Thank You, Don Ameche: A New Comedy in Two Acts

Why Are We Thanking Don Ameche?

Don Ameche was an American actor whose career extended from the late 1920s to the early 1990s. He was a star of stage, screen, and radio, appearing in dozens of movie and hundreds of episodes of radio and television shows, winning an Oscar along the way for Best Supporting Actor in Cocoon in 1985.

This play is not about him.

In fact, he’s not a character in the play.

Instead, we have a roomful of writers for a hit national network radio comedy/variety show in 1938, dealing with both the pressures of churning out an hour-long live radio show every week, and each other.

Show biz, of course, was show biz even back then. Writers wrote whatever they were told to, and sometimes they even got paid for it. One of the writers in this writers room tried to break into radio by writing a sketch for Don Ameche, and found out that network suits have something of a different point of view than his.

Not that it stopped him, which is part of how he wound up in this room, helping America forget its troubles for an hour a week.

This play is about how this group of writers tried to forget their own troubles and keep themselves and America laughing.

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Thank You, Don Ameche is a full-length comedy set in the writers room of a national hit radio show in 1938. It is an homage to both the rapid-fire dialogue comedies of the 1930s and the radio comedy of the era.

There are 5 roles, 4 male and 1 female. The play has 1 set and few props.