Avec Schmaltz

Comedy

Characters: 4 male 3 female

This two-act comedic collision seems at first like a straightforward romp about marital grumblings. But there are all sorts of surprising complexities in the failed marriage of Kit the WASP flame-haired rich girl and Manny the wry wise-cracking Jewish TV composer which has produced two precocious sassy children and a situation in which the ex-wife and the ex-husband can't seem to live with each other or without each other.

'Avec Schmaltz' (a phrase European musicians would ironically use to instruct violinists how to emotionally heat-up their romantic string passages) is about this devoted divorced couple their new partners and their two glib offspring at holiday time. It moves from a Currier and Ives winter wonderland of Christmas Eve in Connecticut to a New Year's Eve in sun-drenched Beverly Hills California. It concerns the ex-marital couple their lovers and would-be-lovers entering and exiting in a farcical light-hearted but dead-serious comedy in two acts.

There is no facile resolution to the question of "will-they-or-won't-they?" get back together. Rather there is the emotional vitality of people clinging to what relational lifeboats they are tossed in the buoyant excursion called life!