Stephen Spotswood

Sidney Malter was once the world's premiere escape artist. He broke out of Fort Knox, escaped Alcatraz, and dug his way out of his own grave. These days, he's happy to pester the cable company from his fifth-floor apartment in the West Village.
That is until seventeen-year-old Eleanor comes knocking on his door and convinces him to teach her the secrets of the trade. Except Eleanor's got secrets, too. Ones that gives a whole new meaning to the word "trapped." And she has more at stake in these lessons than she'd like to admit.
Soon Sidney does, as well, and together they learn there's some things you can't escape.
Unless you can.

St. Mary Mead is much like any other village in the south of England: quiet, quaint, with its fair share of minor joys and gentle evils. Or so vicar Leonard Clement has always believed. That is until the local magistrate is found shot to death in the vicarage study. The ensuing investigation unearths secrets, opens old wounds, and conjures a cloud of suspicion that threatens to tear the village apart. As the vicar's faith in his neighbors is strained to breaking, his only hope is Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster with a sharp eye and a keen understanding of human nature.
Miss Marple thinks she knows who committed the crime, and with Clement's help she might be able to prove it. But can she do it before mistrust and suspicion damage St. Mary Mead beyond repair.

When Kim finds her best friend Ellen dead, she uses an old family recipe to bring her back to life. Sort of. Ellen doesn’t have a heartbeat, doesn’t need to breathe, and can’t leave Kim’s house without dying again. The question of whether she needs to eat human brains is still outstanding.
Ellen is dubious about her new existence. Also, she has a big hole in her memory to go along with the one in the back of her skull, and her best friend is acting strange even under very strange circumstances.
After Kim reveals what really happened, Ellen’s physical worries take a backseat to more profound ones. Does she want to live? And does Kim want the responsibility of being her friend’s keeper? Their friendship is put to the test as they learn that resurrection is the easy part. It’s finding a reason to go on living that’s the real trick.

Unemployed, fresh off a dead-end marriage, and searching for a way to take control of her life, Halo walks into a gym and signs up for mixed martial arts lessons. Her trainer thinks she’s a light-weight. Her mother and sister think it’s just plain weird. Very quickly the lessons she learns in the ring bleed into the rest of her life and Halo finds herself battling against everyone around her. As she prepares for her first match, Halo realizes that life inside the cage and outside the cage are disturbingly similar. And that the only way to survive either is to fight.

Jim Starkey's version of the American Dream is a modest one: to build a home on his one-acre plot of land, replacing his doublewide trailer with something his daughter, Lorelai, can eventually inherit. When a highway expansion project threatens that plan, Jim finds himself reluctantly thrust into the public eye. Meanwhile, Lorelai is trying to discover what she wants her own future to look like. Will it look like her parents' or something very different? And will the world let her have a choice in the matter? When a tragic accident throws a dark shadow over the family’s future. Jim is left wondering what happened to his now-broken dream, while Lorelai is left to build her own future out of the pieces.

Lucy spends her days being tormented and mocked and ghosting through the halls of her high school. At 16, she's come to believe her life will never get better. Her grandmother, Ruth, knows something is wrong, but can’t bridge the gulf between herself and her quiet granddaughter.

Then Jenny arrives--a California transplant so out of place in the rural town that she draws everyone’s eye. That includes Hunter, one of Lucy's regular tormenters, who immediately becomes infatuated with the newcomer. But Jenny has problems of her own—a manipulative ex-boyfriend and a reputation she's trying to escape.
When Lucy nearly drowns during a trip to a forest lake and Jenny saves her, Lucy finds a new reason for living.

But unbeknownst to Lucy, there’s an old evil living in that lake—something that finds a home in Lucy. Soon, howls are being heard from the forest and night, and Lucy dreams of chasing things through the forest; dreams where it’s someone else who’s the prey. Also, her feelings for Jenny grow from fascination to infatuation to something deeper.

Hunter makes the first move on Jenny, and Ruth is hospitalized after a heart attack, which pushes Lucy to embrace the monster growing inside her. The play reaches its climax at the Halloween dance, where Lucy takes revenge on everyone who ever tormented her.

