Hal Corley

Ambushing her former two best friends in New York’s Sardi’s bar, Anna, a widow, estranged from the couple since the late 70s, initiates a strained reunion to correct a long-depreciated three-way relationship. In the decades since they first rendezvoused in the same city, Rob and Bridget failed to launch once promising careers in the entertainment industry and settled in suburban Washington DC. Anna, a retired Chicago attorney, harbors buried resentment about the duo’s treatment of her former boyfriend Baz, a charismatic but comparably unworldly young accountant. As the tense 2023 get-together triggers old contention, the threesome finds itself slammed into a collective recall: the alcohol-fueled dinner between Dracula and The King and I at the House of Chan, at which Anna sought her college pals’ approval for her incipient engagement. As each controls a niche memory of the snowy Saturday in 1978, the late afternoon intrudes, Rashomon-like, to resurrect unhealed wounds. Baz, settled on a staid life as an actuary, finds wannabe screenwriter Rob patronizing, chic yet calculatingly shy Bridget impenetrable. They’re a hell of a challenge to woo – an obstacle Baz feels uninspired to conquer – and Anna’s plan to create a foursome blows up. As past and present collide, Anna’s 2023 agenda bleeds through: what spilled secrets shook the quartet enough to create an irrevocable schism? What became of Baz? How did this interloper influence the trajectories of the trio? Baz is a seriocomic boomer tale of thwarted ambition and bitter recrimination, lost love and cancelled soulmates: how do we hold onto our treasured past if our only witnesses contradict our memory?

For Will Block, retired librarian facing another winter in emotional isolation after two years of lockdown, a fixation on a non-functioning desktop humidifier – a blue-domed mister hastily returned to Bed, Bath, and Beyond – jumpstarts overdue personal reckoning. Convinced his impatience betrayed a fifty-buck vaporizer, Will’s awareness of the absurdity only exacerbates his heartbreak. Though wife Faye has proven an understanding companion, too much togetherness has taken a toll: why the hell is Will humanizing some “abandoned” appliance now. Desperate to reclaim the broken machine, Will demands answers at the store, a last stop repo before the landfill, even a college campus, stalking his BB&B sales clerk. After all efforts go unrewarded, Will and Faye attend a strained dinner at a neighbor’s, Zachary an out-of-work actor wrestling with consequences of his own sequestration. Though Faye expects pal Zach’s empathy, tables turn. Zach, long indifferent to Will’s aloofness, is triggered by the guy’s anguish: could it be akin to his? When Faye mocks her husband’s attachment, Will’s tamped down frustration detonates. Faye leaves the next morning to mend fences with an estranged sister, and Will grudgingly apologizes to Zach. Yet the mismatched comrades prove too guarded; Will flees to the Jersey shore on the thawing January day. Dueling confrontations – with a morose Polar Bear swimmer and an unanticipated young ally phoning from afar – prove salt and then balm to wounds. Finding purpose in a startling epiphany, Will conjures a plan: could paying forward fill the gap in Will’s empty days? Exploring an all-too-human need to project totemic meaning on our possessions, "Mister" is an existential meditation on solitude and the eternal hope of restored intimacy.

Brighton, England, Midsummer’s Eve, June 23, 1844. A striking white-haired gentleman flees his coastal hotel, descending the pebbled Channel embankment to witness raucous adolescent revelry, including the annual bonfire jump: a young farmer leaping over burning embers to secure a bountiful harvest. Emerging from the waves like a sea witch, her skirt hem soaked, the auburn-haired Angela explains the resulting mishap: slicing through spiraling flames, the chosen boy landed on hot coals, searing both feet. A disillusioned minister’s widow, Angela has endured the death of her husband and two stillborn children and tonight waded into the Channel seeking either Solstice’s answer to her loss of faith or a permanent end to her grief. And who is this inquisitive stranger who calls himself Eben, quick to confess his openness to metaphysical signposts in pagan rituals? Borrowing his godson’s nickname for Ebenezer, Dickens' notorious curmudgeon here resurfaces six months after another Eve’s epiphanies to face new challenges. Angela is a deep if cynical thinker, as bereft of optimism as Eben once was. When Eben’s boyishly handsome secretary arrives, distraught over his employer’s midnight disappearance, a unique triangle slowly forms. Henry, ever the protective apprentice, is initially put off by Angela’s intrusion on a much-needed seaside holiday. Traumatic events in Eben’s dark spring in London emerge: his controlling obsession with the world’s best-known infirm child has led to new anguish. With Angela’s help, Eben finally realizes that his failure to fully alleviate Tim Cratchit’s suffering demands self-forgiveness, not divine exoneration. And when the wounded young bonfire spanner reappears, Angela’s poignant attempt to turn him into a surrogate son inspires Eben to help her release the boy to his abandoned father. Honoring Dickens' intentions, St. John’s Day is niche fan fiction, an update on an iconic character’s transformation. Can a once-in-a-lifetime metamorphosis truly heal a broken human being? Render him vulnerable to long-denied intimacy, even love? Scrooge proves the ultimate test case.

