PLAYS
Bethany
New Work: 2019
Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA 2019 Winterfest New Play Festival Staged Reading
Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA 2019 Launchpad New Play Festival Staged Reading
The Road Theatre Company/LA 2019 The Word at The Road New Play Reading
Seven characters:
5 Male Actors: 2 Black, 3 White
2 Female Actors: 1 Black, 1 White
Approximately 90 Minutes
Historical drama.
Bethany, Arkansas. 1896.
BETHANY takes place on a stormy night in the Southern Cross saloon, forty days after the lynching of young African American, Samuel Oakes, for raping the mistress of the wealthy saloon owner, “Bloody” Bill Honeycutt. Bill is a Civil War legend and notorious Kansas bushwhacker, who is now the richest man in Bethany. His young bar maid, Lucy, is his prize possession. Bill and his ally Judge Walter Raines crash the bar drunk, ready to celebrate Bill’s prank divorce from his wife. They demand that Lucy and the sleazy bartender Plunk serve ‘em up and help with the celebration. Minutes later, two intrepid wayfarers arrive with their own agenda. Anti-lynch activist and journalist Ida B. Wells has traveled from Chicago with her friend Stagger Lee Felton to investigate the lynching of Samuel. Ida and Lee cross the color line into a whites-only bar demanding to know what happened to Samuel, and who lynched him. BETHANY is a play about race, class, sexism, and the lingering stain of America’s original sin and the legacy of white supremacy.
Makepeace
World Premiere Matheson Performing Arts Center in Mendocino, California in May, 2012.
Rogue Machine Theatre 2013 Staged Reading
Seven characters:
4 Male Actors: 3 White, 1 Black
3 Female Actors: White
Approximately 2 hours
A political/family drama. The year is 2007. Martin Foley is an executive consultant for a multinational
corporation called Makepeace Risk Management Services that contracts a multitude of industrial and
security services for governments around the world. He specializes in third world countries involved in
military conflict and has spent the past four years “consulting” in Iraq and the adjoining region. Liz, his
wife of 29 years, has stoically raised their two sons in their luxurious home in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
On Liz’ fifty-fifth birthday she and Martin return home from her birthday dinner where he receives a call
from his boss, the ceo of Makepeace, informing them that their 22 year old son, Logan, has been
kidnapped somewhere in Northern Iraq. The play shifts in time and location from the Foley home to
various stops on Logan’s Mideast road odyssey. All bets are off for Martin Foley and his family when
the devil finally demands his due.
Darfur
2015 Semi-finalist Eugene O’Neill Theatre National Playwrights Conference.
Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA 2014 Launchpad New Play Festival Staged Reading
Rogue Machine Theatre 2015 Staged Reading
Five characters:
3 Male Actors: 2 Black, 1 White
2 Female Actors: 1 Black, 1 White
Approximately 90 Minutes
A political drama. The year is 2013. The play takes place in the elegant living room of international
arms merchant Khristo Volkov’s beachfront villa in Mombasa, Kenya. When Khristo and companion
Sumah Boru are set upon simultaneously by a South Sudanese rebel leader and a former MSF physician
and her adopted Darfurian son, the psychological and emotional blow-back of the Darfur war ends in a
life and death struggle for meaning and identity.
The Pile
Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA 2016 Launchpad New Play Festival Staged Reading
Six characters:
4 Male Actors: 1 Black, 3 White
2 Female Actors: 2 White
Approximately 90 Minutes
Drama.
THE PILE takes place at Ground Zero, dead center of the apocalyptic pile of twisted steel and
colossal chunks of concrete in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks and collapse of the towers.
The action is both realistic and other worldly. It’s days and weeks after 9/11: it’s timeless. New York Fire
Fighter Bull Sweeney digs in the rubble of the aftermath of the attacks, searching for the remains of his
son, Kyle, also an NYFD firefighter who was lost in the collapse of World Trade Center Towers. Bull’s
exhausted, utterly depleted physically and spiritually. He challenges God, or any supreme being that
would unleash such horrendous evil in the world. As he digs he retrieves the remains and artifacts of other
victims. In counterpoint to Bull’s dig, on a scaffolding representing one of the collapsed towers, Godfrey
Malbone, the personification of evil (Satan?), holds Kyle hostage. We learn that Malbone is playing an
existential game with Bull; he will hold Kyle from passing to the next world until Bull quits his dig,
forsaking his search for his son, and abandons his faith. But Bull’s preternatural determination is visceral,
and he refuses to quit despite pleas from his wife, Rose, his best friend and NYFD comrade Bernie who
reports that in three days a full excavation of the site will commence, destroying any chance of Bull’s
ever finding Kyle. Throughout the play Bull’s faith is challenged, yet he forges on until his
confrontation with Malbone. Will Bull give up? Will he find Kyle’s body? Will he defeat Malbone?
Love & Suicide
Three characters:
2 Male Actors: 1 Black, 1 White
1 Female Actor: White
Approximately 90 Minutes
Romantic dramedy. Night. 2:30 AM. 103rd floor private observation deck of the Empire State Building.
An emotional Phoebe is talking on her cell phone as she paces and looks over the low barrier. She’s
telling her lover and boss, Walter, what a jerk he is. He ruined her life. Nothing to live for. She’ll make
him as miserable as she is. She smashes the phone and runs to the barrier and jumps up to the ledge. She
grasps the iron protective grate and pulls herself up just as Damien Palacio, an expert climber and
wingsuit base jumper, vaults up from his Empire ascent on the exterior opposite her. She screams and
drops to the deck. Damien catapults down and thus begins a madcap romance that climaxes when Walter
Kauffman sweeps onto the deck and demands that Phoebe leave with him. Damien subdues the
narcissistic Walter and exposes his duplicity and lies. Damien challenges Phoebe to trust, and take flight
with him across the New York City skyline.
* All plays are available by request. Please click Contact and submit your request to Steve.