David Bowie died on 10 January 2016. He was 69 years old, three years younger than I am. The only album of his that I owned was Ziggy Stardust back in 1972 and, later, I was a big fan of three of his movies—The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), The Hunger (1983), and Merry…
Requirements: 38 parts played by 8 M and 1F (Voice Only). Additionally, Lee’s wife Jane and Allerton’s girlfriend Mary will be represented on stage not by live actors but by life-sized ragdolls. Setting: A bar, a bed-sitting room, a movie-house, and various streets in Mexico City, 1949-1952. Plot: Lee and his wife Jane are American…
Requirements: 2M Setting: Nick’s dormroom, a small carpetted central area containing a bed, a table and chair. Surrounding the dormroom is Jake’s campsite near the turnpike by the Kaw River in Lawrence, Kansas. Morning, Bastille Day (July 14), mid-1990s. Plot: Nick, a student attending summer classes at the University of Kansas, introduces us to the facts and…
Requirements: 3M Setting: Three chairs in Dr. Beatrice’s office. She is a marriage counselor, and the three men talk to her in different combinations–sometimes individually, sometimes in alternating groups of two, sometimes all three together–but Dr. Beatrice herself is never seen or heard. Early August, late 1980s. Plot: Three men, twenty years apart in age,…
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…
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…
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…