Cocaine & Underpants

from Interview, August 1987 by Kevin Sessums:
"There's a creature known in the South as a feist dog. Little. Scraggly. High-strung. You know where one lives by a backyard full of barks. The thing'll take on a German shepard-shit, the whole German army-if it thinks its territory is being threatened. But it likes kids too. And it likes the feel of a hand on its underbelly.

Playwright and screenwriter Alan Bowne, whose work concerns the scraggly underbelly of life itself, has the friendly tenacity of one of those tight-tailed mutts…

Bowne didn't start writing until he was 35. Before that? 'I bummed around. Drug dealer. Movie extra. Junkie…'

…he begins to growl away at a number of subjects. …Love:

'Living without love is death itself. If you have love in your life-the true thing-then you've got everything.'"
And that is what Alan Bowne's great plays-BEIRUT, SHARON AND BILLY-are about. COCAINE & UNDERPANTS tells the story of a small-time drug dealer and his girlfriend, who turns tricks to get by. A man visits them to extract retribution for a little mistake they made…