Delayed due to stormy late-summer weather, Baxter, a loquacious but palpably anxiety-ridden father, awaits with dread the boarding call for a flight that will reunite his musical prodigy son Andy with the birthfather he's never met. As the two men anticipate this life-altering journey, a final stall invites second thoughts and recriminations, bringing up old memories, buried fears, and revelations.

Published in S&K's "The Best 10-Minute Plays 2023," January 2024, available via Amazon

On a snowy March Sunday night, Ralph Dooley is trapped in NYC’s Penn Station, humiliated by an extenuating circumstance: running for the subway, he wet his pants. After a stultifying evening in a Manhattan piano bar, his first such outing in years, Ralph’s saturated jeans are a reminder of his ambivalent relationship with New York City and the handful of people he left when he moved to the suburbs. Armed only with a cell, he scrambles to find help: first, Penn adjacent, his charismatic former AA sponsee, Daniel, a young executive in the film industry. But Daniel is entertaining and tries to pass off spare jeans in his elegant lobby until insulted Ralph flees empty-handed. Foiled Ralph must run through his digital address book, efforts in vain: the fired personal trainer he failed to pay; his smitten coworker-turned-boss whose thwarted pass created havoc in the workplace; a wall-sharing neighbor who remembers only Ralph’s cavalier selfishness; and in an unlikely butt dial, an ambushed NJ divorcee who talks Ralph down from a panic attack. Stranded, still wet, and frantic for any port in an actual storm, Ralph finally dials Emile, the erudite private school headmaster he met earlier in the piano bar. The two men failed to share even a whiff of common ground; yet Ralph is desperate to secure dry slacks. Their hours later reunion is a jump-started showdown of wits, timed by Ralph’s slow phone re-charge. Still, the contentious repartee leaves agoraphobic Ralph charged, too, buzzed from overdue human contact. With trains still out, apologetic texts from Daniel lure Ralph back to his place to crash on the couch. Ralph accuses Daniel of emotional neglect, finally confessing that an evening of cold shoulders has taught Ralph a brutal truth: he has no real friends. Daniel reverses prior roles, daring Ralph to start over, yes, even in his dreaded seventies. Shaken Ralph erratically charges back to Emile’s for last tete-a-tete that teaches both men about the risk and reward in defenselessness. Ralph D is a black comedy about our gnarly third acts – eras that can find meaningful shape only by believing in an unlikely gift: the future.

In the back yard of a sleepy Virginia town the last week of August 1959, Henry Filby is trying to inspire his distracted 15-year-old son A.J. to mark summer’s end with a trip to the drive-in, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman the attraction. His estranged wife away and plagued by recurring nightmares, Henry is desperate to stay connected to his only child. But reluctant A.J., a sci-fi aficionado, has noticed strange blue light behind an improbably shuttered upstairs window next door. Squatters have stealthily taken up residence, the only other traces escaping steam and sounds of muffled coughs. Later, returning Henry and A.J. stumble upon a young non-binary named Colby, their eyes bloodshot, face reddened and raw. When Colby’s mother Helene intervenes, livid that Colby confronted A.J., Henry is alerted. Who are these strange scholarly occupiers? Why do they resist solid food and give off the acrid scent of chemical burns? What is the Monocacy Project they claim to work for? With its Revolutionary era Maryland roots? Next day, A.J. abruptly disappears to share his childhood haunts with the hyper-curious Colby. With the help of his star employee Julian, sometime beatnik and gifted audio engineer, Henry throws a tense backyard party, pushing both mother and child to come clean. A.J. explodes, accusing his dad of sabotaging his new friendship. Left alone with the coolly charismatic Helene, Henry threatens police intervention. What cornered Helene finally reveals – that Colby is, in fact, young A. J.’s biological offspring - turns Henry’s father-son crisis upside down. Monocacy is layered Eisenhower era science fiction posing post-millennial questions about the stigma of learning disabilities. The story is grounded in a timeless dilemma: How do parents shape their children? What unbidden influences should they most fear? When do they finally let go?

