Here it is dear old Dad, one-time genius mathematician Robert who, after completing his best work when he was in his early twenties ("He revolutionized the field twice before he was twenty-two") fell apart. "I went bughouse", as he puts it -- except that they didn't lock the guy up. Devoted daughter Catherine, also mathematically inclined, attended to him, while older sister Claire would have been just as happy to see the old man institutionalized. 

       Dad dies, and Claire comes back to Chicago for the funeral. And it is also Catherine's twenty-fifth birthday. Meantime one of Robert's former students, Harold "Hal" Dobbs, has begun going through the hundred-odd notebooks the one-time genius left behind, hoping that a bit of the old brilliance surfaces somewhere in the pages that seem to be filled merely with a madman's scribblings ..... 

       A notebook surfaces which contains what is, indeed, an impressive proof.  Auburn isn't to concerned with specifics: it is a proof of "a mathematical theorem about prime numbers, something mathematicians have been trying to prove since ... since there were mathematicians, basically." And it really isn't that important. Turns out, however, that there is a question of whose proof it is -- because Catherine claims it's hers. 

       Hal knows it is a work of genius, so it can't be Catherine's (all she had done was take "some classes at Northwestern for a few months", after all). Claire thinks the handwriting is obviously her father's. And while she thinks her sister is like Dad in some ways -- "you have some of his talent and some of his tendency toward ... instability" -- she also can't believe Catherine could have come up with whatever it is that this proof is. And she just wants to sell the house and take erratic Catherine back to New York to get her some decent medical treatment. 

       Catherine herself knows she isn't in quite a right state of mind. Her great fear is of winding up like her father. But she is also gifted. "Even your depression is mathematical", Dad notes, and Hal has some sense of her abilities as well. 

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"The Rainmaker" centers around Lizzie Curry, who is told frequently how "plain" she is by Noah, her know-it-all brother who runs the family farm. Her father, H.C., and her youngest brother Jimmy, are especially keen on getting Lizzie married off.

The play unfolds as the family tries to get the local divorced deputy interested in Lizzie, while outside the Curry ranch, the cattle are dying of drought on a scorching summer day.

Enter Starbuck, a magnetic tale-spinner who promises rain for a mere hundred dollars. To coax the clouds, he has a bass drum and a bucket of white paint; for the rancher’s daughter, a barrel of sweet talk and a belief in her beauty.

Can Starbuck overcome Lizzie’s skepticism and bring rain to the desert of her life?  Richard Nash’s romantic comedy, an American classic, is a tribute to the power of laying claim--and holding tight--to one’s dreams.

The Cemetery Club uses humor, irony, and heartfelt emotion to examine the issues of dying, re-kindling romance, and starting life anew. Ida, Lucille and Doris, three widows, are part of a club - the cemetery club. Every month they meet at Ida's house for tea, and then trundle off to the cemetery to remember the good times and gossip with their late husbands. 

When one of them meets Sam, a handsome widower, their lifelong friendship is threatened as their true feelings come to the surface. As the play unfolds, their inner feelings are revealed and show that whilst life must move on, true friendship remains constant. This touching play about three superannuated, feuding, Jewish women is funny, wise and gloriously witty.

For additional information please call or write:
Richmond Community Theater
P.O. Box 635
Rockingham, N.C. 28380
(910) 997-3765
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