WINNER: Henley Rose Playwriting Competition for Women (2nd place 2021) Jerry Kaufman Award for Excellence in Playwriting 2020.
The Docent is grounded in a lecture on the trees of Central Park given by Urban Forestry expert, Edna Gregory. During the course of the lecture we flash back to Edna’s first encounter with her life’s work – her first job as an Urban Park Ranger in New York City in 1981. Just out of High School, Edna comes to the big city for the first time, and rents a room in an apartment in the West Village with a young man named Charles. While they are surprisingly different, they soon become best friends. Little does Edna or Charles suspect that their community is about to be wiped out by AIDS. All through the play New York City’s trees become a tribute to the astonishingly beautiful and devastatingly tragic history of New York City and the soul mate that Edna has loved and lost.