Mother Tongue: A Recreation in Two Acts

Requirements:  14 characters played by 4F, 3M Setting:  The action alternates between an office and a classroom in a midwestern university.  If possible, platforms and a limbo area can also be used for the various flashback sequences.  Plot:  David Lee, a Chinese-American writer teaching in the English department at a midwestern university, is at a cross-roads…

Woeman: A Recreation in Two Acts

Requirements: 5F, 1M Setting: A small studio apartment in an old building near Columbia University, New York City.  Saturday afternoon, late June, the present. Plot:  Something has happened to Charlie Womack, a photo-journalist in his mid-30s. All we know is that he is in the hospital, and that his mother has called an impromptu meeting…

Homerica: A Trilogy on Sexual Liberation

Requirements: 33 Characters can be played 6F. 11M or (if absolutely necessary) 5F, 9M. Setting: A basement space in the Village in New York City, used three different ways for the corresponding time periods depicted in the play.  In Act 1, “Bull’s Books,” it is an old apartment-cum-antiquarian bookstore, early evening on Veterans’ Day, sometime…

Chambers: A Recreation in Four Parts

Requirements:  2F, 3M, and 4 Ushers (preferably M) Setting:  Four bedrooms in the ancestral home of a Kansas City playwright. The pattern of exits and entrances from each chamber to the next should follow the way blood enters the human heart and the way it exits out of the human heart to the rest of…

16 July 2009: Sonia Sotomayor

Sonia Sotomayor reassures the Senate Judicial Committee that she is all for “the letter of the law.”  She cleverly dodges all questions about “empathy” or “the spirit of the law.” She refuses to be our Antigone to their Republican Kreons.

Conpersonas: A Recreation in Two Acts

Requirements: 2M, 2F Setting: Upper East Side New York apartment.  Thanksgiving weekend. Plot: A Jesuit priest investigates and relives, with devastating consequences, the relationships that his identical twin brother had had with three people who may or may not have contributed to the twin brother’s suicide. Theme: What happens when we confide in friends, sharing…

28 June 2009: Stonewall Riots

Forty years ago today, I was a fairly non-political student taking summer classes at the University of Kansas, and I did not pay much attention to news about the Stonewall Riots in New York City.  Now, of course, the whole world marks the occasion as the birth of the Gay Rights Movement. But the battle…

27 June 2009: Farrah Fawcett

I saw the late Farrah Fawcett in the 1983 Off-Broadway production of Extremities, but the thing I remember best about the show was that there were two men who were standing guard down front, on the orchestra level, one on each side of the stage, facing the audience.  I don’t know if they were there…