PLAYS
Hanging out with the Spin cast at ANPF director Lenny Neimark's picnic table
Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians was a winner of the Ashland New Plays Festival (Oct. 2011) and Centenary Stage Company's Women Playwrights Series (April 2012). When Pulitzer laureate Jerome Hart drops dead onstage, what will become of his Cape Cod farmhouse, his five cats, and his unofficial lifelong partner, Mimi Locke?
"The wonderful thing about this festival is that the Rogue Valley is full of avid playgoers who can give educated feedback on each production," says Lenny Neimark, director of a winning script, Carol Verburg's Spin, or Twilight of the Bohemians. . . . Neimark, a longtime freelance director, says he was intrigued by Verburg's script: "It's a nontraditional plot — more of a character piece centering on life's drama." - Ashland Daily Tidings
Kim Nalley as Billie Holiday, Ed Gillies III as Jimmy Monroe and Lady Sunrise as Sadie "Duchess" Fagan, Lady Day in Love
Lady Day in Love, at San Francisco's Fellowship Theatre Guild (summer 2006), starred local and international jazz diva Kim Nalley as Billie Holiday, with Lady Sunrise, Ed Gillies, and T. Hall. Courtney Brown directed. I'd written it for and with the Black Theatre Ensemble of Cape Cod, led by Paula Carpenter, for a regional Women's Month theater festival. With a cast of Pam Lopes, Paula, and Terry Staples, we staged it at Theater on the Bay in Bourne, then at The Heron Bistro in Sandwich. Lady Day in Love moved to the West Coast as a staged reading in the Discovery Series at San Francisco's legendary Eureka Theatre, directed by Rhodessa Jones and starring Ledisi, before the full production at FTG.
Like my neighbor and comrade-in-arts Edward Gorey, I left my heart in theater when books took over my career, and reclaimed it when I moved to Cape Cod in the late 1980s. The Abduction was my first play produced on the Cape. I wrote it as a founding member of the Provincetown Theatre Company's Playwrights' Workshop (now Lab) and directed it at Theater on the Bay in Bourne. It went on to win a slot in the Utah Shakespearean Festival's 2001 Plays in Progress series.
Edward Gorey contributed the poster art--and the title--for The Whistling Pig.
The Whistling Pig debuted at the Cotuit Center for the Arts in Cotuit, MA, after winning a 1999 Jane Chambers Honorable Mention Award. This all-female murder mystery (or is it?) was directed by P.J. McKey.
Shooting Stars, set in the heyday of Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird, was performed as a staged reading at the Barnstable Comedy Club and at the Studio at Boston's Huntington Theatre. It's my most autobiographical play, and still dear to my heart.
The playwright as OCD zombie, Centenary Stage Co.
Awaiting full productions:
- After the Gold Rush, a large-cast epic drama about the violent 1850s clash between San Francisco's gamblers, prostitutes, politicians, and vigilantes (staged reading at the Magic Theatre)
- On Fire, a large-cast epic romance about the pyrotechnic love affair between French aristocrat and scientist Emilie du Chatelet and the upstart philosopher Voltaire.