Kathleen Thompson
Around the Block Press, 2015
Private Investigations is a collection of three short plays, two of them comedies, about the most serious issues facing us as human beings–love and death. The title play, “Private Investigations,” is a tense showdown between a recently widowed woman and the private investigator she hires to look into her husband’s death. “Kindness” looks at four women who confront grief with shopping and pie. In “I Shall Love You Forever, a young couple considers a peculiarly long-term commitment.
Reviews of the Plays
Private Investigations
Original Production at the Commons Theatre
Directed by Elizabeth Lee, starring India Cooper, Paul H. Thompson, Corrine Lyon, Robert Petkoff, and Marian Hank
A new script by the Commons Theatre’s playwright-in-residence, Kathleen Thompson, “Private Investigations,” is astutely written. The dialogue’s crisp, the characters are well observed, and the structure—a sort of braid with two story-strands passing around and across each other—is canny and useful. . . . As “Private Investigations” stands right now it is the most sophisticated, best realized work I’ve seen Thompson do. A real mensch of a play. It carries a palpable aura of intelligence, compassion, and playfulness, without the least whiff of indulgence. This is a piece of work I would’ve liked even if it hadn’t gotten to me. . . .
Actually, Thompson worked a kind of double whammy on me with this play. Not only did its theme of loss get to me, but also its portrayal of detectives. You see it just so happens my dad was a private investigator until his death. I’ve seen fictional gumshoes from Raymond Chandler’s existential Philip Marlowe to Moonlighting’s Motown David Addison, but never one that conformed to my actual experience as Diana Hughes does.” Anthony Adler, Chicago Reader
Kindness
A play in one act
Original Production at Chicago New Plays
Directed by Ellyn Duncan, starring Ellie Weingardt, Patti Hannon, Suzy Kuhn and Sandy Spatz
Kathleen Thompson’s “Kindness” is a bittersweet slice-of-life look at four women in a small Oklahoma town, glimpsed through an ordinary conversation they have at the town`s lone, unglamorous cafe. They have just come from an estate sale for another town resident, and much of the piece is smalltown Southern dish and grotesque humor. (The deceased fell victim to a binge of cole slaw overeating.) But, slyly, Thompson shifts to a sad, artful look at their lonely camaraderie, delivered with delicate balance from the four actresses–Ellie Weingardt, Patti Hannon, Suzy Kuhn and Sandy Spatz–and Ellyn Duncan`s keen direction. Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune
I Shall Love You Forever
A play in one act
Original Production at The Commons Theatre
Directed by Brian Kaufmann, starring Michael Nowak and Melinda Skilondz
Kathleen Thompson’s I Shall Love You Forever has aspirations of being a graceful diversion along the lines Of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, in which fantasy and reality make a cute and cozy match. lnstead of a ghost quipping in the drawing room, Thompson has a benign vampire, who reveals her occult identity when her live-in boyfriend comes home to their Lincoln-Avenue-neighborhood-type apartment from a softball game. Much of the humor comes from the practical difficulties of dealing domestically with the supernatural. Of course, a few TV sitcoms have evolved from the same premise, but Thompson deserves better comparisons. Her script has the makings of clever, sweet, intelligent entertainment.
. . . [W]hen Malcolm discloses he has been in a bad car accident and is consequently haunted by thoughts of his mortality–and hers–she pops her spooky news, and the action starts. It would be unfair to spill the rest of the story, but Thompson, in the main, wraps things up with charm, gaiety, sensitivity, and occasional poignancy.
J. Linn Allen, Chicago Reader