Bob Bartlett

"Every five years we change. It takes five years to change a life." Two writers discover they write in the same diner booth. A comedy.

A new play about browsing for records and romance in the digital age! Best friends Bogie and Zane visit their local record store and leave with so much more than a stack of vinyl in this really smart romcom.

‘Love and Vinyl’ spins a fascinating and funny story in a real record shop - DC Theatre Arts (https://dctheaterarts.org/2023/07/09/love-and-vinyl-spins-a-fascinating…)

‘Love and Vinyl’ to mix it up at KA-CHUNK!! Records in Annapolis
A music buff previews Bob Bartlett's new rom-com about browsing for records and romance, performed in a local neighborhood record store. - DC Theatre Arts
(https://dctheaterarts.org/2023/06/14/love-and-vinyl-to-mix-it-up-at-ka-…)

Flying through the cosmos in the only home they've ever known, a man and his companion confront life and loss in the outer reaches of the universe - and make first contact.

A middle-aged white dude tries really hard to understand a changing world he fears is leaving him behind, while defending mayonnaise.

On the last evening of each lunar month, a young man meets a stranger in the forest as the moon is nearly full.

"A play about a werewolf, with the audience in the middle of the woods!" Celia Wren, Washington Post
www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/10/14/bob-bartlett-lykos-anth…

"There are your average theatrical adventures, all cozy and warm and indoors on a fall night. Then there are truly theatrical encounters, where you are left to your own devices in the middle of nowhere, with nowhere to go, while the magic unfolds right in front of you. Lýkos Ánthrōpos is just such an evening." - Andrew Walker White, DC Theatre Arts

"Bob Bartlett’s LÝKOS ÁNTHRŌPOS, set in a remote wooded area, is an intensely psychological encounter between predator and prey, of indeterminate species. See it, I dare you.” - Andrew Walker White, DC Theatre Arts

"Be warned, this is not a Halloween haunted house or a family-friendly ghost tour. The 75-minute, two-man drama is a psychological horror with strong language and vivid descriptions of violence." - Susan Nolan, Bay Weekly

Sawyer travels across the country writing about diners - the great American diner - until she finds one she might not be able to leave.

In the spring of 1865 in Washington, DC, Walt Whitman cares for an injured Union soldier and falls in love against the backdrop of the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination.

While healing from a divorce, a young writer accepts the invitation of an older gay couple, whose marriage is falling apart, to stay the summer at their waterfront cottage. [almost ready for a reading!]

It’s been over ten years since Covid came to America and Harlan Hodgson left his tiny apartment. But when Harlan's hateful chinchilla vanishes – and twenty-something newlyweds Stephen and Sarah move in next door, the outside world like never before beckons – and Harlan hears.

While visiting his family’s secluded cottage on Nantucket Island, Owen, a typically urban fifteen-year-old boy, and his fisherman father clash until an unlikely and healing communion with an injured whale awakens in Owen a forgotten boyhood and connection with the sea.

Nominated for Six 2019 Helen Hayes Awards, including Best Production of a Play (producing company: 1st Stage Tysons)

"Affecting and inventive ... the play spins an almost novelistic narrative about loss, healing and courage in the face of death ... " - Celia Wren, The Washington Post

"Bartlett has a light touch as a writer. His descriptions of loss are captivating and ring true to life because they are drawn from his own deeply personal experience of love and loss. Despite its preoccupation with death, Swimming with Whales is joyful, funny, and surprising in all the ways that life everyday can be." - Jenny Munich, Broadway World

"Dramatic issues of abandonment, illness, loss, and grief are countered in the play by love, humor, support, and redemption. The play reestablishes to the characters, and to the audience, the comforting power of nature." - Chuck Leonard, DCMetroTheaterArts

"As the blood family heals and the intentional family regrows its roots along the sands of Nantucket, we see a poignant, at times hilarious, journey of healing and reconciliation. Bartlett weaves a whale of a tale; one that is worth sharing." - Jeffrey Walker, DC Theatre Scene

