Variations On Living In America

"I wanted to write as much about power as about money. There are people in Maine, the way they live, the way they dress, the way their house looks -- there's no difference between them and people who are really poverty-stricken. . . . They look like the sort of people that couldn't keep it together to be lobstermen . . . and they're on Wall Street."

-- Richard Dresser

The only CATF veteran playwright ("Rounding Third," "Below the Belt," "Gun-Shy," "Something in the Air") in this summer's lineup, Dresser set his entire trilogy in Maine, where he has vacationed since childhood. The first play of the three, "Augusta," about two cleaning women, premiered at CATF in 2006. "The Pursuit of Happiness," which premiered in 2007 at the Laguna Playhouse in California and played CATF last year, is about middle-class parents whose daughter refuses to go to college. The people in "A View of the Harbor," Dresser says, "have what the people in the first two plays would practically kill to get, which is endless wealth . . . the point of telling this particular story to end the trilogy is that there's a burden to it as well."

Greg Kotis, "Pig Farm"

The tongue-in-cheek comedy with alliteratively named characters Tom, Tim, Tina and Teddy -- men and women of few words workin' the land, fussin' with one another and standin' up to the Feds -- plays with the idea of big-time agribusiness and the muck that can drain from its fields. In this case, the polluted waterway is the Potomac, and the inspector from the Environmental Protection Agency is armed. The playwright says he chose the river so his characters could refer to a mess of "fecal sludge" washing up near the U.S. Capitol.

"I'm sending up that whole American mythic kind of feeling . . . archetypal struggles and crises and battles. These sorts of American-feeling situations."

-- Greg Kotis

Premiered in 2006 by both Roundabout Theatre Company in New York and the Old Globe in San Diego, "Pig Farm" is as mock-serious as the playwright's "Urinetown." Kotis won two Tonys as book writer and co-lyricist of that irreverent toilet musical.