Andrea Lepcio

Will Buck love the one he’s with or the one he loves?

Third time’s the charm. Buck always thought he would marry young and have a pile of kids. That didn’t happen and now he’s 34. We experience Buck’s romantic life through three different decision points with three different consequences. Which really happens?

Human blends memoir with fiction, exploring how we become who we are in the face of love, neglect, caring, punishment, encouragement, and dismissal. Funny, sad, and everything in between, Andrea invites the audience to
feel and reflect. Human won the Maine Literary Award for Drama in 2022.

Fathers is the true story of a woman who had too many fathers before the age of 21 and too few after. Through encounters with fathers real and imagined, father-figures, and Lear himself, Rachel comes to like herself.

The Last Jew is about Audrey who is, after mass annihilation, the last Jewish person alive on earth. She has been sought out and found because the Tribunal has come to question if they were wise to eliminate all Jews. They and other citizens now wonder if there are special skills that Jewish people have that they will miss if all Jews are murdered. They are delighted that Audrey is of child-bearing age. They hold a trial to determine if she should procreate, to create more Jewish people, or be killed.

Steve Andersen would rather be white water rafting, but he has a world to save, again. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States are against action on climate change. Ten actors playing over 50 characters from 197 countries argue about how to stop climate change as part of the Montreal Protocol. Steve led the lesser known Protocol to phase out ozone-depleting gases in the 1990s. Diplomats argue, industrialists horse trade, scientists invent, and Steve, as a regulator, cajoles as the world comes together to prevent the World Avoided. The play is based on first-hand interviews with Steve Andersen and leading scientists, lawyers, and diplomats and eye-witness accounts.

World Avoided tells the story of the Montreal Protocol, the most successful climate change agreement. As a playwright, I was welcomed to the Montreal Protocol to witness meetings beginning in 2014. I had the impression it was a compatible group given all they had accomplished. I walked into a pitch battle over greenhouse gases. The play begins with this battle, flashing back to tell the story of the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the ozone layer, the hard work to phase out and replace those gases and concludes with the passing of the historic Kigali amendment that will save a half a degree of global warming and the 30th Anniversary of the Montreal Protocol.

By way of background, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer was the first global climate agreement. In 1987, twenty-seven countries initially agreed to phase out the use of ozone depleting chemicals by 2000. By 2012, it had been ratified and fulfilled by every nation in the world including South Sudan and Iraq. While broader climate change remains an unsolved challenge, this phase out added years of life to the planet.

I had the great privilege of observing the 197 countries of the world move from a third against in 2014 to all for by October 2016. Critically, the Montreal Protocol makes all decisions on the basis of consensus. Regardless of population size, wealth, or any other consideration, every country must agree to every decision. The next goal to phase out greenhouse gases will similarly add years and give the world the chance to grapple with the more intractable problem of carbon.

In the play, ten actors portray a wide range of characters from around the world. There are critically important characters from Egypt, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Australia, and more. Science and diplomacy drive the action. When countries pledged to phase-out ozone depleting chemicals, there were no alternatives for essential uses including refrigeration and fire fighting. These extraordinary characters worked tirelessly to invent alternatives, finance, distribute and complete the phase out on schedule.

The play is technical, but not dry. There is humor. The action is driven by the desperate need to save the world and the relationships formed between allies and enemies.

SRTAIT OF GIBRALTAR is a new five character play that examines the impact of the Patriot Act on our rights. Miriam and Zameer meet at a party, and it’s love at first sight. By the next day, they’ve learned just how little they have in common, and just how little that matters. When Zameer tells Miriam that he’s been living in the U.S. illegally, she offers to help – but that turns out to be more complicated and more dangerous than she imagined. Semi-Finalist O’Neill National Playwrights Conference ’14.

The play begins in an unidentified empty space-not a traditional performance space. It could be an art gallery, a warehouse or loft. It could be a storefront, classroom, hotel—any location in which a performance would be unexpected. The audience is allowed in. Chairs are arrayed throughout, but not quite enough for every audience member. There are random found objects, broken or whole, lying about--discarded items from everyday use from home, office, factory or nature. A smattering are accessible in the open; others might be hanging on walls or from the ceiling or hidden elsewhere. Some items may be offered to random audience members as they come in.

