts of his own translations of The Inspector General, The Bakkhai, and Anything to Declare? He has acted and directed with such organizations as the Poets' Theatre, the Loeb Drama Center, the Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Baroque, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the revue The Proposition. He recently devised new courses on Cabaret, Theatre and Visual Studies, and Low Comedy and played Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Balch Arena Theatre. His recipes appear in the Bon Appetit cookbooks.

About the Book

Book Information

Publisher BPPI
Publication Date 9/22/2018
Pages 102
ISBN 9780881457896

Special Notes

Special Notes

Licensees are required to include the original stage producers credits in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
The following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
Me, Me, Me is produced
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
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