Paula Kamen

Absurd 5-minute play about banality of negative TV campaign ads. Using a variety of emotions, characters use only one single line of dialogue: "What is Frank Krusniak thinking?"

Story: Marcy and Frank are bitter rivals for the state assembly. When their war of words escalates to a physical confrontation in a studio producing negative TV ads, the stakes couldn't be more ridiculous.

Would be great acting exercise or subject for very short fillm.

The one generation that mostly voted for Trump was Gen X. What happened? This comedy, offering great roles to actors in their twenties and set in the 1990s, shows the extreme temptations to sell out, especially for the cool people.

Timely and provocative. Reflects current controversies in news, such as the astonishment of J.D. Vance's old friends of how he has sold out on a shocking new level.

SYNOPSIS:
They say nothing has more rules than punk rock, and Brad, a former '80s punk rocker, relishes breaking every one.

He sells out in the most spectacular way possible as top MAGA operative, risking his freedom with prison, and something even more cherished: his coolness. In this comedy/drama, this apparent change has an explosive effect on the relationships of his old Chicago friends. His close artist friend Madge, the main character, struggles to make sense of this puzzling evolution, stay loyal to Brad, and preserve his lucrative advertising connections, such as using her old Riot Grrrl street cred to sell hormone pills to aging Gen X Women via Madison Avenue. Meanwhile, she clashes with her idealistic, socialist, non-compromising eternal-grad student husband to attain basic comforts, such as her ultimate goal of central air. She asks if supporting a bad candidate makes one a bad person -- and at one point has a loved one crossed over the dark side and become complicit?

Timely, urgent, and provocative part-documentary play, Jeff-nominated for best Ensemble in 2024 for Idle Muse production at the Edge Off Broadway in Chicago. Since Roe was overturned, it has had two full productions and 5 readings, including its first reading in a state that has outlawed abortion (South Carolina). The founder of Jane, Heather Booth, is now director of progressive outreach for the Harris-Walz campaign.

The part-documentary play is based on original interviews about “the best-kept secret” in Chicago, “Jane,” an underground abortion service that operated from 1969 to 1973. This network, run by a feminist collective of mostly middle-class housewives and students, was the one safe alternative for about 11,000 Chicago women of all backgrounds. In all those years, “Jane,” which boasted no fatalities and operated in private apartments throughout the city, was well trusted by and commonly received referrals from police, university administrators, social workers, clergy and hospital staff. The play starts with the founding of the group as an abortion-referral service by legendary organizer, Heather Booth, who is now spearheading progressive outreach for the Biden campaign.

Two monologues by Micki, a Jane member and Black civil rights worker, involved in the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, will appear in anthology of women's stage monologues to be released later in 2024 by Venus Theatre Company, the country's longest-running feminist theater company. See https://www.gofundme.com/f/FrozenWomenFlowingThoughts

Since 1999, it has been a favorite of colleges, for its many diverse roles for young women, with a reading at Temple University and full production at UCLA in late 2022.

This play was featured in September 2019 in American Theatre Magazine as a play being used to raise awareness for abortion rights, featuring a high-profile celebrity reading that month at Rattlestick Theatre in NYC to benefit A is For, starring Cynthia Nixon, Kathy Najimy, Ana Gasteyer, Monique Coleman and others:
https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/18/a-is-for-art-about-abortion-…

NPX included the play on a list of recommended plays on reproductive rights:
https://newplayexchange.org/features/reproductive-rights

I provided sources to the 2022 HBO-produced documentary, "The Janes," mainly ordinary women that I found who used Jane while researching this play. That includes Crystal, a Black woman who accompanied her friend to a Jane abortion as a teen from the West Side.

This drama addresses how when abortion is outlawed, it still goes on, and can be a harrowing experience even in the best of circumstances. It also inspires about the power of feminist organizing to meet women's most urgent and vital material needs.

Offered for free for pro-choice fundraisers.

Research for the writing of Jane includes a detailed, original investigation into its past and interviews with those who were on the scene in Chicago. This includes, most notably, women who used the illegal service. The drama is stitched together from original interview transcripts, fictionalized reenactments of conversations, and historical documents, such as an excerpt from an actual "witch"-led abortion-rights street theater from the early '70s, internal memos of the group, and front-page newspaper coverage of “The Abortion Seven.”

The research was used by the makers of the PBS documentary, Jane: An Abortion Service, which aired in 1998. The interview transcripts, quoted in the 1997 book When Abortion Was A Crime (University of California Press), are also on file with the Special Collections Department of the Northwestern University Library.

