plays

PITZ + JOE

PITZ & JOE is a full-length about a sister who brings her brain damaged brother home to rehabilitate him. Everything about Joe has been compromised. He has suffered a profound loss of his life: memory, time, thought, speech, movement; all freedom. Within the harsh world of these huge limitations a different and intangible freedom emerges; that of shedding the past and living in the now.  

2 Characters, 90 minutes. Full Length Drama, contracted by Warner Bros. 

Productions + Credits: Philadelphia Theatre Company (workshop), Williamstown Theatre Festival, Williamstown, MA (workshop), GeVa Theatre, Rochester, NY (world premiere), Arizona Repertory Theatre, Tucson, AZ (staged reading), Hudson Theatre, Los Angeles (production), The Redhen, Chicago, IL (production), National Head Injury Foundation (presentation in Washington, DC)

Below is an excerpt from a monologue from the play.
Almost at the cold light of the morning- a reckoning between brother and sister. 

COUNT DOWN

COUNT DOWN is a full-length about the fragmented lives of abused girls, a teacher who tries to make them whole, and the inherent dissonance between the child welfare system and the reality of the girls who have no choice but to spend their childhood and adolescence in its care.  

9 Characters (8 female, 1 male) 2 hours.

Full Length Drama

Productions + Credits:  The Strand Theatre, Baltimore, MD, 2018 (full production), Women’s Voices Theatre Festival, DC, 2018, Puffin Cultural Forum, Teaneck, New Jersey (full workshop production), Produced by Jane Dubin. Bank Street Theatre, New York City (full production), Finalist for Playwrights First Award, The National Arts Club, NY, NJSCA and Mid Atlantic Individual Playwriting Fellowship, 2009

Bank Street: Double Play Productions, Jane Dubin. Directed by Elyse Knight, choreography by Penny McCourt, photography/lighting by Jill Nagle

Strand Theatre Company, Executive Director Elena Kostakis, Directed and choreographed by Bari Hochwald.

Below is an excerpt from a monologue from the play.

MIRIAM

It isn’t. I feel like I’m going to throw up because of this stupid ass place. I’m getting an early bed because this place forces me to get sick and F’up my digestive system. How would you like to be force-fed corn dogs? I’m not even supposed to be eating pork. Do you have any idea what’s in one of those pole dogs? Cow lips, that’s what’s in that shit, cow lips and intestines - cow, pig, chicken, goose, cat, duck, dog, sheep, horseshit, all pumped into the fine lining of a pig’s intestine, then rolled in cracked corn meant for squirrels. 

How would you like it if you were forced to eat and if you 

didn’t you would have to go to bed at 8:00, and then YOU WOULDN’T BE ABLE TO CALL YOUR BOYFRIEND?

FOR DEAR LIFE 

FOR DEAL LIFE is a full-length, is an ensemble piece about the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis, seen through the lens of a hostage who is trying to put his life back together.  10 Characters playing multiple parts. 2 hours.

Credits: Finalist for Charlotte New Plays Festival, Charlotte, NC, Jean Cocteau Repertory Company- Finalist for ShenanArts Fellowship, VA

Below is an excerpt from a monologue from the play.

Jesus, the last damn thing I want said about me is, “They got to the Col,” or, “He chickened out. Broke down and talked.” Some private or corporal hear that and say, “If he can’t take it, how the hell am I supposed to?” I won’t talk. (pause) There’s enough broken glass in this cell to slash my wrists. There’s been enough shit littering my days and nights in Iran to tempt Jesus.
(standing on the chair)
Hey Buddy, you knew you were gonna walk up that Mount, gonna have a few nails pounded into ya. That’s same as takin’ your own life. You made a choice. I seem to have a few options here. Slit my wrists, swallow some glass, bash my brains out on the wall. I think I prefer the old Spanish mode of capital punishment for my sins.
(LELAND hops up and down several times, trying to reach a cord hanging above him)
Son of a bitch, is this why you made me so goddamned short? This is the goddamn method I choose. It’s the safest, cleanest, most sure way and I want some kind’a goddamned help from you.
(LELAND hops, reaches and grabs the cord)
Thank you. Thank you.
(Tying the cord around his neck)
Bless me Father for I have sinned, I have not been to confession for some 270 days. I’ve been swearing every day since, so I can’t give you a count on…..

LAST KISS

LAST KISS is a full-length. In the summer of 1967 when no young working-class man could feel safe and secure, unless he could find a way to evade the draft, a final push for Vietnam leaves a small river town in the Midwest without its young men. Two women and their daughters struggle to survive the loss of their men and the loss of innocence.  5 Characters (4 female, 1 male) 2 hours.

Productions + Credits: Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York, NY (presented in Octoberfest Festival) & Lexington Center for the Arts, Centenary Stage’s Women Playwrights Series, Hackettstown, NJ, North Carolina’s Festival of New Works, Davidson College, Finalist for Reva Shiner Award, IN, Finalist for ShenanArts Fellowship, VA

Below is an excerpt from a monologue from the play.