"A mixture of magical realism, laughter and healing from heartbreak with an unlikely wellspring propelling the story into a spiritual parable." - David Siegel, The Connection

(O'Neill Finalist) "A derelict city diner becomes a portal to the past - and the future." Mercury's future is bright. He's the star player on his prep school basketball team and is being recruited by the best colleges in the country as much for his ball handling skills and blazing speed as for his talent in the sciences and passion for astronomy. But lately Mercury's orbit is behaving oddly, and sometimes it even feels as if he's moving backwards. He's come home to a place he doesn't remember, a girl who remembers everything about his past that he's forgotten, and a changing relationship with the man who raised him, a retired cop who does everything he can to help a forgotten Baltimore neighborhood, even buying and restoring an historic corner diner. And then he dies. And sees the universe for what it is.

Recently crowned, Edward II struggles to lead England while navigating a relationship that could bring about his downfall. A contemporary reimagining of Christopher Marlowe's EDWARD II. E2 premiered at Maryland's Rep Stage in November of 2019.

"Playwright Bartlett ... skillfully distills Marlowe’s large cast of courtiers, clerics and other characters to just a handful of figures, the protagonists in an engrossing, romantic saga that also reflects meaningfully on homophobia, privacy, social inequality and political corruption." -- Celia Wren, Washington Post

"An imaginative and beautifully executed production ... Striking design, unforgettable performances and superb artistry in Bartlett's poetic new play." -- The Baltimore Sun

"Bob Bartlett’s new play E2 certainly proves it can make a head-turning entrance. This bold and sensuous take on the oft-told tale of King Edward II unfolds against a techno-punk frieze of video lighting and color-form columns that turn even austere 14th century stone into a cushy setting for a Studio 54-style blowout." -- DC Metro Theatre Arts

"... [this] dance party on the edge of the apocalypse works smashingly, with brilliant light, looming digital portraits of the characters that are Robert Mapplethorpe-like in their black and white starkness, sumptuous fabrics and a modern, linear set design that rivet the eye." -- DC Theatre Scene

Ella wrecks a perfectly good suicide pact by jumping the gun, leaving her three pact-mates to deal with a lifetime of hoarded belongings, Bob Dylan memorabilia, and an immortal dog. An unlikely comedy about living, dying, and trying to find really good reasons for both.

"Planning a decent demise turns out to be more than a little tricky in “happiness (and other reasons to die),” a suspenseful, dark and funny new play by local playwright Bob Bartlett. Now on view in a winningly acted production from the Welders, a collective of D.C.-based playwrights, “happiness” turns what sounds like a gimmicky premise into an absorbing chronicle of unpredictable human behavior." - Celia Wren, The Washington Post

Bear has accidents. One a month, every month, without fail. Fender benders, broken ankles, a busted this or that - abrasions, lacerations, punctures, a broken heart. Try as he might, he can’t shake the accident bug until Chance, an unemployed paramedic living in her 1978 Volkswagen Beetle, wanders into his lonely world.

"Bartlett gives us a funny and provocative show involving three people: the dour, accident-prone Bear who owns the laundromat, Chance, who is either a late-night customer or his lover, or both, and Buddy, the worst best friend ever ... a play (at least in part) about the persistent wrongness of memory." - DC Theatre Scene, Five Stars

"Bartlett’s script has a technical sophistication. He tells this story in layers, withholding and revealing information with precision and skill, ratcheting up tension with each iteration of the story." - DC Theatre Scene, Five Stars

“The Accident Bear is an unusual play, staged in an even more unusual location ... a funny, yet touching play about relationships that uses memory in a way reminiscent of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. As a bonus, it is performed in the place that inspired it and where it was written, a small space that allows for a powerful intimacy between the actors and the audience." - DC Metro Theatre Arts

"Bartlett’s play is a comic, quirky and heartfelt paean to quirky, comic, yet ultimately heartwarming people. It is so involving, and so well-acted, that the trappings of the laundromat — the rows of washers and dryers, the old candy machine, the faded signs — soon become part of the story itself, putting the audience front and center emotionally as well as physically." - The Bay Weekly

