"I spend a lot of time thinking about America, who we are as a people and a culture and a nation, and I have always felt that the theatre is a truly appropriate place to examine these issues . . . I am a woman, I am an American, I am a mother, I sometimes write for television, and I sometimes write movies; I play the piano, I knit, I rail at the universe; I am angry, I am sad; I am a comic realist, a misanthrope, and an idealist. There are many ways to categorize me, and my work. But for myself, I would most like to be considered a playwright."

- Theresa Rebeck, introduction to Complete Plays 1989-1998

Bad Dates playwright Theresa Rebeck is a prolific writer for many media: in addition to 15 full-length plays (and just as many one-acts), Rebeck has published two books, penned six screenplays and contributed episodes for nine different television series. Just as diverse are her genres, which range from comedy (Loose Knit) to tragedy (The Water's Edge); crime drama ("Law & Order: Criminal Intent") to social satire (Three Girls and Their Brother); expressionistic (The Butterfly Collection) to romantic (Spike Heels) to political (Omnium Gatherum) to many an industry exposé (Free Fire Zone, The Family of Mann).

This diversity is particularly evident in a sampler of Rebeck's writings - which seem in title and synopsis to be a rather unrelated collection. But perhaps diversity is itself the commonality. More than anything, Rebeck's extensive body of work is an acknowledgement of the many different components - happy and sad, public and private, material and philosophical - that make us who we are.

Katie and Frank (One-act play, 1996): While her husband Frank is getting ready for work, Katie, who has just started therapy, practices her communication skills:

KATIE: . . . This morning, I went out and bought a gun. It's absurdly easy, you know, you walk into a store and just, like, buy it. Actually, you go in on Monday and pay for it but they don't give it to you until today because of this waiting period, they make you wait before they give you the gun just in case you want to change your mind, like they think if some woman comes in here going you know, I hate my husband, I think I'll just put a bullet between his eyes, that they need to give her a few days to consider that. Which doesn't seem like great logic to me, frankly. If you are thinking about shooting your husband it seems to me an extra week is just going to make you more determined to do it. Unless that's what they're hoping for.
FRANK: (Entering.) Where's the toothpaste?
KATIE: We're out.

Abstract Expression (Play, 1998): When a painter's work garners sudden attention just after his death, his children - Jenny and Willy - disagree about what to do with the paintings:

WILLIE: You and I were the ones who lived through it, every sorry, miserable sordid fucking moment of that man's misery, Mom's death, you and I were the end result -
JENNY: And the paintings.
WILLIE: They're not a person! They're nothing! He sat in that room and scribbled self-indulgent bullshit for thirty years, while he was also, by he way, ruining our lives, and now all of a sudden, people are saying that scribble is worth a zillion dollars, well, I want the money! Now, I'm sorry Mac's dead, not because I'm really sorry, but I'm sorry for you. OK? I'm sorry because I know you loved him, and I know you're in pain, but I didn't get what you got from him. We all know that. He loved you, and he didn't love me, and he owes me now. And I'm taking those paintings.

"Law & Order: Criminal Intent," "Yesterday" (Television episode, 2002): While examining a partially decomposed corpse, Detectives Alexandra Eames and Robert Goren note the miniskirt that the 20-year-old victim was wearing:

Det. Goren: You wore one of those?
Det. Eames: Looked good in it, too.

Omnium Gatherum (play, co-written with Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, 2003): At an upscale dinner party, nouvelle cuisine and age-old philosophical debates take an alarmingly surreal turn in the wake of 9/11.

TERENCE: I would like to pose a question, and god knows I don't mean to rile or provoke, but why peace?. . . Historically it is an anomaly. I think we need to examine the possibility that peace is not a beneficial or desirable condition for the human race. If it were, it would have been more readily embraced by now. . . .
LYDIA: A chimera, yes, is that what you mean?
TERENCE: More along the lines of a child's fairy tale. Happily ever after, the imagined state of bliss which can never be fully or even partially described within the story itself because it is in fact a fantasy.
LYDIA: So the human race, people, women, when we say we want peace we don't really mean it.
TERENCE: Perhaps peace is a romantic assumption that has no grounding in a post-modern utopia.
LYDIA: Hey. Enough with the British superiority! Everything is so articulate and calming and dismissive when the fact is, this is just another version of some imperialistic old world excuse to be the right one in the room.

Bad Dates (Play, 2003): For five years, divorcee Haley Walker has been running a restaurant and raising a daughter on her own. But can she face a bigger challenge of re-entering the dating world? From the privacy of her bedroom, she updates the audience on her progress:

HALEY: All right, that first date was not what you would call a success. It was a bad date. I'm obviously out of practice, and having decided to date again as a matter of necessity, I went out with the first guy who asked and it was just a matter of getting my feet wet. What's that terrible thing they used to say, about kissing, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince. Not that I kissed this guy. OK, I did kiss him, and he was an asshole, but by that point I was just trying to get out of the entire predicament and just go home and get to bed, so one kiss seemed a small price to pay. Regardless of the fact that there was tongue involved.

The Water's Edge (Play, 2006): Years after tragedy tore his family apart, Richard returns home to his house on the lake. But his wife Helen and grown-up children are less than welcoming to Richard - and to Lucy, the young woman he brings with him:

HELEN: . . . Because he was absorbed in the intricacies of his endlessly fascinating mind, his child disappeared into the wood, and then into the water, she disappeared from this earth and he was not responsible. . . . I was somehow not womanly enough, the failure was mine, I should have risen from the tragedy like an angel and wiped his crime away from his brow. Like a mother. Well, I am a mother . . . I gave him what he wanted. We finished it, together, the only way it could be finished. And I have no remorse.

The Scene (play, 2006): Charlie is a middle-aged, unemployed actor with an overbearing wife and a deep hatred for the showbiz "scene." But when he meets Clea, a voluptuous young party-girl trying to break into the business, against his better judgment, Charlie is fascinated:

CHARLIE: Look - are you here alone?
CLEA: No! God, no, I came with a friend, I don't know where she is. She's like the total scene-machine.
CHARLIE: Can I ask - I mean - why do you talk like that?
CLEA: (Defensive but firm.) I talk the way I talk. I'm not apologizing for that. I mean, I apologize for before, acting like a little edgy, but language is a totally idiosyncratic and very personal, very organic function of you know, someone's humanity, so I'm not apologizing for my language.
CHARLIE: OK.
CLEA: OK what?
CHARLIE: OK nothing. That's actually a fairly coherent and legitimate point.

Three Girls and Their Brother (Novel, 2008): The three teenage granddaughters of a famed literary critic are launched to "It Girl" status after appearing in a photo shoot for The New Yorker. Their brother narrates the novel's beginning:

"Now that it's all over, everybody is saying it was the picture, that stupid picture was behind every disaster that would eventually befall my redheaded sisters. . . . "