CHRISSY: One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand. I gotta get up. I’m gonna sit over there, on the rock, by the fence. Okay. I’ll be quiet now so I can see your world while we wait for the hummingbird.
(She sits)
Okay. This is good. This is nice. I can sit here. I can sit here for more than a minute. I’ll pipe down.
Silence.
I try. I really do. Please let me talk to you. Let me talk and then when I’m all talked out, I’ll stop. When you’re not around I try and I can’t. To sit. But as soon as I sit I look at another spot and things look better in that spot, see, let’s say, over there, by the sprinkler. It looks good to me. I’m gonna sit there now. That’s what I do. Is that bad? It worries me. I might have a problem, like ants in my pants. I really understand ants in my pants and it’s very serious. I think I may never stop moving. I think I’m going to miss something. Something important. What? What would I miss? The hummingbird, the mailman, a telephone call, a visit. I wait…..

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SAFE

SAFE is a full-length. Larkin is hip deep in trouble, about to turn 18, and precariously close to some serious jail time. With a mother who feels her son is safer locked up in facilities and a father who is living out of a truck, Larkin’s only savior may be Nitz, a kid Larkin finds sleeping in his bed when he returns from a stint at a facility.  7 Characters (1 doubling, 2 female, 4 male) 2 hours.

Full Length Drama

Credits: Writers Theatre of New Jersey Soundings Forum 2012

Below is an excerpt from a monologue from the play.

Larkin has just come home from a juvenile to find Nitz, a homeless kid taken in by his mother, in his room. 

LARKIN takes a band aid box from a book shelf over his head. He opens it, pulls out weed and papers and rolls a doobie. NITZ sits up. 

NITZ
Ever hear, “Ain’t No Grave?” 

LARKIN lights up. 

NITZ
It goes: 

(imitating older Cash) 

“There ain’t no graaave can hold my body down. There ain’t no grave can hold my body down. When I hear that trumpet sound, I’m gonna ride right outta the ground. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down. Well look way down the river, what do you think I see? I see a band of angels and they’re comin after me…” this is the thing about this song. Johnny starts out with a nice enough strum, gentle, like a lot of songs, and then when he says, “when I hear that trumpet sound,” a drumbeat comes in. One constant beat along with a cymbal brush, and I swear to you, the drum beat sounds like a nail going in a coffin and the brush sounds just like dirt, not heavy wet dirt thudding on the coffin, more like dry, very dry dirt, showering the coffin. So it’s like the coffin is being made and the grave being dug, and the burial is happening all at the same time, but not, because somehow you experience the words of the song and the sound as a story of what will happen.  

LARKIN
Shit, you can talk a blue streak. 

NITZ
I’m just so happy to have somebody to talk to!

LARKIN
Well, talk away cause after tonight you won’t be here and not just in this room, jack-nut, this whole house.

NOTHING BUT A GOOD MOTHER

NOTHING BUT A GOOD MOTHER A young girl drops her 17-month old son into a River.  The story leading up to this inexplicable act is set side-by-side with a forty-two-year-old woman who is desperately trying to have her first child, and Margaret Sanger’s crusade for birth control.  8 Characters (a full-length, 8-character ensemble, 2 hours)

Full Length Drama

Credits: Writers Theatre of New Jersey, Women Playwrights Project, Writers Theatre of New Jersey, 2011-12. Forum Reading Series, 2013. Semi-finalist, MultiStages New Works, 2013. Finalist, Downstage Left Playwrights Residency, 2014-15. Speranzea Theatre, Fall Festival, 2015.

Below is an excerpt from a monologue from the play.

Maya is asked by her aunt to describe when she was happiest for an essay to pass her GED.

MYA

Happiest? When I’m eating a Moonpie. I don’t know happiest yet. When a boy first looks at me. How’s that? I love it when the first time a boy looks at me, really looks at me in my eyes and smiles and wants to dance with me or talk to me or just sit near me. I feel like a thing in me in my heart or something gets warm and it spreads and then everything is good. I’m good, my life is good, my whole day is good and I’m somebody. Just to be looked at makes everything change and I can see like a bright blue day you know a day when everything around is a color not all gray. If I could, if I could make a way to change my life, don’t you think I would?!  Some days I jus’wanna snap my fingers, like that, and my life is changed. Changed forever.

(SHE eats some Moonpie)

I’m gonna ask Isse if she can watch Mateo. I hate it when I don’t have somebody to watch Mateo. Nino don’t have him all day, hardly ever. No, he’s got Mariah Carey, his new girl- he gotta life but not me! I have to be all alone all day long, no one to talk to, no one to make him milk or pick him up and talk to him. I have to get up early and can’t even pee. First thing I got to see him. First. Thing. I got to be with him all day, can’t go out, forget a boyfriend, can’t watch TV cuz I have to watch him. You take your eye off him a second and he’s in something so if I want to even take a pee, or go in the shower, or take a bath, I have to bring him with me everywhere I go even in the bathroom. And then it’s probably only still in the morning with the whole day to go and the night and all the way until I can get him to go to sleep. Damn no more MoonPie. You think I could put that on my essay?