A car screeches to a stop at a suburban intersection on a sweltering July night. Improbably, Christmas music spills forth from its open window. Two pedestrians have been hit. One eyewitness sidesteps knowledge of the accident; another, a mysterious woman glimpsed around town, disappears into a post-storm brownout. Culpability unsettled, everyone heads home, where analysis by the three involved married couples ensues. Bucking against wife Nell’s interrogation, the shell-shocked driver, Brendan, anticipates arrest. Brendan threw a party the summer before that resulted in the shocking death of the title character, the town’s notorious 95-year-old hermit. Could tonight’s legal troubles be retribution? The party victim’s son-in-law Calvin, casualty at the stop sign, seizes the chance to further exploit the freakish death, as her daughter Delfy faces unresolved grief. And for hostile witness Josh and husband Harry, the night’s episode triggers a startling confession of blurred lines in neighborly compassion. At the center of these postmortems in all three residences: the heritage of Vivenne Marie Lavoie, whose fabled eccentricity inspired decades of local legends and internet conspiracy. Was Vivienne a dangerous cultist? Will her daughter escape her curse-like legacy? Will Brendan’s guilt over Vivienne’s demise be exorcized? And who is this stalker eavesdropping on these interconnected tête-à-têtes, awaiting a missing puzzle piece? Equal parts thriller and black comedy, Vivienne Lavoie is a Rashomon-like oral history of a complicated American woman, and finally, a meditation on intercession: whom do we rescue and at what cost?

In a crowded makeshift shelter atop the higher ground of Staten Island on the tumultuous night of October 29th 2012, a bewildered Antonio Fucini, now dressed in dry if mismatched pajamas and relegated to a cot in a dark corner, must be forcibly detained by Noah, a young nurse. Only minutes before, Antonio was pulled from a car swamped by the crushing surge from super storm Sandy’s landfall. Rather than grateful for the medical attention, Antonio bristles at every invasive question, venting about authorities’ indifference to the plight of the unconscious woman he was cradling when police rescued him from rising waters. Making calls to inquire, Noah stresses that Antonio might well need further treatment in an ER, once flooding recedes. For restless Antonio, the life and death jeopardy imposes an onslaught of unbidden memories. The strange woman in the car bore an uncanny resemblance to a troubled school friend once dependent on his emotional support, conjuring snippets of long-forgotten conversations. As Noah gently probes, one recollection triggers another, a fuller portrait of Antonio’s isolated years in New York’s now hurricane-ravaged borough taking shape: from his eccentric boss in a vintage book store who failed to shield Antonio from cruel and disturbing community accusations, to shattering chapters in his relationship with the chronically ill woman he shared his home with. For Noah, aiming to ground Antonio on a night fraught with anxiety, battering winds and power failure summon memories as well – of deeply personal loss in a similar gale, guilt lingering over his own helplessness. As the men await transport, a provisional lifeline begins to inspire a glimmer of greater salvation. For Antonio, so frightened of male attention, a vulnerable response to Noah’s gentle ministrations ultimately holds a mirror up to his repressive existence. When news arrives confirming the fate of the mysterious woman Antonio saved, it’s clear that a life adrift might inadvertently be moored anew. The Boy Who Could Talk to Girls is a paean to unexpected last chances in the most improbable of circumstances.

"Married North" is pitched against the end of the infamous Lavender Scare -- the homophobic purge of the Government during the Eisenhower years. Set in a sleepy Washington, DC suburb, the play's action over three stifling summer days in 1959 chronicles a final chapter in the gnarly relationship of formerly rural Georgians, estranged siblings August and Ivy Wilcox, now an Atlanta store manager and the sister who 'married north' -- to a low level bureaucrat proudly ridding the Feds of 'perverts and pinkos.' With her husband packed off to his army reserves, Ivy desperately wants confirmed bachelor August finally settled. And so against the advice of best friend Dottie, a stressed-out, very pregnant homemaker bewildered by her tomboy daughter, Ivy sets up a life-altering romantic opportunity with a quirky beatnik neighbor, Yvonne. Yet the Mailer-spouting art teacher grieving her beloved father's death ultimately offers August far more than matchmaking Ivy ever bargained for. Within this eccentric quartet, Married North examines both the last gasp of the 1950's and glimmers of the radical changes that defined the next decade and beyond.

