''Going On'' is a comedy play by

Charles Dennis Charles Dennis (born December 16, 1946) is an award-winning Canadian actor, playwright, journalist, author, director, and screenwriter. Background Dennis is the third son of Sam and Sade Dennis. He attended Cedarvale Public School, Vaughan Road ...

, set in a

dressing room A changing-room, locker-room, (usually in a sports, theater, or staff context) or changeroom (regional use) is a room or area designated for changing one's clothes. Changing-rooms are provided in a semi-public situation to enable people to ch ...

of a

Broadway theatre Broadway theatre,Although ''theater'' is generally the spelling for this common noun in the United States (see American and British English spelling differences), 130 of the 144 extant and extinct Broadway venues use (used) the spelling ''Th ...

. It concerns the relationship between two

understudies In theater, an understudy, referred to in opera as cover or covering, is a performer who learns the lines and blocking or choreography of a regular actor, actress, or other performer in a play. Should the regular actor or actress be unable to ap ...

waiting backstage during the run of a Broadway hit and hoping for their chance to go on. The characters are called Alfred and Lynn, a tribute to the legendary Lunts and the long-vanished theater they represented. The play was originally produced at the

Edinburgh Fringe Festival The Edinburgh Festival Fringe (also referred to as The Fringe, Edinburgh Fringe, or Edinburgh Fringe Festival) is the world's largest arts and media festival, which in 2019 spanned 25 days and featured more than 59,600 performances of 3,841 dif ...

in 1989 and starred Charles Dennis as Alfred and Gwendolyn Humble as Lynn. It was nominated for the Daily Express Award for best new play. ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' wrote: "Robust dialogue and carefully managed shifts of mood between the comic and the sad have you constantly uncertain whether to laugh or cry." ''

The Scotsman ''The Scotsman'' is a Scottish compact newspaper and daily news website headquartered in Edinburgh. First established as a radical political paper in 1817, it began daily publication in 1855 and remained a broadsheet until August 2004. Its par ...

'' wrote: "It's funny, moving and intelligent but, most of all, a celebration of what it means to be cursed by a thespian calling." In 1990 Dennis played Alfred again opposite Maria O'Brien's Lynn at the Callboard Theatre in Los Angeles. In 1991, the celebrated critic Sheridan Morley wrote about a British touring production featuring Giselle Wolf as Lynn and Tim Earle as Alfred in the ''International Herald Tribune'': "Let us cheer the arrival at the Latchmere in Battersea of Charles Dennis's ''Going On''... It's a love story about two latter-day Broadway understudies, torn between a fervent desire to get onstage and a deep terror that they may suddenly be called on to do so. But 'Going On' does not only mean going on stage: It also means going on with lives that seem often hopelessly bereft of love or purpose or success. The major triumph of Dennis has been to write a very conventional odd-couple love story within the unconventional frame of understudy lives. These people are forever imitating their Hollywood and Broadway betters, because that is what they are paid to do. They also live, like Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, on the fringes of reality until they are suddenly thrown into the blazing lights, albeit as unprepared and under-rehearsed for their show as they are for their own awakening feelings of love. Having made self-absorption into an art form, having lived within the conventions of a horror movie where parents crucify themselves on satellite dishes, they lurch from Ibsen and Strindberg into Coward and Shaffer stereotypes, all the while waiting for the prompter to come to the rescue." Dennis later played Alfred opposite Lane Binkley's Lynn at

The National Arts Club The National Arts Club is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and members club on Gramercy Park, Manhattan, New York City. It was founded in 1898 by Charles DeKay, an art and literary critic of the ''New York Times'' to "stimulate, foster, and promote public ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

in 1997. The play was performed again in 2011 at the Pensacola Shakespeare Theatre in Pensacola, Florida with Geraint Wyn Davies as Alfred and Claire Lautier as Lynn.

References

{{reflist Canadian plays 1989 plays