The American Respiratory Theater, in association with the American Lung Association, is pleased to announce an off-Broadway production of The Sound of Mucus.
In the play, Maria, a severely asthmatic postulant at the Nonnberg Abbey in Austria in the late 1930′s, disrupts the entire convent with her severe asthma attacks. Maria is often forced outside to the nearby mountains, and soon “The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Mucus.”
The mother Abbess, convinced that Maria needs some time away from the Abbey to give the rest of the nuns a break from her ceaseless hacking, assigns her to be the governess for the family of Captain Georg von Trapp, a retired naval officer and widowed father of seven asthmatic children.
The Captain and Maria have radically different ideas about how children with asthma should be treated. The Captain believes the children should use a long-term inhaled corticosteroid. While he is away, Maria ignores his instructions and introduces the children to short-term bronchodilators.
The Captain has been courting Baroness Elsa Schraeder from the sophisticated social circles of Vienna, but she is driven away by the constant coughing, wheezing, and mucus stains on her evening gowns, and it is the unsophisticated Maria who wins his heart.
Meanwhile, the clouds of war are hanging over Europe. The Nazis take over Austria and order the Captain to return to active military service. The family’s last chance to escape comes at a Alpine mucus festival. After the performance, they disable the pursuing Gestapo by coughing up a thick coating of slippery mucus, and are able to slip away and cross the mountains to safety.
