As the playwright’s website makes clear, Tom Dudzick has drawn freely on his own past in creating the characters and situations in The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s. Here is what he posts about himself online ( from Tom Dudzick’s official website, ):
Often referred to by theatre critics as “the Catholic Neil Simon,” Tom Dudzick has created a series of semi-autobiographical comedies that have played successfully in theatres from New York to Los Angeles and a hundred cities in between. His plays have broken the box office records at Buffalo Studio Arena, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and Chicago’s Northlight Theatre.
Tom was born in Buffalo, NY (over a tavern) in 1950 and received his early theatrical training creating musical comedies for that city’s massive dinner theatre industry, always casting himself in the lead role, thus garnering critical acclaim as “Western New York’s premiere comic actor.”
In the 1980’s Tom relocated to New York, left performing behind and focused on writing. Within a few years’ time he had landed his first off-Broadway play--“Greetings!”--a Christmas family comedy produced by the legendary Arthur Cantor and starring stage and screen veteran, Darren McGavin. The Los Angeles Times described “Greetings!” as “a wonderful, wacky look at how cleverly a mixture of Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Age philosophy can--in the right hands--flick on the electricity.” The play is now a holiday favorite, appearing annually in theatres all over the country.
For his next play, Tom dipped into his own childhood, semi-fictionalized his family, called them the Pazinski’s, called the play “Over the Tavern” and turned it into what Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune calls, “one of the biggest grass-roots successes in American regional theatre of the last few years.”
The hilarious and touching play created such interest that Buffalo Studio Arena commissioned him to write a sequel, employing the same characters ten years older, which Tom entitled “King o’ the Moon.” This comedy has also been performed to great success in major cities such as Pittsburgh, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Tom has finally created an “Over the Tavern Trilogy” by writing yet a third play about the Pazinski’s, set in the infamous Blizzard of ’77, and entitled “The Last Mass at St. Casimir's.”
Tom now has a “day” named after him. By mayoral proclamation, May 5 is declared “Tom Dudzick Day” in Buffalo, NY, in gratitude for “his contribution to his boyhood community and theatre-goers nationwide."
Tom now lives in Nyack, NY with his wife Holly Caster, and their children, Charles and Emma.
Clearly, Dudzick is working in the tradition of many other American dramatists who have mined their autobiographies for theatrical material.
The most notable example of this practice is probably to be found in Eugene O’Neill’s family tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play whose characters are strikingly similar to the members of the author’s immediate family, whose plot is closely based on events from his youth, and whose setting in a house in New London exactly mirrors his family’s summer residence in that Connecticut town. Similarly, in creating The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams tapped into his experiences as an alienated young man in St. Louis and bestowed many of the qualities of his mother and sister on the characters Amanda and Laura. And more recently, Sam Shepard has made repeated use in his dramas of material from his early years in California, peopling plays such as Curse of the Starving Class and Fool for Love with variants of his father, an ex-military pilot who fell prey to alcoholism in his middle years.
The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s is in fact the last in a trilogy of plays based on Dudzick’s family. In the first, Over the Tavern, we meet the Pasinskis—the fictionalized version of the playwright’s own family—as they grapple with their domestic problems and crises in 1959, during the last years of the Eisenhower era.
In the second installment, King o’ the Moon, the playwright leaps ahead a decade, and shows us the various members of the family responding to the disruptive currents abroad in America in 1969.
In The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s, set in 1977, the family is saying goodbye to their tavern and to the life they have lived in and over it. In this final installment of his family drama, Rudy’s mother advises her aspiring-playwright son to, “[W]rite what you know.” Obviously this has been a guiding principle for Tom Dudzick in the three plays of his Over the Tavern trilogy—as it has also been for generations of dramatists before him.
An earlier version of the play, under the title Lake Effect, premiered in Buffalo in 2001. A later version with the current title opened in California in 2007.
Often referred to by theatre critics as “the Catholic Neil Simon,” Tom Dudzick has created a series of semi-autobiographical comedies that have played successfully in theatres from New York to Los Angeles and a hundred cities in between. His plays have broken the box office records at Buffalo Studio Arena, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis and Chicago’s Northlight Theatre.
Tom was born in Buffalo, NY (over a tavern) in 1950 and received his early theatrical training creating musical comedies for that city’s massive dinner theatre industry, always casting himself in the lead role, thus garnering critical acclaim as “Western New York’s premiere comic actor.”
In the 1980’s Tom relocated to New York, left performing behind and focused on writing. Within a few years’ time he had landed his first off-Broadway play--“Greetings!”--a Christmas family comedy produced by the legendary Arthur Cantor and starring stage and screen veteran, Darren McGavin. The Los Angeles Times described “Greetings!” as “a wonderful, wacky look at how cleverly a mixture of Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Age philosophy can--in the right hands--flick on the electricity.” The play is now a holiday favorite, appearing annually in theatres all over the country.
For his next play, Tom dipped into his own childhood, semi-fictionalized his family, called them the Pazinski’s, called the play “Over the Tavern” and turned it into what Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune calls, “one of the biggest grass-roots successes in American regional theatre of the last few years.”
The hilarious and touching play created such interest that Buffalo Studio Arena commissioned him to write a sequel, employing the same characters ten years older, which Tom entitled “King o’ the Moon.” This comedy has also been performed to great success in major cities such as Pittsburgh, Chicago and Los Angeles.
Tom has finally created an “Over the Tavern Trilogy” by writing yet a third play about the Pazinski’s, set in the infamous Blizzard of ’77, and entitled “The Last Mass at St. Casimir's.”
Tom now has a “day” named after him. By mayoral proclamation, May 5 is declared “Tom Dudzick Day” in Buffalo, NY, in gratitude for “his contribution to his boyhood community and theatre-goers nationwide."
Tom now lives in Nyack, NY with his wife Holly Caster, and their children, Charles and Emma.
Clearly, Dudzick is working in the tradition of many other American dramatists who have mined their autobiographies for theatrical material.
The most notable example of this practice is probably to be found in Eugene O’Neill’s family tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, a play whose characters are strikingly similar to the members of the author’s immediate family, whose plot is closely based on events from his youth, and whose setting in a house in New London exactly mirrors his family’s summer residence in that Connecticut town. Similarly, in creating The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams tapped into his experiences as an alienated young man in St. Louis and bestowed many of the qualities of his mother and sister on the characters Amanda and Laura. And more recently, Sam Shepard has made repeated use in his dramas of material from his early years in California, peopling plays such as Curse of the Starving Class and Fool for Love with variants of his father, an ex-military pilot who fell prey to alcoholism in his middle years.
The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s is in fact the last in a trilogy of plays based on Dudzick’s family. In the first, Over the Tavern, we meet the Pasinskis—the fictionalized version of the playwright’s own family—as they grapple with their domestic problems and crises in 1959, during the last years of the Eisenhower era.
In the second installment, King o’ the Moon, the playwright leaps ahead a decade, and shows us the various members of the family responding to the disruptive currents abroad in America in 1969.
In The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s, set in 1977, the family is saying goodbye to their tavern and to the life they have lived in and over it. In this final installment of his family drama, Rudy’s mother advises her aspiring-playwright son to, “[W]rite what you know.” Obviously this has been a guiding principle for Tom Dudzick in the three plays of his Over the Tavern trilogy—as it has also been for generations of dramatists before him.
An earlier version of the play, under the title Lake Effect, premiered in Buffalo in 2001. A later version with the current title opened in California in 2007.