Always Love Lucy Theatre & King Lahiri Productions is holding a COVID-safe production of two Thornton Wilder one-acts: The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and Love and How to Cure It.

The cast of each play is the audience for the other, with theatre producers invited to attend. The production, held at the Producers Club in midtown Manhattan, is not open to the public.

Both plays turn 90 years old this year and were directed by Artistic Director Saima Huq, MPH. The production was stage managed online by production assistants Jill Katera and Sabrina Zara. The host is Danish Farooqui, who plays Daanish Lahiri in King Lahiri.

Both plays were first produced on November 25, 1931, at the Yale University Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, by the Yale Dramatic Association and the Vassar College Philalethis.

The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden is about a middle-aged couple and two of their three surviving children as they drive through New Jersey, from Newark to Camden, to visit their eldest daughter, who has recently suffered a tragedy. The journey is full of arguments, laughter, and joy in simple things like billboards, hot dogs and sunsets. It’s a journey where nothing happens, and yet everything happens.

Trenton native Saima Huq plays Ma Kirby, who is based on Wilder’s own mother. (The play’s working title was The Portrait of a Lady). Brian DiRaimondo plays Elmer “Pa” Kirby, her husband and the navigator of this journey. They are accompanied by their teenaged children, Arthur (John DeFilippo) and Caroline (Janina Salorio, in her New York theatre debut.) Noah Riley takes on the iconic Stage Manager role that Wilder made famous in Our Town. The Kirbys’ humble married daughter Beulah is played by Radha Singh.

Singh also takes on a completely different character in Rowena Stoker, the glamorous actress and singer in Love and How to Cure It. In this work, set on the stage of London’s Tivoli Palace of Music in April 1895, a teenage music-hall dancer (Jennifer Kim) reveals to her aunt (Singh) that a young man she has rejected (Evan Joslyn) is so in love with her that he is going to shoot her. Her aunt and their friend, an over-the-hill comedian still mourning the death of his wife (Roni Banerjee), intervene to cure him of this unrequited love by teaching him what love really means.