Kurt McGinnis Brown

Turns out even the heart can be replaced by something better, like one of those synthetic jobs the Germans perfected that lasts 400 million heartbeats. “A hundred more years!” says Marilyn, 62 and on the waiting list. Her neighbor, Russ, doesn’t want to live even another couple seconds. His wife of three decades ditched him for a younger man. While Marilyn woos Russ and tries to convince him to sign one of the new, realistic marriage contracts of five years (renewable), her daughter is having an affair with an older man, and her ex-boyfriend (sometimes not so ex) is about to explode with jealousy.
Love or Forever is a comedy about the consequences on love as lifespans increase. If the actuarial chart says to expect to live to age a hundred, it’s tougher to believe it when you hear, “I’ll love you forever.” Because forever just got a lot longer.

In a recommendation letter to judges of The Relentless Award, Steve J. Spencer, Chicago Dramatists Artistic Associate and founding member of The Shakespeare Project of Chicago, writes of Happy Endings Must End:
“This is the play about marriage we’ve been waiting for. Happy Endings is shot through with savage observations and brilliant dialogue. This caustic but hilarious play dissects failed relationships and dismantles the ideal of marriage. Put simply: it deserves to be seen, discussed, and fought over.”
Synopsis
Before doing something he’d regret, a man runs away from home to hide at an experimental shelter that isolates unhappy men from their unhappy spouses. The shelter was developed recently by a man who knows the statistics: 50% of first, 67% of second, and 73% of third marriages end in divorce. Only fools marry for love. And so he waits for a flood of clients.

The runaway’s wife refuses to let the marriage end with his cowardly escape. She too has a fanatic for an ally, one who is adamant that love and marriage are incompatible. The two women track down the husband’s hiding place. If a marriage is a failure, let it fail in convincingly and in the open. The comic derangement of the four characters’ beliefs creates new possibilities for happy endings.

Decades ago Henry Percival wrote a bestselling novel about the murder of a young Black woman. Cultural critic Xan Smith reluctantly accepts a commission to write a study exploring how white male novelists of Henry’s generation (mis)treated characters of color. The project will interest only a meager audience of academics, pay a few months’ rent. But Xan is stunned when Henry admits that the murder in his novel was taken straight from fact—and that he was involved. Now Xan is sitting on a bestseller of her own!

It’s a progressive but overwhelmingly white campus. Blatantly faking its diversity cred, the university photoshopped Black faces onto photos in its recruiting brochure. In this well-meaning but fundamentally inequitable climate, a faculty committee must determine whether to reinstate a Black instructor barred from teaching after she required each white student in her class to say the N-word aloud. The instructor makes it clear that she considers provocation and force as legitimate means to break the dominant whiteness that oppresses her. Her supporters and counter-protestors are a spark away from warring on campus grounds. No matter how the committee members vote on the instructor’s future, racial tensions outside the building where they meet seem likely to become violent. Why couldn’t she have been a nice person of color?

Wanting to redo the ending to his miserable marriage, Ben writes an auto-theatricality in which he plays himself and hires an actor to play his wife. To be true to his anguish, he must also hire an actor to play his wife’s lover. In rehearsals Ben finds he has trouble making “Ben” believable, while the other characters are even more rebellious than the people they’re based on. Dramatizing heartbreak proves difficult—and opening night may foil Ben’s attempt to revenge himself on the hard reality of what is past.

Love seems gone for good for two young, married actors whose 4-year-old child is terminally ill, hospital his home. They sleep apart in their tiny Chicago apartment, rotating who gets the bed based on who needs to be well rested the next day, Paula for her shows and promotional appearances, Van for another (failed) audition. They also alternate hospital visits. Avoidance helps mitigate the pain of seeing each other’s tortured face. In a last effort to save the marriage, they call on their training as actors. Pretend! Problem is, one of them is a gifted actor while the other is realizing he’s not really an actor at all.

Bianca, an English instructor at a community college (“Do you really teach five intro courses each semester?”), organizes a book club. On the inaugural evening, none of the colleagues she invited manage to make it. That leaves her with her pathologically honest husband, her novelist son by a previous marriage, his estranged girlfriend, recently institutionalized for stabbing the son, and one of Bianca’s new students, who has yet to read a book.

The chaos at the first meeting over what book to select turns to horror when it's discovered that Bianca's son is writing an autobiographical novel in which the others appear. Horror turns to curiosity and a demand to read the manuscript, which becomes the book club’s selection for discussion, leaving everyone to wonder if they can possibly retain any love for fiction after this.

Playwright Marisa Wegrzyn (Butcher of Baraboo; Killing Women) writes, “This play is filled with smart, raunchy humor and lunacy. The threats of violence, mental instability, sexual promiscuity, disaster, and a possible stabbing are all delightful.”

When Livia Hart becomes famous overnight for painting a giant sex scene on a building that houses an abortion clinic, her agent has a brilliant plan to capitalize on the sudden fame. She urges Livia to sign dozens of other paintings—which happen to have been painted by Ruley Jones, another starving artist and Livia’s lover. Can they pull off the scheme without artistic integrity (make that jealousy) causing damage to themselves and the paintings? This serious comedy examines the relationship of artist to art, and of artist to other artists.

Laurel is a leading scholar of the ancient Roman poet Ovid, whose sophistically naughty erotic poetry made him a bestseller while also causing his exile from Rome. Those poems took the form of advice for both sexes on how to get laid. Which was the extent of an ancient Roman’s conception of romantic love.

We moderns are not so lucky and daily struggle with the hope that love lasts forever, with one person. Laurel, recovering from a rotten marriage, is grateful to at last be finished with love. But then there’s this intriguing man who moves in next door…. And when Ovid himself appears, giving her love tips, Laurel has to figure out if she’s brave enough to be “in love.” And what the hell does that mean exactly?

Down and out brothers, Vern and Wally, move into their recently deceased mother’s home in a crumbling city neighborhood. At night they burglarize homes in wealthy neighborhoods, hoping to eradicate their past by stealing the furniture of different lives. When Wally exposes their secret by bringing their neighbor Jamila into the house, the brothers find out how wrenching it is to leave the past behind.

Playwright and screenwriter Mary Ruth Clarke (Meet the Parents, Meet the Fockers) reviewed the final script for Chicago Dramatists and called it “a terrific play. Suspenseful, unpredictable, and insidious, with a sprinkle of danger along the way.”

Game’s over. Roger “Rajah” Rain has made his final appearance as a minor league pitcher, having never attained his dream of starring in the majors. At 31, he must now figure out what to do with his life after decades of monomaniacal devotion to playing a game.

A friend gets him a job videoing the stories of former ballplayers now in their 80s and 90s for a documentary on a passing generation of athletes. A new skill. He needs it. He also determines to learn a new language. Might help erase the vocabulary of baseball that now haunts him.

Yet, through his video camera and the new language, Rajah comes dangerous close to the lives of two needy characters who show him that creating a new life involves killing the old one.