Two female characters enter this space. It is unfamiliar to them and they are unfamiliar with each other. Unsure how they got here, they quickly find themselves “stuck” in this liminal space. Now what? The first woman introduces herself as “Olexzandra with an O and a Z.” The other responds: she is “Jill with an ill.” Gradually, Olexzandra proudly reveals she is a doctor, a wife, a mother expecting her third child. Jill reveals much less but appears to be hypo manic and suffering from somatic delusions. The two struggle to maintain their composure while competing for audience attention and approval. Frequently, they break the fourth wall to ask for random items, for confirmation, acknowledgement--anything to avoid confronting the circumstances that lay beneath their arrival at this "place" or admit their burgeoning attraction to each other. They clash against each other and then, unexpectedly find connections. Ultimately, they fall irretrievably and undeniably in love.

Take one aging rock star clinging to his dated stage persona and two talented young people looking to take on the world and what do you get? In this clash of generations, Bobby uses Damien and Case to make one more play for the big time. He thinks his break is here when Jonny Buckland of Coldplay admires the band’s new video. When he learns Coldplay is looking for an opening act, Bobby goes on a balls to the wall bid for the gig. When the dust settles, Bobby is out and Case is in. As she reaches for megastardom, Bobby realizes fame may never be there, but his music and loyal fans always will.

The action takes place as the band performs and rehearses, sweats, groans and dreams in New York City. Fourteen rock songs drive the storytelling as the band reaches for glory.

The cast of six are the band including lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, vocals. In a staged reading format, Ariel’s band can play with actors in front. We’ve made that work.

ME YOU US THEM is a theatrical piece utilizing both text, dance, sound and projection to create the play’s language, thus physicalizing as well as describing for an audience the world onstage. This play is particularly complicated - the language is invented, at times broken making Dance and Sound as essential a mode of communication and, at times, a more articulate one than text.

Two B-Boys find each other in a vacant lot, while a woman sits alone at her desk searching for answers on the Internet. Another B-boy arrives and an explosive connection is made between the boys and, when she figures out how to get there, the woman’s Avatar. Bound by a search for the Center of Things, the four new friends invent the ultimate battle plan.

Set in 2005, a Federal Bench Judge with Supreme Court aspirations comes face to face with her principals when her slacker son shocks her by signing on with Halliburton to go to Iraq and an under the radar political operative delivers on his promises. A modern tragedy, One Nation Under is about the laws of the land and the laws we each, as individuals, chose to live by.

Sean Lynch announces to his beloved wife, Fiona, they are dropping their cultured New York life and returning to his family’s ancestral home in Ireland. Shocked by this unprecedented request, Fiona presses Sean to find out what has happened. Fiona has just won a green card for her maid Esperanza to save her daughter from the poverty of Guatemala; Fiona is not going anywhere. When Fiona’s sister Kat arrives looking for her step-daughter Lily, one of Sean’s employees, the truth gradually emerges. Through flashbacks between Lily and Sean and the present battle between Sean, his wife and sister-in-law, it is uncovered that Sean and Lily were having an affair, that Sean has been de-frauding his investors for the past five years and that he had thrown Lily overboard off his sailing yacht that afternoon. A pitch black comic thriller, Dinner at Home between Deaths examines the American Dream and American identity in the face of eroding ethics.

Eloisa (Oisie) is finally ready to leave a lifeless career to pursue a long-delayed dream when her sister Lauren is diagnosed with breast cancer. Lauren's perfect life and Oisie’s second chance collide as the sisters grab hands and embark on a roller-coaster ride of treatment, ambition, loss and acceptance. As funny as it is heart-breaking, LOOKING FOR THE PONY is a fast-paced journey dedicated to the fierce love of two sisters.

Dramatists Guild Hull-Warriner Award finalist 2010
NEA Outstanding New American Play finalist 2008