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Playbill.com article: Scarcity, Thurber’s Laughter-Spiked Family Drama, Opens at Atlantic Theater Sept. 20 {Excerpt}
Without giving too much away, Thurber told Playbill.com, “Scarcity is about the pull between the loyalty you feel for your family and the loyalty you feel towards your own personal dreams.”
Stories about American family life are so often focused on the middle class, upper middle class or the rich. Did Thurber go into Scarcity specifically wanting to look at poverty and class, or did the family come first and their “situation” come second?
“I’m not sure how to separate the two,” Thurber said. “Scarcity is about a family that is living in poverty. I wanted to write a play about love, loyalty and the culture of poverty in rural America, the family and the scarcity model are intertwined.”
The complete article can be read here.
TRIVIA:
The play’s original title was Innocence is a Sin, “which was a horrible and heavy-handed title,” Thurber said, adding, “I changed the title to Scarcity because of this definition: In economics, scarcity is defined as ‘a condition of limited resources and unlimited wants and needs.’ In other words, society does not have sufficient resources to produce enough to fulfill subjective wants. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society’s goals can be attained at the same time, so that trade-offs are made of one good against others.”