"Married North" was a runner up in the 2014 Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Competition for plays on LGBTQ history.

For Maya Keeley, middle aged, terminally alone, restlessly serving out her days as a high school secretary, six critical – ultimately final – weeks one spring prove game changing. Her mother Annabelle has cajoled the small Illinois town’s Chamber of Commerce to honor her lifetime achievement as doyenne of a children’s dance academy, and Maya’s daughter, a feminist gerontology professor on Long Island is simultaneously embarking on her PhD and starting a family with her wife. Add: baby brother Maris, once the apple of his ambitious mother’s eye as star ballet pupil, now a web designer white knuckling a threatening personal crisis, and Emmarie, a mysterious, statuesque 20-year-old Maya summons for comfort, and counsel – to help Maya sort out her stage four cancer prognosis. For Maya is suddenly dying, and her family’s focus remains fixated, as it has for decades, on myriad other challenges, oblivious even to Maya’s increasingly confrontational behavior. As the days tick off, Maya’s resolve to withhold her diagnosis provides an oddly sustaining strength, yet slowly isolates her. The night of her mother’s ponderous ceremony, Maya commandeers the dais and her indifferent clan’s attention, offering an outrageous synthesis of stand-up, performance art, and impromptu psycho drama that changes the stakes for everyone. With biting humor and a nod to the ballet world’s theatrical panache Pas d’Action is a humanist entreaty to look closer at choices and decisions, especially involuntary ones. It’s never too late for a journey’s long-set itinerary to be altered.

Two New Jersey suburbanites, strangers to one another, greet each dawn listening to a classical music broadcast, annotated with eccentric anecdotes by their favorite DJ, Kevin Kepner. Both Remy Voclain, widow, painter, and burnt-out art therapist, and Fred Sparling, lonely owner of a small town shoe store, have become die-hard aficionados. On the first back-to-work day of September, Remy and Fred eagerly await the reboot of Kevin’s program. Still grieving abandonment by his partner, Fred is recovering from a nasty fall, bewildered and agoraphobic; Remy is haunted by a troubling beach incident that made her estranged son Sam a local hero but left her frightened and empty. Meanwhile, Fred’s neighbor Colin hopes to kick his good Samaritan status up a notch, and asks startled Fred for a proper date; and Sam, a Y lifeguard just out of grad school, abruptly begins packing to leave his mom’s house. For mysteriously stalled Remy and Fred, the only lifeline remains the companionship offered by “Classical Kevin,” whose poignant just-published memoir details music’s role in his overcoming learning disabilities. The next Friday night, a labored mother-son birthday celebration and romantic date fizzle disastrously. Both Remy and Fred stumble to their radios, Kevin’s live media launch offering existential comfort. Finally, awaiting Kevin’s delayed arrival at a book signing, individual obsessions overlap, compete, and clash explosively. Who is worthy of Kevin’s reciprocal attention? Could the apex of this oddball triangle harbor secrets which might color his loyalists’ adulation? Is idol worship, even of a disembodied voice, ever rewarded with genuine inspiration? Loosely constructed on the Baroque musical form of the same name, "A Double Fugue" is a multilayered tale of parallel lives and their karmic convergence.

100 minutes, optional intermission; unit set; 2 f, 4 m

(interior; 3 m, 1 f): Perry, the radically queer half of a young, just-married male couple finds himself aggressively haunted by a ghost, the bombastic, Eisenhower-era architect who designed Perry and Ian’s gleaming suburban house. The aggressive Lorenzo, who died as a newlywed days after moving his bride into his boldly stylish home, sets out to literally scare the hell out of Perry, a feat he has accomplished with stay-at-home spouses over 60 years. Yet Lorenzo has finally met his match in the confrontational Perry. On a storm-ravaged July 4th, the two men, one human, one other-worldly, almost move past their ideological impasse, discovering things in common, and in an unguarded moment, perhaps even an emotional attraction. A freshly obsessed Perry hunts down an enigmatic 75-year-old stranger, who may shed light on the night of Lorenzo’s death and his true motives for occupying his gleaming architectural prize. A harrowing séance-like showdown leaves members of an unusual quartet – even the restless, long-deceased one – poised to face all new futures. Midcentury Modern is a postmillennial ghost story about gender, domesticity, and the cost of escaping our most precious comfort zones.

