An American classic adapted for the stage, starring Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson and Matthew Rhys as Benjamin Braddock. A fresh-faced college grad returns home, diploma in hand, to seek an answer to that age old question: "Now what?" Lacking any clear career path, he falls prey to the original "cougar", the predatory Mrs. Robinson, wife of his father's business partner. But it's Mrs. Robinson's daughter who captures his heart.
Includes and interview with the star of The Graduate, screen legend Kathleen Turner.
An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring:
Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson
Matthew Rhys as Benjamin Braddock
Bruce Davison as Mr. Braddock
John Getz as Mr. Robinson
Jamison Jones as Hotel Clerk and others
Devon Sorvari as Elaine Robinson
Linda Purl as Mrs. Braddock and others
Adapted for the stage by Terry Johnson, based on the novel by Charles Webb and the screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry. Directed by John Rubinstein. Recorded before a live audience at the Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles.
At the end of Charles Webb's first novel, The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock rescues his beloved Elaine from a marriage made not in heaven but in California.
It is now eleven years and 3,000 miles later, and the couple live in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, with their two young sons, whom they are educating at home.
Through no accident, a continent now stands between them and the boys' surviving grandparent, now known as Nan, but who in former days answered to Mrs. Robinson. As the story opens, the Braddock household is in turmoil as the Westchester School Board attempts to quash the unconventional educational methods the family is practising.
Desperate situations call for desperate remedies - even a cry for help to the mother-in-law from hell. She is only too happy to provide her loving services - but at a price far higher than could be expected.
Charles Webb has a knack for pinpointing the horrors and absurdities of domestic life, and Home School displays all the precision and wit that made The Graduate such a long-lasting success..
The basis for the acclaimed 1967 film, this novel about a naive college graduate adrift in the shifting social and sexual mores of the 1960s captures with hilarity and insight the alienation of youth and the disillusionment of an era.
When Benjamin Braddock graduates from college and moves back to his parents' house, everyone wants to know what he's going to do with his life. Embittered by the emptiness of his education and indifferent to his grim prospects, Benjamin falls haplessly into an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the relentlessly seductive wife of his father's business partner. It's only when her lovely daughter Elaine comes home to visit that Benjamin, now smitten, thinks he might have found some kind of direction in his life. But Mrs. Robinson is having none of it. A wondrously fierce and absurd battle of wills ensues, with love and idealism triumphing over the forces of corruption and conformity.
"Brilliant...sardonic, ludicrously funny."-New York Times