A bloody deconstruction of Little Red Riding Hood, the play takes the familiar elements of werewolves, teen lust, and high school bullies, experimenting with the question of just who’s the victim and who's the monster.

The seven students of Mr. Maloney’s high school drama class have more important things to worry about than their final scenes from "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." Deandra is dealing with her anger over her mother’s death. Maggie is trying to balance school with supporting her father, a recovering alcoholic. Katie B is preparing for an audition in New York she hopes will jumpstart a career. Her boyfriend, Brian, secretly hates his role as a failing-to-emerge quarterback. Darren is trying to break out of his tightly-constructed shell. And Katie K is deciding if she should join her now-estranged friend Angela in coming out. Paired with classmates they’d never have chosen on their own, their secrets, anxieties, and hidden desires begin to bubble to the surface, resulting in break-ups, public battles, and surprising alliances. All seven are driven to answer the question of who they really are, and who do they want to become.

Even though he’s spent his life painting them, people confuse Harry. Confuse and aggravate and generally piss him off. He goes through models like tissue paper, alienating them quicker than he can capture them on canvas.
All except for Gwen, who showed up on his door two years ago, desperate for a job, lost in a world not built for someone dependent on a wheelchair to navigate it.
Set against the backdrop of Washington, DC in the 1980s, the play follows them from their unfortunate last meeting to their unlikely first, uncovering the seeds of what would grow to become a strong and very strange friendship.

Faced with impending prosecution, Andromeda's parents have sacrificed their only daughter to the powers that be in the hopes of holding on to their criminal empire. Sitting across an interrogation room table from Percy, a hard-nosed police officer who blames her parents for much of what's wrong in rural Stagger County, Andromeda has to choose between remaining loyal to her family or telling Percy everything he wants to know. As she tells her story--one filled with fallen heroes, capricious gods, and lonely minotaurs--the line separating hero from villain begins to crumble and Percy learns that this damsel in distress is anything but. A crime noir tale set against a myth-infused Southern gothic landscape where everyone is suspect and no one emerges unscathed. Single set; minimal tech; approximately. 60 minutes

The Gantry sisters somehow managed to survive a youth pockmarked with poverty and emotional abuse at the hands of a deeply ill mother. Returning home to be together at their mother’s deathbed, it's the first time all six women have been in the same house in years. The experience unearths old grudges, reveals new secrets, and confronts them with the question: Is shared trauma a strong enough bond to hold their family together?

Before he became the blind seer tasked with bearing other people’s bad news, Tiresias lived an epic tale all his own. After an affair with a priestess of Hera ends in disaster, turning him into a fugitive, he thinks he understands the meaning of tragedy. But when Hera catches up with him, and curses him to live life as a woman, he discovers he doesn’t know the first thing about sacrifice. A reimagining of ancient myth, WE TIRESIAS tells the story of one soul trying to escape the whims of the gods.

Twenty-five years ago, Eve ran away from her hometown of Aaronsville,
escaping an abusive home life and a fraught romantic relationship with her best friend,
Samantha. As an adult—and one of the world’s premiere forensic anthropologists—she
finds herself driven to return, tasked with examining the remains of an ancient skeleton
discovered on church property. Eve wants to do her job and escape a second time, but is
drawn deep into her own past, helped along by a father desperate for forgiveness and the
church’s minister—her one-time love, Samantha. The play draws past and present together,
weaving the loving beginning and violent end of Eve and Samantha's love with Eve's
present-day investigation and her confrontation with her own past.

Elsie and Abby have led a hard, strange childhood, secreted away in the remote town of Ellery Hollow. Orphaned at a young age, they face a populace that hates and fears them, and the only people that understand or care for them are those few who are even more of an outsider than they are. But Elsie and Abby have learned to cope by translating their lives into a series of tall tales: from their impossible birth to their adoption by the strangest of caretakers, to an eventual confrontation with the Hairy Man of the Forest—a terrible creature with a secret that threatens to destroy their tiny family.

