My Sister Eileen
Performances
February 18, 1944
Venue
Majestic Theatre
Synopsis
The play recounts the twelve months that the two Sherwood sisters, Ruth and Eileen, share a Greenwich Village basement apartment and a few of the amazing adventures that befall the two girls. Through their basement grating, the swirling life of the Village: a football player, its drunks and gamins, its hucksters and hustlers, and occasionally cops seep, flow, and sometimes come in in an unwelcome deluge. Finally six Brazilian naval officer cadets “conga” Ruth home and something short of an international incident occurs, but all ends happily as Ruth becomes the writer she has always wanted to be.
Authors: Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on short stories by Ruth McKenney
Historian’s Corner
The Daily Pantagraph ran a photo article about some of the types of jobs that 33 performing citizens of Bloomington-Normal have and what parts they will perform for the upcoming comedy “My Sister Eileen.” The photo showed Mrs. Ruth Jaeger, a private secretary who played the part of Ruth Sherwood, one the the two leading parts in the show. The other sister, Eileen, was played by Kathryn Kennedy LaBonte, a duration widow. The article went on the mention that the V-5 Unit from Illinois Wesleyan would take the parts of the six Brazilian Cadets who want to “conga” with Ruth; a high school teacher and a radio program director would take the parts of a motherly matron and a Irish cop; and a businessman and a lawyer by day would play two drunks in the show. After the curtain falls, these citizens would return to their everyday life in Bloomington-Normal, but for a few hours, they would move about in the atmosphere of Greenwich Village in New York.
Cast
Crew
