Cocaine & Underpants - Alan Bowne

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…