Cold Springs, Buffalo
A Play in 2 Acts
In the summer of 1960, a star-studded jazz-festival commemorates a last hurrah-and-goodbye in the communal heart similarly doomed baseball-stadium of the low-income, ethnically diverse but culturally vibrant neighborhood of Cold Springs, Buffalo, NY, green-lit for demolition by America’s “urban renewal” program. As a variety of residents gather in one of its’ many jazz-clubs, in denial, defiance, reminiscence or simple acceptance of their governmentally mandated fate, one relatively recent resident fatefully decides to take fate into her own hands. A play about racial and community identity, loss of control, the vagaries of love and ambition, jazz and baseball, neighborly tolerance and decency, and the ability to keep on dancing in the face of an uncertain future and not fully explained past.
Multiple ensemble cast. Single set. Happens in real time.
The Specials
A Play in 2 Acts
A mechanical breakdown thrusts two couples from dramatically divergent backgrounds into an awkwardly enlightening but fatally proscribed showdown.
Contemporary. Single set. 4 characters (2 female, 2 male). The suburbs of a minor city on the Northern US West Coast. The ranch house home of Ivan and Ruth, a marine in the Special Corps on leave, and his young wife, an ex-stripper, now suburban misfit. Diane, a college Social Science teacher, is traveling cross-country with Tom, a high-school English teacher.
The Thunder of Tiny Feets
A Play in 2 Acts
A mythological meeting at the Pike Theatre, Dublin, in the early 1950’s, between the Irish writers Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan leads to a classically tragic bloodbath.
Single set. 7 players.
The Damned in Fairyland
A Play in 2 Acts
A scarred aging brothel-keeper recruits a recovering-alcoholic combat-veteran into her vigilante retribution-and-rescue crusade against under-age sex-traffickers and their higher-profile clients. A mission apparently goes wrong, leaving the old woman critically wounded but refusing any medical attention. Meanwhile, a young ghetto-brat, petty thief and druggie recently released from jail is offered temporary refuge from the unforgiving streets by a middle-aged diner-waitress with a troubled past. When he becomes entangled in a double-homicide she is forced to choose between her own or his survival.
8 players, 12 characters. As conceived and scripted for stage : minimal set and prop enhancement. No breaks between scenes. Supportive doubling-up.
Having violently escaped her captors, a trafficked underage prostitute finds precarious refuge in the home of an aging, ailing retired actor. Shocked by the cruel derangement of youthful innocence and the pervasiveness of such goings-on even in the most benignly civilized of environments, the old man first confronts his physical helplessness then the blind-eyed distracted self-indulgent vanity of his own life, as they move together towards some measure of transcendent loveliness.
2 characters. Single-set drama.
She Sleeps in Beauty
A Play in 1 Act (90 minutes)
Two dissimilar women arrive in the same city at the same time, discover they are staying at the same hotel. Both in search of a satisfying sequel to a recent murder-mystery, one real, the other fictional.
6 players (3 female, 3 male) : 10 characters. No fixed set, non-naturalistic staging. No breaks between scenes, continual segue of action, minimal props and settings to accentuate.
“A Woman Together” (Is Never Alone)
A Play in 3 Acts
The heart of a young man is harvested for trafficking. An alcoholic mother with a gambling and sex-addicted husband and an ambitious teenage daughter with a clear head for amoral self-reliance. teenagers rebelling against their own innocence. Criminality pursuing its’ own version of the American Dream. Love and generational bonding at work in mysteriously deranged ways, to ends that can only be defined by their fatal conclusions…
8 actors. Non-naturalistic staging.
Hearts Without Flowers
A Play in 3 Acts
“There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all”
Eternal innocence temporarily deranged…
A young man confronts the sexual predator who raped his wife, finds himself with a dead body on his hands. From there he takes a journey in the bowels of an urban underbelly world of deranged disempowerment. Though the human spirit endures in the most unlikely of places..
5 characters, single-set.
The Sign Painter
A Play in 3 Acts
A historically contexted dramatic fiction, set throughout the turning of the American twentieth century. A wealthy but haunted industrialist struggles to reconcile family responsibility, social respectability, the skeletons in his closet and the price of privileged material success.
4 characters : two male, two female.
The Unfinished Heart
A Play in 3 Acts
An ailing homeless alcoholic despairing of his human condition wanders off to find some peace in the woods. He is surprised, disappointed and disturbed to discover that all of nature’s creatures seem to be plagued by the same conditions..
9 players, multiple “characters”
The Insect Show (Adapted from the 1920’s Kapek play)
A Play in 2 Acts
Loosely structured after Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”. A suicidal child-star, on the cusp of puberty already a Hollywood has-been, is salvaged by a budding angel, a now-deceased would-be actress. Together they review his life and rudely aborted career. Comedically echoing various iconic figures and movies of Hollywood’s “golden years”, including “The Jazz Singer”, “It Happened One Night” , “Blonde Venus”, Marlene Dietrich, Orson Welles etc….
6 players, multiple “characters”
Hollywood Bound
A Comedy in 2 Acts