Town leaders and notable figures had a star turn on Friday night during the Wareham LIbrary Foundation’s annual one-act play. 

The show, “Complaint Department and Lemonade,” was set in an imagined town office exclusively for complaining. The group punched up the script by writing and improvising a number of complaints specific to Wareham: nip bottles, crowds of marijuana dispensary customers holding up traffic, the lack of trash barrels in Onset, and the looming prospect of a casino.

“It’s a lot of fun,” said Selectman Mary Mackey, who wore a platinum blonde wig and played a character preoccupied by litter. Mackey said many of the lines were ad-libbed during the show, to laughter from the crowd and the cast members waiting in the wings.

Marcia Hickey, the children’s librarian, played a woman perplexed by her TV’s failure to work during the ongoing power outage. 

“People tend to look at the bad news, so this is a way to say it’s not all bad,” Hickey said.
Selectman Peter Teitelbaum played the character who experienced the most dramatic transformation over the course of the play. His character was initially against the proposed casino, but reappeared at the end of the play as a devoted convert wearing an open suit jacket with no shirt and a chunky gold chain.

“If you’re going to be a lounge lizard, you have to dress the part,” he said.

Ticket proceeds support the Wareham Library Foundation, a group that Wareham Free Library Director George Ripley is vitally important to the work the library does. The library is now recertified, and is bringing back programs like museum passes and a number of free programs for the community and those from the area. Ripley said that Wareham’s libraries have become a draw for people around the South Coast.