The Wake

Kentwood Players
( 01/12/2007 - 02/17/2007 )

Steve Allen was a natural and one of America’s true Renaissance Men. His mother was the popular vaudevillian, Belle Montrose. As a boy he would usually wind up in Chicago, home of his mother's Irish-Catholic, lower-middle-class family whose humor he described as “sarcastic, volatile, sometimes disparaging, but very funny.” In 1971, he wrote his only play, The Wake. This semi-autobiographical drama based upon reminiscences of his early childhood, is a bittersweet familial “love story,” provoking memories of anyone from large or small families as it delves into the very soul of the family, filled with the warmth, humor, anguish, rage, resentments and love.