2f, 1m

The doctors said Trula’s 90 year old father’s memory was fading, he had at best two years left. So Trula moved him in with her. It’s worked out fine—in some ways. He watches old movies all day, and Trula loves watching them with him when she can. But year after year, his memory isn’t getting worse. On the one hand, that’s wonderful. And on the other hand? Trula has another problem. And it’s not just that her father will eat only chicken pot pies and they’ve stopped making the one brand he will eat.

A play about how we carry our memories, and how they carry us.

Development:

Rude Mechs Rude Fusion, Austin, TX

New Harmony Project Reading

Playwrights Center Core Workshop

Dorset Theatre Festival Workshop Reading

4f, 3m

How Water Behaves is a comedy about what happens when your dream of saving the world meets the reality of your empty bank account. We watch a young couple, Nan and Steve, as they fight all the odds to change the world and still have the means to start a family. The play includes liberal amounts of bad string theory poetry, gluten-free diet bashing, Melinda Gates worship, and sperm banking. It invites us to engage in new ways of thinking about money, responsibility, and the act of charity.

Warning: This play does not answer Plato’s question “How to live.” But the characters in it are trying to.

1f, 1 Barbie Doll

When Something Wonderful Ends explores the loss of one’s mother, America’s dependence on foreign oil, and Barbie dolls in an ingenious, whimsical, touching, funny, infuriating manner that only playwright Sherry Kramer could achieve. While packing up her parents’ home following the death of her mother, Sherry uncovers the treasure trove of Barbies from her baby-boom childhood while embarking on the homework of a lifetime: discovering the roots of Islamic hatred of America and our dependence on the oil in the Middle East. As a Jewish girl growing up in the epicenter of the Bible belt, Sherry knows a thing or two about religious fervor and the passions it engenders.

Premiere Production:

Actors Theatre of Louisville, Humana Festival of New American Plays co-produced with Interact Theatre.

Awards:

Austin Chronicle “Top Ten Theatrical Treasure”

2f, 2m

Two women find that they have everything in common until the death of a brother drives them apart. Part stand-up comedy, part stand-up tragedy for two. The redhaired mythology that glorifies and empowers two women leads them into a big love, but can’t lead them safely out again. A play about the heaviness of the things we carry.

Premiere Production

Woolly Mammoth Theatre

Awards

Jane Chambers Playwriting Award

2f, 2m

May eats dinner every night on the most valuable antique table in the world. But her husband wants to sell it. A troubled marriage, a mysterious malaise, and where is all that water coming from? How high will it have to get before someone does something about it? A play about American money and the American dream of a table big enough to feed the world.

Development

Williamstown Theatre Festival Reading Series

Dorset Theatre Festival

Ruth Easton Series Reading, Playwrights Center

First Light Festival, Theatre of the First Amendment

In Conversation at The Playwrights Center: Writing a Play about Money

4f, 4m

The perfect rent controlled NY apartment has one fatal flaw: the roommate from hell. The play takes place on the day the newest roommate can’t take it anymore. Classic humor of mistaken identity mixed with new-age twists. The Wall of Water is farce with all the sharp edges showing—it is an intractably woven tale that tackles subjects as serious as death and as important as scientific inquiry, and everything in between. A farce about the nature of madness, the way it is infectious, how we treat it and how we know who is and who isn’t. A play with 4 leading roles for young women about strong women and the men who love and sometimes sedate them.

Premiere Production

Yale Repertory Theatre

Awards

LA Women in Theatre Award

4f, 1m

The earth is being sucked into a giant black hole, and everyone will be stuck in a single, endless moment for the rest of time. Carson is hired by PharmaNOW to create a drug that manufactures everlasting beauty, the one “sure” way to insure that everyone’s eternal moment will be happy. She must tackle the myth behind the meaning of beauty itself. As the world crashes to an end, we are left with the question: Can there be happiness without beauty?

Development

Hedgebrook Women Playwrights Festival

3f, 1m

There is a rule in book conservation: You must never do something perfect. Perfection is forgery. Once a page in a book is torn, the tear cannot be erased. Joan dreams of the man who will erase all her imperfections, even though she’s sure that’s against all the rules of love, too. She decides to fall for a seductive psychopath who she knows can make her perfect—but she doesn’t know the price she will have to pay.

Premiere Production

Second Stage Theatre

Awards

Weissberger Award, Marvin Taylor Playwriting Award, Time Magazine Best Bet

4f, 2m

A play about hearing and the limits of language and forgiveness. Alan works at the Atkinson Center, a place where children with auditory processing problems go for help in understanding the simple sequences of cause and effect we all take for granted when we speak. Alan meets Ava, a woman who makes him hear a language he cannot ever truly comprehend–passion. We follow Alan’s descent into madness as his feelings for Ava make him doubt that he has understood a single word he has ever heard. The play is structured with past and present parts of Alan’s story intermingled. The central image of the play is Alan’s bathroom, where Ava’s bloody, broken body haunts him. But the mystery of her death is not a simple one. Alan must find the courage to decide where, in the dream of his life, responsibility begins and ends.

