Charles Green

P o l a r i s (a tragedy expansion pack) is a sci-fi memory play that wrestles with grief and childhood trauma through a theatrical landscape of emotional adventure and alternate realities. The drama follows Polaris, an astronaut who arrives on an alien planet while searching for his brother, Gideon, a scientist who has been kidnapped by a cell of intergalactic pirates. Polaris, however, is sightless, moving through the world (an empty stage) with the help of Dawn, a disembodied voice who describes the fantastical surroundings for Polaris (and the audience) and offers him choices, acting as a GPS and theatrical Game Master as the astronaut follows clues, grapples with his troubled past, and attempts to solve the mystery of his missing brother. But as Polaris falls deeper into the wondrous alien maze of jetpacks and talking statues, the true human reality of his loss and pain begins to materialize— and all the imagination and fantasy in the world can no longer mask the truth of his heartbreak.

A play that changes with each performance– based on the roll of the dice– In the Castle of Eternal Sunset follows two teenage boys as they play a game of Dungeons & Dragons on an autumn day in 2004. As the teenagers roll to see what happens next, their different possible futures slowly unfold— both in, and outside, the game.

During the play, audience members will be prompted to read aloud fragments of text from their seats, determined randomly by the fall of the dice. The texts contain the hundred different possibilities of how the boys’ lives might unfold. Their fates, then, are never set— until the die rolls, each performance, set them on their path— and the audience speaks their futures into being.

Photobombing Hiroshima is an experimental coming-of-age play. The audience is cast in the role of the protagonist, asked to silently read their “lines” from projections illuminated over the stage. Internalizing their character, the audience engages with a cast of long-lost friends and estranged family members, piecing together their haunted past as they struggle to find self-actualization. With this theatrical device, the audience participates in a ritual of empathy, attaching themselves to the pain and hopes of their “character” through the simple acts of internalization (silently reading their character’s words) and being addressed as an other (by the supporting characters in the play). However, there are limits to even the most well-meaning attempts at empathy; and the tragedy of Photobombing Hiroshima lies on the razor’s edge between true empathy and the co-option of another’s pain.

A drama of loss and trauma set in the aftermath of the holocaust, Genocide: A Love Story is loosely based on the lives of Vilna Ghetto resistance fighters Abba Kovner and Vitka Kempner, following these troubled, young Jewish survivors as they plot their retaliation against the Gentile world by poisoning the water mains of Europe— in order to kill six million Germans. But as the couple navigates an existence of darkness, vengeance, and bloodshed, they find themselves faced with the greatest struggle of all: that of confronting their grief. A non-traditional approach to a true, biographical narrative, Genocide: A Love Story metaphysically expresses the inner, emotional lives of its characters, presenting a world haunted by the Angel of History, a chorus of Eternal Jews, and monstrous Biblical figures in a drama that attempts, unsentimentally, to wrestle with the trauma of the holocaust and its pernicious repercussions today.

The Dybbuk of Dachau is a ghost story set in a German death camp. Taking a non-traditional approach, the play presents the inner-lives of its characters, erasing the physical/literal presence of others in this world-- and leaving only a vast and empty space of total isolation. The drama follows Yael Bat-Gidon, a young Jewish woman, and her son, Asher, as they struggle, day after day, simply to survive. But when a supernatural presence begins to terrorize the mother and son, they are forced to travel into the farthest depths of this Hell in order to save the soul of Yael’s dead sister, Dvora, and free themselves from Dachau. Journeying through a universe plagued by Nazi giants, phantom rabbis, and haunted ruins, the tragic family must rely on their spirituality, tradition, and humanity in order to ensure the future of the Jewish race.

When Jack— a frail, nihilistic, cowboy-gunslinger— unloads twenty clips of his M16 onto a bustling crowd at the Texas County Fair, he is tracked down by the sheriff, locked away in a desert prison, and sentenced to death. But when the phantoms of his imagination take control of the world, he breaks from his cell, traveling across the wastelands of the Mythic Wild West to find his kidnapped fiancé. Taken by a cadre of daemons at the county fair, it is revealed that Jack has been searching for his love, Alice, this whole time— taking his M16 to, what he believed, were the shadowy forces that kidnapped the young woman. Jack moves through the psycho-spiritual realms of his mutilated unconscious, forced to face the violence of his fragile masculinity, the brutality of his colonial whiteness, and the wickedness of his very being. But, as the drama unfolds, we come to see that Alice is, perhaps, not simply the reified feminine ideal that Jack has conjured but, instead, a being far beyond the control of daemons, Jack, or anything at all-- besides her very will of self.

Arthurian legends, Chinese folktales, Morality Plays, and the real-life adventures of Chairman Mao Zedong collide in this epic journey of myth and history. Following the events of the Long March-- when, in 1935, the fledgling Chinese Communist Party had to flee the clutches of the nation's tyrannical government-- Seven Plays By Mao Zedong explores the impossible survival of these young men and women who fought, with every breath, for a free and just China. Blending facts with the supernatural, the epic brims with quests in a haunted forest, daring escapes from a dragon king, and, more stupendous than any magic-- the victory of Chinese Communism.

In the deserts of Nevada, a secret lies buried. Tex, a tragic cowboy, spends the endless prairie nights of his life haunted by the past... and fearing for his future. But when a fast-talking gunslinger (Pierce) pays an unexpected visit to his ranch one day, Tex finally comes face to face with his doom-- and the wild, vile, consequences of history itself. Treasure, torture, and the American Dream all stare down the barrel of a six-gun in this drama, and every secret a man can bury rises up from the earth-- like the dead on Judgement Day.