Andy Boyd

Pentheus is the boy-King of Thebes. Pentheus wants to be a woman. IT IS A SECRET! It is a poorly kept secret. When the new God Dionysus arrives from the east promising liberation from all hang-ups and insecurities, Pentheus sees an opportunity to finally achieve her dream. But at what cost? Pentheus is a play about power, gender, and being trapped in the wrong story.

Victorian Vape is a queer coming of age story about a young pre-transition trans woman named Carey who returns to a small town in Washington state to help care for her grandparents. There, she runs into a childhood friend who encourages her to think more seriously about transitioning. Meanwhile, her grandparents' health takes a turn for the worse, which prompts Carey's mother to fly into town, starting a long-delayed process of reconciliation between the two. Victorian Vape is a play about the terrifying and exhilarating fact that life is nothing but change.

It is Right to Rebel! tells the story of Jiang Qing, who was Mao Zedong's wife for 38 years and eventually became one of the most powerful women in the Communist world. After a hardscrabble climb from street urchin to actress (including starring in a celebrated production of A Doll's House) to first lady, Jiang Qing begins a reform movement in Chinese theatre that quickly becomes something much more sinister: the Cultural Revolution. However, when Mao dies without naming her his successor, she quickly falls from power and is put on trial for treason. This is a play about theatre as politics, politics as theatre, and revenge as revolution.

Synopsis:
Three Scenes in the Life of a Trotskyist traces the forty-year story of Lev Trachtenberg from idealistic radical to hard-core conservative. We first meet Lev in 1939 as a leftist firebrand at City College. But after finding himself on the other side of the picket lines in the campus rebellions of the 1960s, he finds himself zealously embracing the Reagan Right. This horrifies his one-time comrades, who wonder: has Lev abandoned his old ideals, or held onto them too tightly as the world around him changed? Three Scenes is a play about politics, literature, and the corrosive power of success in America.

Available as a podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-scenes-in-the-life-of-a-tro…

A historian of early New England delivers an appreciation of his late friend and rival Eddie Faust.

This play begins in the fall of 2011, when a libertarian rancher, an anarchist punk, an aging hippie, a radical priest, and a single mother gather in Courthouse Square in Prescott, Arizona, determined to fix America. They all agree that the one percent is too powerful, and the rest of us are getting screwed. When they try to get more specific than that, though, they find themselves disagreeing about nearly everything. Some want to focus narrowly on economic inequality, while some want to reimagine the entire structure of society. Some see the government as a potential ally, while some see it as the main enemy. Over the course of the occupation, unlikely alliances form even as friendships crumble. People unused to articulating their worldview in public are forced to defend their most cherished beliefs. The personal and political merge and fuse, and abstract debates about political theory suddenly become intensely emotional. This is a play about the sometimes frustrating, always necessary work of trying to create a new world.

The play is prefaced with two quotations, “We need a better world right away, this week” by Wallace Shawn and “We need everybody and all that we are” by June Jordan. These two “we needs” are held in tension in this play, as they are in our political moment. We must move incredibly quickly to deal with the myriad problems in our society, but we must also make sure we don't leave anyone behind. How do we do both at once? I don’t have answers. But I do have a play.

In 1867, several thousand "refugees" from the former Confederacy landed the SS South America at the Brazilian town of Santa Barbara, soon thereafter renamed Americana. Here, in the western hemisphere's last slave society, they tried to recreate the world they had lost. Os Confederados begins with the story of these first pioneers as they arrive in Brazil, only to realize they have very different ideas about what legacies of Dixie are worth preserving.

From that opening, the play jumps one hundred and fifty years to 2017. Descendants of the original Confederados are holding their annual Festa, a celebration of...something? As the character struggle to reconcile their Confederado identity with their Brazilian values, the same contradictions evident in the founding generation reassert themselves. After all, what does it mean to celebrate a past you don't really remember?