"You can smell the lint in the air. You feel the cold air sweep in on the entrances and exits ... using the Laundromat as a theatre is unusual, but not without precedent. From the Greeks congregating on hilltops to medieval troupes who performed from the back of wagons to the concept of the whole theatre developed in the 1970s by Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, who thought the actual theatre should become part of the set, thespians have performed for audiences in many unique settings." - Maryland Theatre Guide

"Just a marvelous experience. I felt like a fly on the wall of somebody's life. Moving." - Audience Member

"One of DC Theatre Scene’s twenty-four favorites of 2018." - Lorraine Treanor, DC Theatre Scene

Three strangers commune around a backyard fire pit at a house party to Bruce Springsteen's seminal album, NEBRASKA.

Why Bob Bartlett is putting on his new play in his own backyard
Inspired by a Springsteen album and in spite of COVID, the site-specific script shows theater can happen anywhere.
By David Siegel - October 25, 2020
https://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2020/10/25/why-bob-bartlett-is-putting-o…

A collection of stories set in a roadside motel near Disney World - tales of hapless and hopeful people in transit to the happiest place on Earth.

Courtship in the Time of Quarantine: A Series of Facebook Posts from April 18 through June 7, 2020

Note: A state of emergency and catastrophic health emergency was proclaimed on March 5, 2020, and renewed on March 17, 2020, April 10, 2020, and May 6, 2020, to control and prevent the spread of COVID-19 within the state of Maryland.

Press: DC Theatre Scene (June 4, 2020)
Artists persist: Playwright Bob Bartlett writes Starbucks romance MIXTAPE for Facebook audiences
https://dctheatrescene.com/2020/06/04/artists-persist-playwright-bob-ba…

Inspired by Bruce Springsteen's LONG WALK HOME. Mr. Tomlinson - a white man in his late fifties or sixties or older, a cane at his side, spends his afternoons sitting in front of the vacant storefront of the hardware store his family owned and operated for decades - accepts that his small, big world has changed.

In 1932, a journalism student from Howard University witnesses the struggles of The Bonus Army, a group of 43,000 diverse marchers including almost 20,000 U.S. World War I veterans and their families, who demand the payment of their war bonuses. Squatting along the shores of the Anacostia River, they would fight to survive Depression-era America as well as the violent encroachment of Douglas MacArthur, George S. Patton, and the U.S. Army at the direction of President Herbert Hoover.

A prepper is mysteriously trapped in his isolated Montana cabin with a family of refugees during an end-of-days event.

"A raging narcissist, drunk on authority, pulls the supernatural strings in Bob Bartlett’s unapologetically queer neo-noir about desire, possession, and the perversion of power."

The Rape and Abduction of Ganymede - in all its celebrated and problematic forms - has been the subject of artists, writers, and thinkers since antiquity, and remains emblematic of the treatment of generations of men and boys at the hands of powerful and sometimes corrupt systems. Commanded by a mysterious patron, a young man enters a noirish, purgatory-like tattoo shop where an isolated and withdrawn artist inks the boy’s back over the course of several months. Both men are prisoners, one stolen as a boy and ascended to the heavens, the other cast out and fallen to earth. In this erotic tale of desire and possession, Bartlett’s modern-day Ganymede - rejected by family, community, and culture - subverts our oldest gay myth by fighting back.

An army vet and his thirteen-year-old daughter set out on a drive from our nation’s capital to Wichita to murder an abortionist in this piercing snapshot of radicalized America.

Set in the spring of 2009 and shortly before Uganda’s legislature passed a bill making homosexuality punishable by death, the violence of homophobia destroys two households – one in Kampala and the other in an average American city.

In early April of 1968, two hundred and twenty seven Bowie State College undergraduates travel by bus to the State House in Annapolis, Maryland to protest deplorable conditions on campus and the lack of support from state government. Written to commemorate Bowie State University's Sesquicentennial.