Friend Now is a play written by award winning playwright Peter Swords. It tells the story of five friends who become old friends and re-established themselves in their lives after getting remarried. The play has won six Tony Awards including Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Musical, Best Director for a Running Score and Best Original Score.
Swords is very popular with the audience. He wrote the script for the play for his daughter aged eight years old. He wanted to write a play that would teach his daughter good lessons about making old friends. Friends make new friends and good friendships last. In the play, the friends rebuild their friendship, learn to trust each other again and enjoy life after the break up of their previous relationship.
Each of the five main characters, Steve (Wareham), David (Simmons), Kevin (Curtis), Max (Barry) and Greg (Speaker) build their own dream relationship over the course of five years. David, however, wants to be involved with the deep sea diving business and gets distracted by his desire for a share of the diving profits. The business fails and David is left with no money and no one to talk to. He meets Steve, who is an avid diver, and the two begin to spend more time together.
Eventually, the friends start trusting one another and they slowly realize that they have to do everything they can to keep their friendship alive. Things get difficult when David’s love life starts to suffer and he finds it difficult to meet new people. He meets a girl who turns out to be his friend Lisa. Lisa is a close friend of Steve’s who comes from the same background as him: low income, Jewish and close minded.
David and Steve start dating and eventually marry but they still remain friends. It takes them some time to reach the stage where they want to have a family but they always have feelings for each other. Things start to get even worse when David’s parents die and he is left with his two sisters. His parents were the ones who encouraged him to pursue his education, so David now knows what it means to have a family of his own. His dedication to become a good husband is obviously cut short but he has a good friend in Lisa who will always be there to support him.
This novel is a great example of how a long time friendship can be made better by maintaining the bonds of friendship after the break up. It is obvious that David feels very good about being with Lisa and he does not feel like a man who has lost his sense of friendship. Even after he has had his family, he chooses to keep in touch with them through his phone and visits them whenever he can. People tend to change over time and it is very common for relationships to fall apart, but David shows that he wants to stick with his friends and their friendship. This book is a must read for all who have been in a similar situation, or for those who are looking for a new way to approach long time relationships.