Stowe Theatre Guild - Presenting four theater shows a year in Stowe, Vermont.

The Great American

Trailer Park Musical

Music and Lyrics by
DAVID NEHLS

Book by
BETSY KELSO

Thursday July 23 - Saturday July 25
Thursday July 30 - Saturday August 1
Wednesday August 5 - Friday August 7

There’s a new tenant at Armadillo Acres—and she’s wreaking havoc all over Florida’s most exclusive trailer park. When Pippi, the stripper, comes between the agoraphobic Jeannie and Norbert, her tollbooth collector husband—storms begin to brew. Narrated by a colorful trailer park Greek chorus, mature audiences will leave the theater laughing in search of Doritos and Cheez Whiz.

Jeannie Garstecki has lived in a trailer at Armadillo Acres for 20 years with her husband and high-school sweetheart, Norbert. She was 17 when she married, 18 when her son was born and 23 when he got kidnapped. That, coupled with a really bad perm, has turned her into an agoraphobic. She hasn’t left her trailer in all these years, and the man she loves is drifting further away. She is determined to get him back--- that is if she could manage to get out of the trailer to do it…

Norbert Garstecki collects tolls for a living and tries to be as good a husband as one can be to an agoraphobic. He is a simple man who desperately wishes his wife could get out of the trailer, but he’s not equipped with the emotional or intellectual tools to help her to do it. He has never loved or slept with a stripper before, and is excited and dismayed by his current behavior.

Pippi is a striking beauty with a great body and a taste for clothing that shows it off. Up to this point, Pippi’s life has been about surviving. She is a professional stripper who has gotten by on her looks and talents for dancing. She means no harm and is ready to start making changes, but first she has to get lost in a hick-town trailer park in North Florida so she won’t be found by her last bad choice…

Duke is Pippi’s obsessive, possessive and excessive Magic Marker-sniffing boyfriend; “ex”-boyfriend according to Pippi. Not the brightest guy south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Duke leaves a trail of disaster in his wake wherever he goes. His road trip to Starke is no exception and his arrival at the trailer park is full of surprises—even for a group of people who have had their share of excitement…

Betty attended high school with Norbert and Jeannie Garstecki and has lived at Armadillo Acres for just as long. She now runs the leasing office and makes it her business to know everything about everybody who passes through the trailer park. Though a self-proclaimed “bad-ass”, Betty is really a mother hen to the denizens of the trailer park.

Lin(oleum) is so-named because her mother gave birth to her on the kitchen floor, Lin has a husband on death row at the Florida State Prison. His fate is an electric chair that doesn’t work properly unless most of the town’s electricity is turned off. So Lin watches everyone’s lights and appliances very closely in the hopes that she can keep the chair on the fritz.

Pickles, aka Donna, is called “Pickles” because she is perpetually hysterically pregnant. Her husband is a whole lot fancier than she is, as he is from the big city of Jacksonville. His parents haven’t been very supportive of his marital choice, so Pickles is desperate to give her husband a family of his own—even if she has to fake it

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