Gus Ashbrook is a respected children’s book illustrator and sometime painter, his body of work known for its evocative romanticism, yet always in service of a collaborator’s vision. Alone at sixty, he’s emptied of inspiration and, his first solo book rejected by critics and readers alike, feeling invalidated and invisible. While strolling through Upper Manhattan’s Trinity Cemetery, he encounters a flirtatious Italian tourist whose palpable curiosity and heightened awareness of new surroundings motivate the burnt-out Gus to flee New York City for Florida’s Gulf Coast. The first night at his Captiva Island hotel Gus encounters a strikingly handsome groundskeeper, in a gap year before college. His visceral attraction unbidden and uncharacteristic, Gus is disturbed by his profound fixation. Although he stalks Thad around the island, even overhearing a contentious visit with Thad’s troubled mother, Gus avoids any introduction. In confessional calls to his ex-husband Benjamin, and finally estranged professor friend Geoffrey, Gus opens up about this inexorable preoccupation. Benjamin gently encourages Gus to own his all too human responses, the sort Gus buried in his youth; Geoffrey, wounded from a similar compulsion, insists Gus return home or face devastating consequences. Despite warnings of a pandemic spreading over the globe and even into Florida, Gus finds himself unable to leave. Subjecting himself to a humiliating spa make-over, he sacrifices dignity and emotional stability for mere proximity to a total stranger’s youth and beauty. After witnessing a vicious confrontation between Thad and another employee on the day of Thad’s departure, Gus collapses. Admitted to the Fort Meyers hospital ICU, Gus’s only visitor offers a final gift: anecdotal evidence that proves Gus’s voyage to Florida and indeed lifelong quest to find meaning in his work were not in vain. Hotel des Bains ’20, inspired by Mann’s Death in Venice, updates a timeless tale of obsession and salvation through the dark prism of 2020’s cascade of crises.

On Thanksgiving Eve 1969, Briggs Bingham, a 19-year-old Virginia college student traumatized by parental divorce, a break-up with a high school sweetheart, and a violent mugging months before, awaits Nixon’s first draft lottery only five days away. Ostensibly to serve a sociology paper comparing attitudes toward World War II vs. Vietnam, Briggs begins to investigate the 1944 combat death of his uncle Grady. Perusing correspondence (circa 1937) between Grady and Briggs’s father Merce, Brigg’s fascination with the handsome captain of a Merrill’s Marauders unit deepens, tied to missing letters that paint an oddly too generic portrait of a young soldier’s final years. Grady, who died in from a sniper’s shot in the Burmese jungle, was a melancholy loner who failed to launch in his hometown of Augusta, Georgia after graduating alongside his brother from The Citadel. As Briggs pores over a battered foot locker crammed with photos, memorabilia and the sweet scent of violets, Briggs’s investigation becomes provocatively personal. Briggs’s estranged childhood friend Tate shows up, just home from college. Having recently come out, Tate’s a take-no-prisoners anti-war activist and impromptu thorn in Briggs’s side. Bouncing theories off Tate, Briggs wonders what drove his uncle to a near suicide mission as the war in the Pacific wound down. At an impasse, Briggs and his father Merce fly to Augusta for a tense Thanksgiving reunion with his grandfather, an erudite if dogmatic retired dentist ensconced in a nursing home. With too little sleep and mounting anxiety about his selective service status, Briggs demands details about the family war hero. Why was unemployable Grady so restless and unmoored? What was the mysterious lure of the South Carolina island, Edisto? What Briggs uncovers – a horrific, covert plan to remove all obstacles from Grady’s path just as global conflict loomed large in 1939 – alters the unformed young man’s views on war, identity, and his long-troubled father’s propensity for secrecy. Briggs finds both startling vindication and a poignant new connection to Grady himself, who all but materializes to aid and abet his emotional inquiry. Briggs marches toward the lottery that could change his own fate forever, now buoyed by an 11th hour embrace an unexpected legacy. "Edisto" is a striking profile of contrasted wars, and the ironic personal sacrifices that shaped their participants, willing and reluctant.