Was excerpted in two Smith & Kraus "best of" stage scenes and women's monologue anthologies. Two scenes were recently accepted into the first anthology of abortion-related literature, Choice Words (2020, Haymarket Press).

The play has also been written about by drama scholars, such as in in Frontiers article about innovative feminist docudrama structure, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/530604
and as chapter in book about feminist plays on abortion, as one play that addresses the issue most directly and unapologetically.
http://www.amazon.com/Examining-Confrontation-Ambivalence-Depictions-Re…

Three versions are available, including the revised & updated 2019 version requiring fewer actors. Also available on request are two shorter student-made adaptations: one hour-long monologues-only version and one half-hour of scenes.

The new version of the play includes three main characters, which emerge organically as leaders during different parts of The Service. That includes founder Heather Booth, who went to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, signed into law in 2010 by President Obama, and spearheaded by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

The theme of this short play is the incalculable loss to society when artists or inventors die before their prime, whether because of illnesses or other tragedies -- man-made or not, rooted in Jewish history.

The drama takes place in the imagination of a former Nazi, Heinz in 1995, in a hospital room. While facing the imminent death of his son from AIDS, at a time when treatments were limited, he sees a news story about the death of the Jewish inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk. Realizing the profound impact of his crimes, he then imagines a present-day confrontation with a Jewish boyhood friend, Abraham, an aspiring inventor and doctor, whom he had killed in a concentration camp during WWII.

Like other works of the playwright, even while contemplating dark subjects, the play dares to use humor, such as in a meditation on Holocaust survivor Anne Frank’s sales of her twentieth novel and ego problems.

AWARDS and PRODUCTIONS:

Finalist in Chicago Dramatists’ “Ten-Minute Play” Competition, receiving staged reading with Steppenwolf actors. Judged by David Zak of the Bailiwick Theater, Spring 1999.

First-place winner of play competition of the Unfinished Works program of AIDS Services Foundation Orange County, Irvine, California, December 2005.

Winner of Diversity Festival, Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, New Mexico, March 2001.

Offers prime comic role to older actress. A 2022 O'Neill NPC finalist!

World-famous libertine philosopher Dionne advocates for polyamory, but her younger friend Judith argues that she's not that ambitious.

Two-act comedy/drama about two generations of feminist writers with terrible taste in men, battling same invisible disability in very different ways.

The play has a modern take on a still-under-dramatized core struggle of the ambitious woman: to sacrifice career or family -- with the added challenge of dealing with an invisible disability.

The story is about a complex friendship between two generations of ambitious women writers -- including Dionne, a groundbreaking feminist philosopher obsessed with dieting. The O'Neill judges singled out this role for its "complexity of character" and their "delighting in her eccentricities."

At first, Judith, a young author, doesn’t know what to make of Dionne. In her first visit to Dionne’s almost-magical cottage in Michigan, Judith even fears that Dionne is trying to recruit her into an orgy. But soon Dionne and Judith bond over their shared struggles, and Dionne becomes Judith’s valued mentor, helping her overcome a major career crisis, caused by disabling chronic pain. But clashes how to achieve their other goal in life – domestic bliss — rip them apart. Judith is suspicious when Dionne decamps to Kankakee, Illinois with a longtime boyfriend on parole; Dionne is more upset when Judith choose a traditional route of marriage and kids in suburban middle-class Buffalo Grove.

Meanwhile, they both struggle with the need to be alone to create -- and questions about how to control the unruly body: its fertility, its weight, its pains, its addictions, its wayward lusts.

Also made first cuts for ScreenCraft Stage Play and Gary Marshall New Works Festival competitions in 2022, ranking highly as a comedy.

An absurd short play with all stage directions and no dialogue -- but with lots of action -- about the absurdity and isolation of living with chronic pain. Inspired by the format and form of Krapp's Last Tape by Beckett.

A woman with chronic back pain tries to retrieve a computer mouse she has dropped into a gaping void by enlisting the help of others via her cell phone. She orders a grabber from Amazon, and then drops that grabber in the void and orders another grabber to pick up that lost grabber. Another tactic is to book a Tinder date to get help. When he hurts his back, she enlists the responding paramedic. At the end, she starts all over again when she drops the cell phone into the same void.

Trust me, it works well on Zoom with two actors alternating reading stage directions.

A neurotic thriller/ten-minute play with introverts, showcasing the tragedy that ensues when their distinct consumer algorithms become one. It starts when a hapless woman accidentally torments a parent from her kids' school by constantly running into him everywhere she goes. This escalates until one day in the gym when they have a violent, not to mention awkward, reckoning.