Darcy spent her childhood roaming the backstage of Val and Vera’s Valley of Burlesque, Sideshow, and Assorted Mischief while her parents performed to the delight of sold-out houses. But after Val’s death, and an inevitable estrangement from Vera, she’s spent her adulthood staying as far away as possible. When she discovers the Valley is on the verge of bankruptcy, Darcy is drawn back to the place she used to call home. There she finds old friends with problems of their own, a new lover who insists on pushing Darcy’s boundaries, and a mother struggling not to let her down. But will she find what she’s really looking for? This play offers the opportunity for producers to blend theatre, sideshow, magic, and burlesque into a sexy, dangerous drama.

The script encourages the use of trans and gender-fluid actors.

In a country coming out of a long war, there’s a small town: isolated, battered, and on the losing side. Here, courage does not come from the heart, but is picked and processed and sold by the ounce. But this town’s Courage ran out long ago. And now its citizens are being forced to take refugees into their homes–people whose country their soldiers were fighting just a few months ago. Winners and losers–the dead, the living, and the lost–will be forced to overcome their fears. Or let the war begin again.

Originally developed with Imagination Stage's New Works Performance Ensemble and later adapted for The Theatre Lab School of the Dramatic Arts teen program, this play has had multiple productions using an all-teen cast. The role of Jackie, though referred to as "Mom" by her daughter can be, and has been, played as a man.

It’s Constance’s first time dressing the deceased in her new job as funeral director’s apprentice and the body on her table is Bobby, a long-lost friend from high school. As she helps Bobby into his last suit of clothes, she remembers why he was one of the few bright spots during a traumatic time in her life. A sweet, sad story about love and mortality.

"Playwright Stephen Spotswood does an outstanding job mixing personal revelations about high school, family, and the nature of love in Dressing Bobby Strong. Every little detail is finely stitched together like an artisan’s embroidery. The work adroitly mixes gentle humor and wistful regret." - Steven McKnight, DCTheatrescene

Standing in their backyard, staring up at a winter-clear sky filled with stars, Charlotte and Tara listen to a recording of their unborn baby's heartbeat and struggle to find a way to say goodbye to a daughter they will never meet.

When their decade-long relationship comes to an end, MAGGIE begins the bloody, heart-wrenching process of dissecting their years together in an attempt to prove that JENNIFER ever loved her in the first place. But when she slips her scalpel in, she finds far more than she bargained for.

Naomi Birdsong-Schultz, daughter of a lapsed Jew and a half-Ute flight attendant, is a brilliant 16-year old searching for her place in the world. When her usually peaceful sleep is plagued by images of her long-dead grandfather, she turns to her online friends for help. This begins a journey through the world’s creation myths and into Naomi’s own history. But one of her cyber-friends isn’t who he says he is, and is determined to force Naomi to answer those difficult questions and face her fears about growing up.

Naomi remembers the moment her childhood came to an end. On a roadtrip through the Arizona desert with her parents, little Naomi meets a man who will teach her about Heaven, Hell, and the fragility of life.

"Spotswood does what the ten-minute play does best: capture a small moment perfectly." -- Tim Treanor, DCTheatrescene, reviewing the play's premiere at the 2013 Source Festival

When Mister Taylor moves into his new room at Pleasant Acres, he finds a retirement home under siege. The villains come in the form of obnoxious residents and uncaring staff. When asked to help do something about it, he has to find a way to replace his lost strength and speed with hard-won cunning and guile.

This was commissioned by Roundhouse Theatre to be performed by the Heyday Players, their company of senior citizen acting students.

Lucy Bunyan (wife of Paul Bunyan) is sick of being left out while her husband goes off and has adventures. She needs to find a way to carve her own niche in America's folk history. She goes to her best friends Nancy Appleseed and Sue, wife of Pecos Bill, to help figure out what to do. They might just save the Bunyan's marriage. If they don't kill each other first.

This was commissioned by Roundhouse Theatre to be performed by the Heyday Players, their company of senior citizen acting students.

It's lunch break during tech weekend and the children of the cast and crew take over the empty stage to put on a show of their own. A sharp-witted, family-friendly dissection of the stereotypes and conceits of modern theatre that highlights the gulf between putting on a play and the simple joy of playing.