Monologue excerpted in S&K's Best Men's Stage Monologues of 2022

Following his idol’s every rumination in social media, Theo Archer attends Paxton Bennett Lee’s book launch in Manhattan. After years of advice column blogging and lower-level work for magazines, Paxton has penned MannerLee, a witty postmodern treatise on etiquette destined to put its erudite author on the map. Down front for the Q&A, Number One Fan Theo poses a thoughtful question about the pitfalls of ghosting. Impressed – and eager to flee the event’s spotlight-hogging host, former child star Melinda Burgreen – Paxton pulls Theo out for a late night on the town. As Theo calms wired Paxton and encourages him to phone and forgive pal Melinda for her erratic performance, an unlikely friendship takes shape. Within days, church music director Theo presents Paxton to his suburban Unitarian congregation book club for another signing, topped by a halcyon evening under the stars on Theo’s deck, Melinda tagging along. As the odd trio heads into summer with an almost familial bond, Theo’s secret crush only intensifies. In TV interviews Paxton adroitly mines his moment, even exploiting a dropped reference to a once-in-a-lifetime love affair with a fallen Gulf War correspondent. A tragic 90s tale immediately gains internet traction, further boosting MannerLee’s Amazon sales. Until the dead reporter’s surviving partner – and soon to be authorized biographer – ambushes Paxton and Theo, mid-celebration for a glowing NY Times review, vowing to fully reveal Paxton’s deceit and airbrushed past. Exposure imminent, Paxton spirals down and into Theo’s arms. A one-night comfort hookup leads to sporadic erotic trysts. But shaken from the consequences of overnight fame and infamy, Paxton vanishes. Theo, clinging to Melinda for solace, presumes the cruel ultimate irony: Paxton has ghosted him. And then at summer’s end, Paxton’s sudden plea for a reunion rewards Theo’s year-long obsession: another shot with this elusive luminary. Yet in their reconciliation, big surprises await both men. Followed asks: if we inch closer to celebrity, can its coveted compensations – and liabilities – rub off? Can our cyber intimacy – 280 characters in service of hearts and minds – ever secure genuine human connections?

Recruited by the War Production Office in 1943, 18-year-old Emmy Shipstad, daughter of a Chicago milkman, moves to Washington, DC, enrolls at GW University with meager savings, and volunteers at the Stage Door Canteen. On only her second night to offer coffee and small talk, the young war-time hostess – cautioned against being too inquisitive, a lifelong rebuke of her curiosity – comforts a distraught young African-American soldier. Bound for the 92nd Infantry “Colored” Division and combat in Italy, Private London Wesley is terrified both of front lines abroad and his bleak future in a threatening America. Over the next sixty years, Emmy will be haunted by the evening with the young North Carolinian, as she: begins her start-stop career in journalism; weds her old school lefty husband Llewellyn; raises and loses to a right wing cult her rebellious son Morgan; and, above all, sustains friendships with three witnesses to her journey, Jo, Oona, and Mae. Acting as Greek chorus slash biographers, three proven reliable narrators chart Emmy’s rise from secretary to sidelined reporter to slowly simmering activist in civil rights and progressive politics. Moving from Truman-Eisenhower stasis into the optimism and violence of the Kennedy-Johnson years, onto the corrupt Nixon era and beyond, Emmy grows from wide-eyed naïf to disciplined observer of both history and human nature. Through it all she proves a dependable if provocative ally: inspiring, cajoling, intrusively shaping her friends’ confrontations with post-partum anxiety, suburban isolation, LGBTQ identity, and a quest for validation in times marked by female invisibility. As Emmy wins, loses, and wins again, Emmeline emerges, making heartbreaking trade-offs, finally casting aside much of what she achieved. Culminating in an unexpected reckoning on a Sausalito Ferry in 1996, Emmeline slowly discovers the worth of her own niche story and perhaps the universal tale of her generation’s

At midnight on the chilly deck of a luxury liner atop the Baltic sea, midway between St. Petersburg and Estonia, sixty-ish Gray receives a cryptically worded email addressed to Ingo, his husband of four years. The message, intruding upon a long-delayed honeymoon, is a provocative entreaty to reconnect “after so long,” and brings up a cascade of unexpected questions about some less than innocent indiscretions in Ingo’s youth. Buckley, the now successful if emotionally stalled fifty-year-old entrepreneur Ingo first seduced, is hellbent on correcting all remaining “irresolution” in his own troubled life, even if it means stalking Ingo’s husband; for Buckley, abrupt abandonment by movie-star handsome Ingo has left open wounds. Though Ingo insists on ignoring Buckley’s aggressive overtures, Gray begins his own investigation into what happened in 1987. After a covert meeting with Buckley and his sociopolitically opinionated fiancé Ezra in a Washington DC gallery, Gray is shattered by fresh evidence of Ingo’s deceit: Does Buckley, fixated on Gray’s similar traits and behavior, secretly want to usurp Gray's place at Ingo’s side? At a turning point in their marriage, Gray demands that Ingo finally face long-buried reasons for decisions made thirty years ago and their sobering consequences. At an elegant September garden party at a New Jersey arboretum, each player in the quartet confronts the costs of a complicated liaison. Loosely constructed on a variation of the Narcissus myth, "The Ameinias Curse" asks: What is the responsibility of those blessed with beauty's power? How do the rest of us survive after possessing the beautiful, if only for a fleeting moment?

