A woman brings her fiancee home to meet her parents and secrets are revealed. Based on an old Irish folksong, it’s either a light drama or a dark comedy. But it plays extremely well and taught me something when I first produced it. The play has a pretty important reveal (which is the raison d’etre for writing the piece) and I tried to hide that it was coming in the dialogue but I noticed that some people in the audience figured it out before the play got there. It didn’t matter. They enjoyed the “moment” as much as those who were totally surprised.

A young woman visits her grandmother, and in alternating flashback scenes we see their difficult relationship as the grandmother paints a portrait of her granddaughter. Certainly a challenge to produce. The young actor must play guitar and sing and even dance a little. The older actor must speak some Yiddish and sing a Yiddish song (Dona Dona, but in the original Yiddish). There are several quick set and costume changes as well. The play loosely borrows from when I, as a teenager, was sitting for a portrait that my grandfather painted.

Zach is visited by his ex-girlfriend, Betsy, and the two of them go through a photo album and revisit episodes from their past leading to her leaving him. The play is based on what I thought Jackson Browne’s Fountain of Sorrow was about. But after writing the play and doing some idle surfing, I found out I had it all wrong: Fountain of Sorrow is not about his ex-wife but about Joni Mitchell. But the play is very much about an ex of mine, Rosalind (for whom my song Letting Go was written), although the end of our relationship was quite different from the end of Zack and Betsy’s. The play uses projections of the photographs.

A woman stumbles into an ice cream store and flashes back to a similar store some 35 years before, when she encountered a mysterious and damaged Vietnam vet. Only she comes away from the flashback with new knowledge that changes her life. Two middle aged women, one 13 year old girl and a 40 year old man. Produced in a couple of venues by me and once in Sisters, Oregon.  Written for a remarkable young local actor, Maddy Sledge.missing

Alex visits her estranged brother Toby after the death of their mother, and he tries to get her to remember the TV show they had starred in as kids, and to convince her that it wasn’t a show, that it really happened to them. The story first occurred to me when I was watching Dragon Tales on PBS sometime around 2000 but it was another dozen or so years before I attempted to write the play.

Franklyn meets Jesse at a concert at which he resuscitated a member of the audience. They hit it off until they learn that they come from very different worlds. They try to make it work until…

After not writing a play for ten years, for some inexplicable reason (although I have postulated quite a few quasi-explicable ones) I met a couple of actors who blew me away and I decided I wanted to write for them. This is the first of three two-character plays that followed.

When I interact with people, I always try to read them, to understand them and do a lot of questioning. Can’t do that with a therapist so I have to fill in the blanks. And the one thing that I wonder about the most is how guilty they might feel if they fail their patients; or worse yet, if one of their patients acts on something the therapist says with a bad result and, in the case of this play, collateral damage. A man, whose wife has apparently just left him, walks into her therapists office and asks to take her session, but what he really wants is to understand why she left him. The show has had a few productions and eventually I was able to get a tight script. This latest version seems to work well.

An elderly woman, unresponsive in advanced dementia with complications, relives some warm memories of her children as the two of them discuss whether or not to pull the plug. When my own mother drifted off into this state, I would visit her and wonder what was going on in her mind.  Written originally for the children to be brother and sister but changed to sisters because, let’s face it, there are way more women actors around than men.

A 13 year old girl takes her parents to a hilltop to view a comet, but really to try to salvage their faltering marriage. I knew a family who was going through something similar to this, and so I wrote the play for them (since they all acted) but we never had the chance to do it.