playwriting
BIRDS OF EAST AFRICA (produced)
When Marion’s husband dies unexpectedly, she takes up her friend Stephen on a youthful promise that if either friend were left alone in life, the other friend would take them in. As Stephen’s husband Nick carries her luggage through the front door, it dawns on Marion that her friend and his husband are not looking--no, not even speaking to one another. Caught in the center of a marriage unraveling due to a chronic illness, Marion discovers that her grief is not unlike theirs, and wonders if home is here or somewhere much farther away.
THE STRANGEST THING (unproduced)
The snow falls constantly on a sidewalk with three houses. A boy rides his bicycle and the houses move past him: first one way, then the other. Clara, escaping a run of bad relationships, returns home to find her mother, Charlotte, isn’t cooking dinner. She’s waiting for husband Harry to come home. When he arrives, he confesses, “The strangest thing happened. I forgot how to get home.” Harry forgets more and more, and is eventually remembered by the family down the street. “He’s a POW,” their boy says to Clara “He’s not a POW. He’s never been in a war.” Furious with her father’s forgetting, Clara kidnaps the boy in hopes of bringing her father back. Waiting for Harry in a world that’s filling up with snow, Charlotte, Clara and the boy build snow forts, cook a turkey, and finally, face how families forget and re-form.
SAMMY & ME (produced) recounts one man’s lifelong fascination with Sammy Davis, Jr – and his questions take audiences on a whirlwind journey from Sammy’s tap dance beginnings on the "the Chitlin' Circuit" to headliner on the Las Vegas strip he helped to desegregate. Part self-portrait, part celebrity investigation, the answers that unravel are as powerful as the new questions they raise. www.sammyandme.com