Eight Fourteen features over 20 characters played by 10+ actors. Simultaneously depicting predicaments in New York City and a New Jersey town, Eight Fourteen covers 24 hours in the summer of 2003 when 42 million people were inexplicably without power, plunged into sultry darkness and briefly an atmosphere of paranoia. Though terrorism was quickly proven not to be the culprit, Northeastern residents were gripped with déjà vu, reminded of cataclysmic events in their recent past. The journey in this evening has its own arc, as people moved from fear to frustration, from relief to smug complacency. The play's built around a parallel construction: A married couple is forced to endure the hot night apart and attend wildly contrasting social events. For Susannah and Henry Reiniger, the disconnect proves a bittersweet turning point, the night's blend of apprehension and celebration holding a mirror up to unspoken regrets. A disillusioned daytime TV executive, Susannah is trapped in Manhattan and attends an impromptu candlelit affair hosted by two Canadians, estranged friends all but abandoned in a knee-jerk move to the suburbs. Meanwhile, Henry, a burnt-out documentary filmmaker turned stay-at-home dad faces a meticulously planned birthday bash for a recently fired investment banker. Susannah's night in New York moves from personal temptation to fiery showdown over reactionary values, and finally, to a painful overdose of nostalgia in the neighborhood where she raised her young child. Across the Hudson River, Henry realizes his calculated retreat to a safe haven — his once cozy but now impersonal childhood hometown — has left him isolated. By the time the lights come on again, the misadventures at these gatherings have provided a seriocomic snapshot of post-millennial Americans: decent people held hostage to an increasingly calculated climate of fear — too often oblivious to one another and the natural world they depend upon yet all-too-quickly take for granted.

The startling death of a fellow collaborator inspires an awkward cyber reunion for two men who met 35 years earlier in a new play workshop. For Simon, a semiretired actor-teacher, and Gabe, a once-promising Virginia playwright, now a Washington DC bureaucrat in arts funding, an intense week in the 80s proves challenging to recall objectively. Each man offers a wildly different take, their younger selves (late 20s/30s) enter the fray, and the past tumbles back. As they rehearse Gabe’s first opus, "The Culpeper Antiquarian Club," a teacher-student tale set in a historically rich Appalachia-adjacent town during the Vietnam era, it’s clear that the plot has personal repercussions for budding writer Gabe. Motive and authorial integrity prove controversial fodder for debate, a withering analysis spearheaded by opinionated Simon. Mutual attraction both mars and enhances the brief creative alliance before the men return to separate lives. When they meet in Washington decades later, their old intellectually playful cat-and-mouse kicks in. As animosity and sexual sparks resurface, Gabe’s autobiographical script returns to life, too: in a coup de théâtre, the story the men once developed morphs into a more complex play-within-our-play, penned and enacted on the spot to excavate parallel emotional issues, circa 1862. The past collides with the present until a still deeper structure is revealed. Bolder questions surface: who is dramatizing what and why? "The Culpeper Antiquarian Club" is a layered inquiry into the mystery of artistic authenticity and a paean to the theater’s ability to heal – even wounds created in its spotlighted glare.

The only two people in a rural tavern on a slow Monday evening, seated back-to-back at nearby tables, suddenly find themselves embroiled in a strange one-upmanship: an attempt to establish which of them is the most sensitive. The apparent challenge: to conjure up a single image that best exemplifies a state of abject sadness. Melinda brainstorms imaginatively, but Teddy tries to control her rush of distracting details -- and reign in Melinda's creativity. In short order, they arrive at a heated impasse. Or do they? What sort of mind games are at work? And is their very circumstance -- meeting publicly if covertly -- the saddest thing possible? Dolor is a little black comedy about big feelings, those withheld and too readily voiced.

