JOY!
A Period Dramedy | Approximately 75–80 minutes | Cast of 5 | Flexible, Economical Staging
1965. Small-town America. Nineteen-year-old Joy knows how to design, draw, read blueprints, repair and build—but she is growing up in a world that has very different ideas about what a young woman should do and become.
At home, Joy and her two sisters are coming of age under the authority of their widowed father, a proud, controlling farmer with a hidden dependence on alcohol. Each daughter begins imagining a different future: Cathy heads to college and becomes caught up in the emerging women’s movement. Carly dreams unapologetically of marriage and family. Joy, after being rejected from construction work because she is a woman, begins searching for another way to use her abilities, leading her to the world of drafting and architecture.
Joy also meets Bill, a young aspiring minister on the spectrum whose tics have made him an outsider in his own way. Their relationship deepens as Bill prepares to counsel wounded servicemen returning from Vietnam, but Joy refuses to make love her escape; she must first claim her independence.
Inspired by true events, JOY! combines humor, romance, family conflict, and the social upheaval of the 1960s. The characters discover there is more than one way to choose a future, as they confront both the traditions and possibilities of a rapidly changing world.
Carly Takes Her Turn
Carly Takes Her Turn continues the story begun in JOY!, following the youngest of the three sisters into the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s.
Carly heads to California in search of the freedom she could never find in her small hometown. There, she encounters a world unlike anything she has known—communal living, free love, drugs, and political activism—each offering its own promise of liberation.
But as Carly moves from one experience to another, she begins to discover that rejecting old rules doesn't necessarily make a person free. Sometimes it only means trading one set of expectations for another.
Funny, provocative, and ultimately hopeful, Carly Takes Her Turn is the story of a young woman learning that growing up isn't about finding someone who has the answers. It's about developing the courage and discernment to choose for herself.