Os Confederados is a play about family, about history, and about memory. It's about race and gender and Brasilidade. It's about why we hold on and how we let go

A young experimental playwright named Andy Boyd pitches George Lucas her screenplay for a new Star Wars film. The concept: a prequel to the prequels that fleshes out the economic and social implications of the mysterious intergalactic organization known as The Trade Federation. Replacing the veiled references to colonialism in the original films, Andy’s script is a full-on allegory where The Trade Federation is The International Monetary Fund, the Gungans are the Zapatistas, and the Jedi are an international community reluctant to push for any real structural change – the UN, basically. Lucas thinks the movie sounds really boring and unceremoniously kicks Andy out of his office. Then things really get weird.

The Trade Federation is a play that uses the grand narratives of late capitalism against capitalism itself. It weaponizes one the most successful film franchises of all time against the dead-end ideology of “capitalist realism,” which insists that history is over and that there is “no alternative” to the unfettered rule of the market. No, this play argues, we can always fight back. Star Wars told us so.

The year is 1939. The place, Southeast Missouri. Three members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (Billie Barstow, Harry Leland, and his daughter Baby Blue) are sitting on the side of Highway 61, attempting to gain public sympathy in the wake of a wave of anti-Union evictions. They are also trying, fitfully, awkwardly, to trust one another.

This is a play about people who, forced against the wall and with nothing left to lose, fought back.

A weight loss competition in a small Midwestern town. A budding romance between two park rangers at the local bird sanctuary. A diner run by a mother/daughter duo whose relationship is showing serious strain. When these three collide, 15 year-old Jenny will learn valuable lessons about self-acceptance, care, and the perils of an all-lentil diet.

Eric and Ace are a pretty normal couple. Except Ace is transgender, and they’re Eric’s human puppy, and Eric’s Catholic family doesn’t know about any of this. But Eric’s little sister isn’t doing well, so they go home to help take care of her—and maybe say goodbye. Pup Play is a play about figuring things out: what we owe each other, who counts as family, and how to be honest about who and what we love.

Nora's mother Cassandra is fading fast. She has late-stage Alzheimer's and needs constant attention, attention Nora can't give. Nora hires Juanita, a live-in nurse, to take care of Cassandra. As Juanita and Cassandra bond, though, Juanita begins to provide more than physical care. As a way to help Cassandra emotionally cope with her impending death, Juanita indoctrinates her into fundamentalist Christianity. This play asks the question, what is a "good death"? Is it a death without fear, safe in the arms of Christ? Or is it a death without illusions, surrounded by loved ones? This question implies a broader one: what gives life meaning? People? Or God?

In this play, two women in Puritan Massachusetts navigate friendship, love, sin, and death in a struggle to live Godly lives. Mercy Pritchett is a young woman recently widowed who must carve out a space for herself in a society that praises women only as wives, mothers, and daughters. Sarah Gooden is a recent arrival to Massachusetts, a refugee of the tumultuous civil war that led to the widespread discrediting of the Puritan movement. Their unlikely friendship takes us into the founding moment of American exceptionalism even as it reveals the darkness at the heart of our national soul.

After 17 year old Kim's mother dies under mysterious circumstances, Kim must decide whether to stay in her hometown of Prescott, Arizona or leave with her 23 year old boyfriend Scott. Meanwhile, her friends from high school are dealing with much more pedestrian concerns. It is, after all, the weekend of winter formal. Affordable Rates and Color TV is a mashup of Sam Shepard and John Hughes, a coming of age dark comedy set in the Arizona high desert.

A military official answers allegations of war crimes.

Two people, Shotwell and Firegood, are serving a 90 day stint in a protected nuclear bunker far beneath the earth's surface. They are each equipped with keys: in the event of nuclear war, they are to turn their keys at the same time, releasing "the bird" at the enemy. The play begins on day 90, when their replacements are supposed to arrive.

Nobody arrives.

This is a play about isolation, paranoia, jealousy, and jacks.

An adaptation of the story by Donald Barthelme.

An audio recording of the play can be found at: https://soundcloud.com/user-498240986/game-by-andy-boyd-from-the-story-…

A tale told from far-off times that's also somehow a powerpoint presentation.