The End of America in the Time of the Fireflies
As a nightmare of (hyperbolized?) fascism overwhelms America, a family’s resentments surface to search and destroy the marginalized idealist arrested in the house of her lover during a national emergency. Unfolding in real time, surprising connections to power and revenge are revealed as the political oppresses in a very personal way.
Seven actors, ages 19 to 50s, 3f, 4m, doubling to 11. Indoors/outdoors set This is a powerful and timely play demanding a stellar lead female. Playwrights Platform, Boston, Provincetown Theater Lab
The Men or Stalking Random Pastels
In this Me-Too timely play, harassment (although not sexual) is a feature. A magical woman’s relationship with her lover is destroyed by men who despise her otherness in this fragmented memory play whose central metaphor is the hunt--woman as prey. Simple set, five actors, 40s-50s; 80 minutes. Playwrights Platform, staged reading at Cultural Center of Cape Cod, and Provincetown Theater Winter Reading Series, read at Infinity Theater NYC.
Both The Men and The End of America are in part about how the feminine threatens the status quo of the male patriarchy.
Pirandello’s Hex
Six actors (20s-70s) weave in and out of fiction and reality as a writer who was brought by her father from Argentina (escaping the Death Squads) finds herself enveloped by her own satirical political plays as the wars of her adopted nation continue relentlessly in the middle east. Trapped by impoverishment and a demanding mother, she descends into madness.
No set, surreal props only and lights. Worked at Playwrights Platform. Staged reading at April Madness: Factory Theatre, Boston, directed by Lisa Burdick.
CASTLE
A king and a troubadour vie for love and power in a 12th century epic of war, oppression, love and rebellion; of betrayal, revenge and revelation.
It runs 3 1/2 hours, in two parts. 10 characters, 5 actors can double. Simple set, basically a castle hall and balcony, with a turn piece for a "hovel" and a forest. Playwrights Platform.
At the Hollow
She is out of work. He is in need of security. A biologist and his flower child girl friend vacation at a at a cabin Catskills during Fourth of July. They join the biologist's uncle, a Vet who loves Satchmo, and his estranged son, a failed actor. Enter the biologist's disaffected daughter to light the fireworks' fuse. This small American tragedy rides to its inevitable conclusion as each parallel duet of relationships triggers fault lines in the other with explosive results. The gestalt of the counter-culture, of the 1960's, has been treated in novels and non-fiction, but (with the exception of those about Vietnam) seldom if ever in theater! This play captures its essential desires and conflicts. 3m, 2f, 20s-50s. Indoors/outdoors set. It's been invited to Provincetown Winter Reading Series, Brandeis University’s WBRSFM Boston, Great Plains Theater Conference, featured play.
The Second Coming or the God Annals
A fatwah producing, groundbreaking and scathing catharsis of human cultural psychoses to be performed in the kiva, church, outdoors—from midnight to dawn. A huge cast.takes a village or a tribe.
Capitalism, world religions and militarism produce ecocide, genocide and destruction as a mysterious being appears. The play is a series of pageants, cartoons, through which a rite of catharsis by a conflagration of various archetypal human lies takes place. (At the end of this piece of theater, we should have a deeper understanding of some of our unconscionable “realities” as a largely insane species.)
The Shame of Daniel Shays
Historical drama, bare bones sets delineated by props or other devices. 10 actors play 30 parts. Ages 20s-60s. Mostly males. Also 2 F 40s. (All the parts could be played by high school or college students if needed.)
In 1786, Daniel Shays leads the oppressed farmers of Massachusetts to rebel against a totalitarian state which failed their expectations after fighting in the Revolution. Finding their houses lost to taxes, their civil liberties destroyed by arbitrary laws, this was a noble rebellion which failed in part, but succeeded in changing the course of the forming nation.
90 minutes, prop driven. It was staged as reading at the famous First Encounter Coffee House, Eastham, MA. to benefit the Nauset Fellowship.
Impossible!
Comedy about an insane president his evil henchmen and the oppression of a newspaperman.
Read at Women’s International Festival Provincetown. Incomplete.
Shorties
Three Storey Owls
Ten minutes, examines class warfare, using masks. Can be an on site piece.
The Mobile
Ten minutes. 5m or f. Is it art, chaos or string theory as pieces of a mobile conflict? (Done at Provincetown Theater Spingfest. Voted springfest favorite, most original playlet. IWPC Fest, Cambridge. “Raises the bar for short plays.” Geralyn Horton, IWCP organizer. Lark award winner.
Hunting Life
Ten minute monologue, 1m
Provincetown Theate Lab, “Fabulous language and a piece which needs saying, " Guy Wolfe, former Artistic Director, Provincetown Theatre
The Side Project, Chicago
PIE
Ten minutes. A Sioux man is saved from suicide, by a piece of pie. SlamBoston, Boston Playwrights Theatre
Frames
Anti-war visual verbal 1-minute play for one woman. Ganameed Fest, Boston
Smoke and Mirrors
One minute love, visual and verbal, Boston
Christmas Lovers
Five minutes. Two estranged lovers reunite in a kind of victory dance of love. SwanDay, Boston Playwrights Theatre
Wha Da Fah Bus
Utter nonsense on the cheap bus to New York.
Read at PACT Playwrights and Actors Cape Theater
No School
Ten minutes. A multiracial kid angry at his mother and his lack of opportunities explodes. Libraried at Jamaica Plains theater company.
The Meaning of Life
Ten minutes. Father daughter interplay as tourists annoy.
Sail By
Ten minutes. Former lovers of any gender meet up on the docks; one is flush the other not so; ships that cross in the night.
A Woman and Lioness
Based on a true story, a woman confronts a kindred lioness at the Central Park Zoo. Provincetown Library, Provincetown Theater for International Women’s Playwrighting Festival
DARK
Ten minutes. Her-Gaia confronts Politician Puppets and rages to end the world.
The Hurricane
Ten minutes. A couple with a rocky relationship are surprised by a hurricane as they stay in a dune shack overlooking the bay to a nuclear reactor. Provincetown Theater Summer Fest.
Rose Cottage
written to a Paul Schulenburg Painting
COIN
Half hour. One act, 2m 2f. Set in the 1950s, in a swanky Boston bar, a mobster reveals the corruption of a school principal. Can be an on-site piece. Provincetown Theater Lab. Tim Babcock, actor: “Fascinating juxtaposition of good and evil.”
POOR
A man who has played by the rules and has lost everything takes a theater goer hostage.
The Living Theatre.
A complete list of plays, as well as synopses of their production history, is available on request ([email protected]).