collected works

an evenings worth full-length pieces

Malefactions
1-Room Drama, 5f
Four women on fire come together for an act of rebellion against the world that forgot them. When their plan miscarries they find themselves pent up with a prisoner, whose presence could ruin their cause or raise it to new heights. Forced to confront their doubts anew, the Lost Girls must face down a transgression that could destroy them.

wreck[s]
Tragedy, 2m, 4f
A sad young prince arrives at the Oracle at Delphi, because that's where he's supposed to be. A priestess rummages through his past and plunges headlong into his future. The young prince faces three riddles: a dark stranger in the desert, a man-devouring monster, and the widowed Queen of Thebes. The priestess tries to help the prince find a happy ending to his tale. The prince's name is Oedipus.

Troy is Burning (a goat-song)
Post-Modern Greek Epic, various, originally 8m/6f
The Trojan War enters its tenth year. Helen of Troy is no longer welcome in the Trojan Women's Sewing Circle. Achilles lies dead, an arrow through his heel, leaving only his troubled teenage son Pyrrhus to take his place. The famished Greeks wait for the war to end. Helen decides to take matters into her own hands, forging a path down the aisle and through the gates of madness. Odysseus, the last sane man, takes matters into his. The Trojan Horse takes shape over a burning city.

Friend of the People
Historiography in Three Acts, 4m/1f
On July 13, 1793, a twenty-four year old girl stabs a man through the heart as he soaks in his bathtub, and watches him bleed to death. The man is Jean-Paul Marat, Hero of the French Revolution, Friend of the People. She believes she is a saint. For France, and her interrogators, the jury is out. A twisted time-bending chamber dream about Charlotte Corday, the Angel of Assassination.

Marvellous
An Illuminated Tale, Young Audiences, 2f/4m
Verbatim, an orphan boy left on the steps of the Abbey at Clonmacnoise, climbs an anchor that fell from the sky and finds himself in a dream he’s been waiting for all his life, and meets the girl who’s been popping up in it. A mystical, mythical, meta-fictional manuscript to illuminate the fine art of growing up, imagining things, and telling stories about them—with shadow puppets.

Birdland (a tragedy)
Jacobean Tragedy (with Music), 4f/3m
In the smoke of a music hall, the three best-beloved songbirds in all of Italy take their final bow. Two of them fettered to fine-feathered husbands, and the third flung back to their father's nest in a castle far away, the sisters try to forget the world that made them. A sultry song in a minor key about old wounds, new worlds, cages, rages, music, marriage, forbidding, forgiving, and the songs we sing to hold ourselves together.

Some Pictures of the Floating World
Cult Play, 3f/2m (probably)
Shiloh is happy. She and her friends in the Word of Joy do nothing but love each other, tell jubilant truths to one another, and think of the day when they will be called up to the Floating World. But when a stranger turns up on their doorstep, full of words from a world they’ve tried to forget, Shiloh and her friends must consider for the first time if they’re as happy as they seem, and if the truths they tell are really true.

stolen out of holy writ adaptations

hedda (gabler)
Ibsen, 3f/3m
Hedda Tesman (née Gabler) has everything, but wants none of it. But when an old flame flickers back under her palm, her hungry heart ignites a blaze of lust, deceit, and manipulation that could consume more lives than just her own. A shaved, shattered translation-adaptation of Ibsen's timeless conflagration.

A Misanthrope
Moliere, 2f/3m with doubling
less a translation than a distillation / of Moliere's classic tale of the stagnation / of a society weighed down by flattery / and the one man who best know what's the matter, he / whose quips equip him more than all the rest / to diss dishonor: venom-tongued Alceste. / A play precocious, prating, and perverse, / and 95% in rhyming verse.

dreamplay
Strindberg, various
Agnes, Daughter of God, decides to give being human a go. What could go wrong? Strindberg's dreamy phantasmagoria gets clipped into a weird, wooly roller-coaster of colorful characters, nocturnal absurdities, and delusions of divinity, featuring puppets, and a Dance Number.

War of the Roses
Shakespeare, various, 14 m/f with doubling
A slice-and-dice redux of the Bard's Original Trilogy. A free-for-use adaptation that twists, turns, and titillates the text of three apprentice works of the Swan of Avon to create one brutal epic spanning the width and breadth of England's War of the Roses, a blood-red tale rife with royals, rage, and revenge.

A Separate Thing from Earth
Fragments, various, 8-80, with something
A short story of two young people born straddling their graves. A party on the day of Emily and George's Wedding and, on that same day, Emily's funeral. Using text ripped from Thornton Wilder's Our Town, Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. A meditation on what it is to bind yourself forever and how hard the knot is.

A Sea Gull
Chekhov, various, 4f/7m
If an actress, her lover (a writer), the lover's mother (an actress), and the lover's mother's lover (a writer) fall in a forest, do they make a sound?

Antigone
Sophocles, various
A body rots in the sun. A girl takes a stand against the new regime. What is she fighting for? How far can she go? A Past meets Present collision of Sophocles' masterpiece and modern America, a mixed-media myth for modern times about fear, tyranny, justice, revolution, revelation, and hope.

Children of the Sun
Gorky, various
In Moscow, the people are rioting. Soldiers fire into the crowd. In the village, protestors march against the injustice of the Tsar, and there's something in the water making everyone sick. On the outskirts of town, the Protasovs throw a dinner party for their friends, and talk art, politics drink, dance, and dream about the bright, beautiful future. A play about the diseases we can cure and the ones we can't, or at least haven't yet.

hors d'oeuvres one-acts and fragments

Artaud Artaud
Cruel Experimentation, 10m/f, 90 min
Antonin Artaud, theatrical sensation, finds himself locked in an insane asylum in France with His Double, a Doctor who worships him, and an ensemble of lunatics. A dissertation on the Theatre of Cruelty. A spurt of blood.

wyrd
Witch Play, 4f, 70 min
Three ageless, timeless, deathless sisters weave together the strands of fate in a basement in Bushwick. One of them falls in love, or at least tries to.

The Pitch
Darkish Seriocomedy, 2m/2f, 25-30 min
Berkeley thinks she's found the Next Big Thing in World Entertainment. Wilson thinks otherwise. Russell thinks there's a meeting at 2. A savage, twisted misinterpretation of reality.

A Thing I Cannot Name / Funny Voices
Experimental Something, 1m/1f, 15 or 60 min
Lee and Leo are trying. They want This Thing To Work Out, they swear. Watch them test every conceivable answer to the equation: him + her + x = Love [solve for x] -- or die trying. A slice of meta-theatre featuring both the Martial and Performance Arts, Naughty Language, Silly Voices, and Love Triumphant (maybe). [available in two sizes: short and less short]

The Good Book Trilogy
In Heaven, Everything is Fine   (Comedy, 1m/1f + 1, 10 min)
A stiff drink in Purgatory. Redemption Straight Up, No Chaser.

The Naming of Things (Comedy, 1m/1f, 10 min)
Adam & Eve name the first awkward moment in the Garden of Eden.

On The Line (A Play About Hell)   (Comedy 2m/2f, 10 min)
Theophilus J. Frost calls the wrong number. Damn.

the genuine article non-fiction publications

Boy Writes Girl for HowlRound: multi-part article series on female characters in the male theatrical canon (Introduction | He That Plays The King | What's Hecuba To Him)

How To Cure a Plague for HowlRound (article)

Sam Shepard Series for Gathering of Tribes: an obituary/retrospective for the late, great American myth (article) and a review of his final work, Spy of the First Person (article)

Interview with Lisa d'Amour for The Dramatist (article)

The (W)right Stuff for Audition Rep Matchmaker (article)