Jonathon Ward

On the night a son comes to move his father into his home, he discovers his father, who took a DNA test through 23 and Me, is not Jewish although he raised his son to be. The Conservative beliefs of the son and the secular faith of the father threaten their faith in their family.

At sea in a storm in 1611, Rebecca Stanford, the wife of an abusive Puritan leader, discovers an actor on board, George Greene, whom she knew in London. He is sailing to the new world disguised as a Pilgrim to start a theatre in Jamestown after the Globe Theatre didn’t hire him to replace Burbage. Rebecca’s husband, John Stanford, finds the copy of The Tempest they are reading. Believing the storm is conjured using spells from the play, he accuses George and Rebecca of being witches and has George put in chains. In the storm, Rebecca is washed overboard and thought to be dead, but she floats ashore on Cape Cod and hides. She discovers John Stanford has left George and Stephano, her indentured servant from Africa, on the beach to force them to confess that they are conjurers. While hiding in the woods, Rebecca is befriended by Askamaboo, and together they gain the freedom of George, Stephano, and Massasoit, who was captured by John Stanford, and they all flee into the woods. George, Rebecca and Stephano watch the Puritan boat sail away. They feel lost in the New World until they are invited to stay in the Wampanoag’s village for the Winter, where they plan to start the Paradise Theatre while working their day jobs planting corn and digging out canoes.

A drama of three generations of a middle-class family living the American Dream on Long Island taking care of life's pains with prescribed medications and recreational substances. When the grandson’s dream falls apart as a result of opioid addiction and the grandfather has to leave his home because he's mixing up his medications, and the father refuses to take his prescribed SSRI, each generation’s aspirations for the family come unraveled. They must find a way to rediscover a shared dream that will sustain them as a family and as individuals living in a new American Reality.

Three short plays:
ROOM TO ROAM
Synopsis
Annie tries one last time to convince her boyfriend to move to a place where there is space.

LIFE PASSING BY
Synopsis
As they watch couples pass by while sitting in a sidewalk café, they realize what their life is becoming and where it’s going.

I M = 2 U
Synopsis
ANN and DAN are starting to make a life together until his calculations about their relationship don’t equate with the world she’s dealing with at work and home.

"Devil's Holler"
Terry and Meg have been scraping by on his father’s pension check, since the steel mill closed. When Terry's father passes away, he wants to keep it a secret so that they can keep getting his checks. His wife and friend who is a union leader want to help him survive, Terry lets them know he can’t live depending on the past.
"Son of Abraham" - A song
An Appalachian re-telling of the Abraham and Isaac story with banjo accompaniment.
"Witches on the Hill"
A daughter comes to understand the womanhood her mother and grandmother have known and breaks free.

Owen visits Annie, who he knew and loved when he was a clockmaker’s apprentice. He urges her to run away to Paris to discover the beauty she has hidden while married to a blacksmith. When she does, she must escape Owen's literary definition of her freedom.

Dexter and Lewellyn grew up together in a small-town called Jasper (The Best Place in America to Raise a Family) and dated each other in high school. When she went away to college to become a teacher, he stayed in town and worked at the local factory. At the beginning of the play, Lewellyn has returned home to help her mom take care of her dad and is considering taking a teaching job at the local school. Dexter still loves Lewellyn, but he has been involved with Maggie, who works at the local MacDonalds and who has been chasing him since high school. Lewellyn is less interested in rekindling her high-school romance, because she has met Chris, the videographer from New York City who is making a safety training video for the factory. Chris, without realizing what Lewellyn’s relationship is to Dexter, casts him in his video. Dexter is really good and picks up on video production very quickly. Encouraged by Chris, he starts thinking about taking college classes at the local community college. When Maggie gets pregnant, Dexter breaks up with her because she won’t get an abortion. Believing that he can win back Lewellyn because Chris is going back to the City at the end of the summer, Dexter pursues Lewellyn. She must decide whether to leave her hometown or redefine her past to have the future that she wants.