Development

EST LA

Rattlestick Theatre

Sundance Institute

Wilma Theatre

New York Stage and Film

7m, 4f

David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and James Boswell in a play about the moment when the modern age was born and Fundamentalism first rose to crush it down. Also, a little love story. 1776. David Hume, the mind at the center of the Scottish Enlightenment, is dying without fear of hell or hope of heaven. Samuel Johnson has completed his dictionary and reigns supreme as the authority of all things written in the English language. Both have the same disciple: James Boswell, an alcoholic, diseased, sex obsessed man who is driven by his fear of death to record every moment of his life in his journal. In a lifelong search for a father figure, he is torn between the Royalist, conservative Samuel Johnson and the Deist, progressive David Hume—men whose philosophies and religious beliefs are diametrically opposed and who are bitter enemies. At stake is the future biography Boswell will write, and the literary and cultural immortality it will grant. David Hume’s peaceful acceptance of approaching death pushes Boswell to the very brink of madness, and proves to be the moment that determines Boswell’s choice.

Development

New Harmony Institute

State Theatre New Play Festival

Playlabs, The Playwrights Center

4f, 2m

Human spontaneous combustion is not something that most people worry about, but Amalia Parker does, and that’s why she won’t sleep with Rob. Sex with someone she doesn’t care about might not be so dangerous, but with the man she truly loves? Spontaneous combustion is a definite possibility. This is the kind of logic that only makes sense in the Parker household, where mom cooks obsessively, dad has turned the house into an interior 18 hole golf course, and ancient maiden Aunt Emily does laundry and practices the family art of selective sight. When Rob manages to talk Amalia into ignoring her fears, the worst happens. Amalia’s sister Mary Catherine arrives for the funeral, and Amalia and Rob have a terrible choice to make. A sweet, quirky comedy.

Premiere Production

Brass Tacks Theatre

2f, 2m

A young man who sows his wild oats is a small hero—every woman he beds is a medal. The more medals, the bigger the hero. But a woman who does the same? Not a hero. The exact opposite. Some things never change. Nell has fallen so deeply in love with Brent that every man she sees reminds her of him. Sleeping with every man who reminds her of him—which is every man—is an act of love and belief for her. But that’s not the way the world sees it. Her sister Coco comes back to their childhood home in Texas to rescue her, but Nell doesn’t want rescuing. She wants to be alive. And then two men arrive who may be everything both sisters have been dreaming of. Nell will have to choose between the perfect, vivid life of obsession and the every-day world where love is less destructive, less powerful, but real.

Premiere Production

Brass Tacks Theatre

1f, 2m, 1 child

The Faust story is one of our eternal myths–a story about striving, about always wanting more, about the struggle to know more, feel more, be more like God. Partial Objects is an adaptation of the myth with two Fausts—a man and a women. When the devil offers them a moment of perfect love, they eagerly agree to give their souls for it. But perfect love is harder to come by then they’d bargained for. A fairy tale about what happens in the night.

Premiere Production

Mill Mountain Theatre

Awards

Pilgrim Project Award

5w, 6m, and ensemble

An adaptation of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe is a novel about the abuse of power and the betrayals of the ruling classes, written to offset the anti-Semitism in Shakespeare and books popular in Scott’s time. The adaptation transplants the novel to the backwoods of Arkansas in 1966—a time when hillfolk still roam the hills, practicing their own brand of magic. The Vietnam War is raging. The Woodstock Nation is gathering. Ivanhoe is a Vietnam vet, suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Rebecca, Scott’s beautiful Jewish healer, is a psychiatrist. Jousting is replaced with stock car driving. The villain of the play is based on America’s most infamous anti-Semite, a man known as the American Hitler, Gerald L. K. Smith. The play takes place beneath the shadow of his giant Christ of the Ozarks statue, as his private militia is poised to overthrow the American government. Just as in the original novel, the common people band together to destroy the ruling class villain and save the country they love.

Development

Theatre Squared Festival

New Harmony Institute

1f, 1m, 1 singer

Written with Ann Haskell and Rebecca Newton

Claire is on a cyclone-like campaign against a past that is threatening to sink her. She is a mosaicist who is breaking antique china that has been in her family for generations and using it to cover tables, vases, walls–every surface in sight. She is contemplating breaking and using the china Napoleon took to Elba, which belonged to her great, great, great, great, great, great, grandmother Josephine. Naturally, the proposed destruction of Napoleon’s historically significant dinnerware horrifies Shepard, the historian who lives across the hall. Will Claire break the china? Will Shep break Claire’s heart? A play about history, the way we hide it and hide from it, and the way we carry it.

Premiere Production

Salt Lake City Acting Company

3f

Nicki drives her 84 year old grandmother down to Florida every year. But this year will be the last trip they take. Nano longs for the world she used to know, and Nicki is hell bent on dragging her into the present. A play about the genteel anti-semitism of the south, and the special way that grandmothers and granddaughters fight and forgive each other.

Premiere Production

Theatre J

3f, 6m, chorus

An adaptation from the novel by Mikail Bulgakov, written with composer Margaret Pine.

The Master and Margarita begins on a hot spring night, when the devil arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a beautiful naked witch and a huge talking black cat with a fondness for chess and vodka. Before it ends, heads will roll beneath trolleybuses, deals will be made with the devil, true love will overcome both good and evil, and it will be proven, once and forever, that great manuscripts don’t burn. A triumph of the artist’s voice over a totalitarian state. A heartbreaking love story.

Development

Hal Prince Music Theatre Project/Directors Company

O’Neill Music Theatre Conference

The Mad Master is a meditation on time and the sex drive. The title comes from the time when Plato asked Socrates, when he was really old, how sex was now. And Socrates replied “Most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. When we are freed from the Mad Master, we are freed from the grasp of not just one master, but of many.”

The Mad Master was commissioned by the Audrey Skirball Kenis Foundation.

Development

Zachery Scott Theatre

3f, 2m, ensemble 2f, 3m

Premiere Production

Theatre of the First Amendment

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