In Richard Nelson's comedy, SOME AMERICANS ABROAD a group of American college professors and their students is making an annual summer pilgrimage to London and indulging in an orgy of theater-going (28 plays in 28 days!) When the group is not at the theater, this band of wandering academics is playing out a few dramas of their own. For example, no one can find the courage to tell an untenured associate—who paid his own way to come on the trip—that he isn't being asked back next year. And there is a panicky attempt to hush up a few sexual indiscretions.
SOME AMERICANS ABROAD appeals to both the mind and the funny bone. The result is a sometimes harsh, sometimes hilarious view of America's love affair with everything English, the politics of academia, morality in art and life, intellectual pomposity and penny-pinching tourists. Richard Nelson is also quite familiar with England, where he had a number of plays successfully produced, including SOME AMERICANS ABROAD, which was embraced by British audiences and critics at its world premiere the previous summer at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