The Damnation of Theron Ware (published in England as Illumination) is a classic American novel written by Harold Frederic in 1896. The book and my adaptation are a tragi-comedy depicting the rise and fall of a minister in the Gilded Age. Theron preaches in a small town where he falls in love with a well-to-do young woman, who is worldly and free-thinking. He leaves his wife to follow her to New York City, where she jilts him. He ends up living on the streets in the Bowery until he is found by his wife and Sister Soulsby, who runs a mission. He accepts Soulsby's help and is reunited with his wife, but he doesn't return to preaching. Sister Soulsby sees he is not capable of being a sincere believer and she gets him a job selling real estate Out West so he can, at the very least, support his wife and family.

Set on Memorial Day 2008 on a 600-acre dairy farm in New York’s Catskills, Memorial Night follows Daniel Hale, a tenth-generation farmer haunted by the death of his son Marc in Iraq and by the fear that the land that defined Marc’s childhood will be lost on Daniel’s watch. Daniel has built a front-lawn memorial—flagpole, stone marker, flowers, and a bench—where family and neighbors gather each year to remember Marc. But on this particular Memorial Day, the memorial becomes a battleground: grief collides with money, and memory collides with the future. With milk prices low and the aging barn in serious decline, Daniel has quietly decided to lease the farm’s mineral rights to a natural gas company. The lease would bring in enough money to rebuild, modernize, and keep the property intact, and Daniel convinces himself it is what Marc would have wanted: a farm made “up-to-date,” a home worth returning to, and a legacy that proves Daniel did not drive his son away. Daniel’s wife, Mary—whose Lenape heritage deepens her connection to land and history—fears that fracking will poison the watershed and desecrate both the farm and Marc’s memory. Their daughter Abi arrives with her husband Rick, a lawyer for environmental regulators, determined to honor Marc by resisting drilling and by imagining a different future: an organic farm, the completion of Marc’s unfinished house by the pond, and new life where grief has stalled. Caught between these visions is Colton Moore, Marc’s Army buddy turned landman for an Oklahoma gas company. Colton promised Marc he would look after the Hales if anything happened overseas; now his “help” threatens to tear the family apart. He is scorned by locals, challenged by Lindya Polansky (Marc’s former girlfriend, herself displaced by gas leasing), and increasingly shaken by the realization that saving the farm through drilling may destroy the very people Marc loved. As the day’s rituals—flag raising, food, stories, and visits to Paradise Falls—give way to arguments about loyalty, sacrifice, and what it means to “remember,” the farm’s physical decay mirrors the family’s fracture. Late at night, trapped by guilt and desperation and knowing the barn cannot be rebuilt without the lease money or an insurance payout, Colton commits an irreversible act: he sets the barn on fire. Daniel, disoriented by grief and convinced Marc’s spirit has returned to judge him, is forced to confront what his son truly valued. In the aftermath, Daniel begins to understand that memorializing Marc is not about preserving land at any cost, but about choosing a form of remembrance that keeps the family—and the living landscape—whole.

Mag and Ryan, best friends since college, confront doom with Zoom, social distancing with close-up romancing in a pandemic fatigued world.
NOTE: This can be done as a Zoom play or live. If done live, the image of the Zoom screen could be projected on a screen behind the actors for the audience to experience the characters struggle to overcome their pandemic isolation. OR audience members could be given the Zoom link to experience the live and Zoom theatre simultaneously on their phones and in the theatre.

The Heathman family gathers to decide whether their Father, who is in a coma because of a suspicious fall, should have his life-support withdrawn. The brothers and sisters are evenly divided about what to do with his pharmaceutical company. Their decision will determine its future. Will the brother and sister who are business oriented and want to sell the company for a profit prevail? Or will the siblings who are a doctor and a nurse reform the company to follow their father's ideals? After it is revealed that Kyle, the company attorney, is given control of the company in their Father’s will, the Father’s life-support device is shot. The family turns on him, until the truth of what really caused their Father’s death is discovered, and the legacy of their father, who believed in good medicine for people not profits, prevails. The play is a murder-mystery of drugs, money, death, and how they unsettle everyone’s sense of well-being. Big pharma vs. family karma.