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Morality ~ A Comedy in Three Acts, by Ludwig Thoma, translated and adapted by Alma Thieme.

Ludwig Thoma got the idea for this play when he was jailed in Munich's Stadelheim Prison in 1906 for insulting the local "Morality Club." The insult had appeared in the political magazine Simplizissimus, which Thoma edited. Thoma turned his prison sentence into a biting comedy, with revenge-served-cold debuting almost simultaneously in Berlin and Munich in 1908.

Alma Thieme has taken Thoma's truly funny play and adapted it for Americans. She left it set in 1906, but the locale is Houston, Texas. A pompous businessman-cum-wannabe-politician joins the town's Morality Club to advance his political aspirations. His mother-in-law in the role of wise old woman ridicules his shameless hypocrisy (she knows her daughter's husband all too well) and the Morality Club's lack of morality.

All hell breaks loose when the police chief arrests Houston's most notorious Madam and confiscates her little black book. Of course, every member of the Morality Club ~ including our chief protagonist ~ knows his name is in the Madam's book.

And they go to tremendous lengths to recover it.

To this point, Thoma's play is nothing new, that is, the plot is one that has been used and reused frequently over the past century. But his denouement is special and funny, and Thieme renders it well in an American context.

We recognize the false family values preached by fakes like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh in this old play. Perhaps the fact that nothing has changed, that there never have been any "good old days," makes the Thoma/Thieme comedy more relevant than ever. It becomes timeless because it is not contemporary.

19 characters, 12 adult males, 6 adult females, 1 teenage/young adult female.

Script can be ordered through our online store ($10 each ~ either 1 copy only for perusal purposes, or minimum order of 20 scripts).

Royalties: For high school, college, university, and community theaters, $50 for the first performance, $35 for each subsequent performance. Can be paid online.

To order scripts or pay royalties, click here.

For-profit professional theaters: Please write us for quote.

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Date of last update: 18 March 2008