Unmerciful Good Fortune
Play Description
Arrogant young Puerto Rican Fatima, who works as a counter girl at a fast-food restaurant, has been arrested for the murder of 14 people, poisoned at her workplace. Young attorney Jeremy has been assigned to defend her and asks a Latina colleague, Maritza, to be his translator. But Fatima refuses to talk to anyone but Maritza, and she's enough of a manipulator to get her way. Fatima claims she has been blessed — or cursed — with psychic powers. By merely clasping the hand of an individual, she says, she can immediately grasp everything about him/her including past, future, and innermost secrets. She tells Maritza that her murders were mercy killings: She “read” each of her victims and killed them because they wanted to die. Maritza is first incredulous, then indignant at Fatima's playing God. She firmly resists letting Fatima clasp her hand, but Fatima is persuasive, constantly shifting from pugnacious, foul-mouthed street girl to wise and wily seductress to gentle, compassionate young woman. Maritza finally offers up her hand, yielding her secrets and placing her fate in Fatima's grasp.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
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- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“Since graduating from the Yale School of Drama in 1994, Edwin Sánchez has won more fellowships and foundation grants than most playwrights receive in a lifetime. Go see UNMERCIFUL GOOD FORTUNE and you will understand why. The drama’s premise is intriguing, and the action often riveting, but what really sets the play apart is the dialogue. Sánchez’s characters can change moods on a dime.” —Virginia Gerst, Pioneer Press
“Many years ago, playwright Tom Stoppard demonstrated the art of creating suspense to an audience … Playwright Edwin Sánchez probably did not attend that lecture, but he certainly knows how to create the same mood in his latest work, UNMERCIFUL GOOD FORTUNE … The audience is kept on the edge of their seats. While they cannot predict what will come next, each twist and turn of the plot seems exactly right as it unfolds. The play centers on two Latinas: Fatima, a clairvoyant, uneducated hourly wage earner-turned-murderer, and on a successful, highly educated assistant district attorney, a single parent caring for her dying mother. From this unlikely pairing, Sánchez builds a story that examines class, racial and gender conflicts, family and professional relationships, friendship, heterosexual and homosexual love, self-realization, personal worth, and the ethics of euthanasia …” —Beverly Friend, Lerner
Book Information
Publisher | BPPI |
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Publication Date | 2/1/2016 |
Pages | 64 |
ISBN | 9780881456455 |
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them 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:
Originally co-produced by Victory Gardens Theater and Northlight Theater, Chicago
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypublishing.com