October 1992. Ellen Cabot is a disillusioned Maryland divorcee, a devout Sunday School teacher who fills her days rattling around her too-empty suburban home. Her husband, a retired low-level bureaucrat, has taken up with a young female police officer; her son has married a firebrand hell-bent on raising their adopted Chinese grandchild without religious training. Ellen feels abandoned by both family and her own principles. Yet beneath a tightly coiled exterior she's quietly bewildered that so many people and beliefs have failed her at the golden time of life. When Ellen reluctantly embarks on a Fall Foliage tour of the Adirondacks, her bus breaks down and she stumbles upon her temperamental opposite — sunbathing nude in the tall grass.

With a sheepish grin and a silvering braid down his back proudly flaunting his vague Iroquois roots, Perry is seemingly a vagabond, the definitive aging hippie.

Yet Ellen soon learns he's neither an idealistic 60s relic nor a reclusive mountain hermit. Transformed each evening into an elegant resort bartender by his formal black and whites, Perry's also a smooth sophisticate with a winning way with women d'un age certain, as live-and-let-live as they come. Their initial meeting is fire and water.

Yet when Ellen finds herself stranded in Lake Placid on a rainy autumn weekend, Perry takes her for a walk in the storm-dampened woods and gently leads them toward common emotional ground. After Ellen slips into a leafy puddle, they stop by his old trailer to dry off, and perhaps to the surprise of both, end up making love.
Ellen awakes the next frosty morning shaken by her own uncharacteristic behavior, yet enchanted with the rustic Perry and his no-nonsense existence incompatibility of their very separate lives. In an unguarded moment, she admits that she could happily stay on a while. Ever the self-protecting loner, Perry makes a terse but persuasive case for Ellen to resist the urge to extend their 48 hours and face the inevitable.

2000. Eight years pass apart, and at dusk on a warm summer day, a bizarrely camouflaged Ellen — her identity obscured by a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses — returns to find the near stranger who seems to have altered the course of her life.

Yet the Perry she comes upon is eerily anxious, an edgy, haunted shell of the robust charmer she succumbed to. As caustic as he once was copacetic, he initially neither recognizes Ellen nor remembers their fleeting romance. In a harrowing high stakes confrontation on the very turf where they first became lovers, Ellen and an increasingly paranoia-fueled Perry wrestle with long-kept secrets and personal demons—about intimacy, mortality, faith and the relative weight of memory.

On a stormy winter night in 1959, a Virginia couple with an emptied nest shakily embarks on a new enterprise: teaching an adult night class on “Family Dollars and Sense.” Amateur gurus both from humble Appalachian roots yet prescient harbingers of the self-help movement that would follow a decade later, Thaddeus and Sunny Popper aim to instruct their students (the audience) in cost-saving domestic tips, from meatless meals to retirement goals. But on this icy December night, wires are down, cars are sliding into one another in the slick streets below, the furnace has mistakenly been turned off by the dancing school’s headmistress, and attendance is spotty. Sunny – a combo Suze Orman and Martha Stewart, clearly before her time – has probably over-prepared, and her best efforts to deliver a carefully orchestrated mini-seminar slowly begin to go awry. And Tad – proud WW II vet and laid-back real estate agent by day – cannot for the life of him stick to Sunny's (too) carefully rehearsed text. As the weather worsens and a power failure threatens, these partners vie for their attendees’ attention – and the temporary spotlight – and end up illuminating both their courageous personal story and a Thurberesque portrait of vintage suburban Americana.

On a raw November morning, a woman returns to the devastating aftermath of a freak, late-autumn tornado that leveled much of a small Illinois river town. Her home gone, its contents scattered, Corrie picks through the meager detritus, triggering unbidden thoughts of a troubling past. Her brothers arrive, Greer, a controlling, religion-based home schooling facilitator and Jay, an emotionally volatile custodian. As they try to coax her away from the wreckage, Corrie’s sanctuary for decades, they must continually adapt their strategy in response to their sister’s quicksilver defense mechanisms. To her shock, Corrie finds herself coached by her long-departed ex-husband, the guileless Chester, still youthful and unchanged, materializing seemingly from thin air. Conjuring dark memories as weapons, his damning words unheard by the others, Chester drives Corrie to confront her brothers in the high stakes stand of her life. Will she finally receive the help she’s long needed yet been denied? Or with her hallucinated defender as her explosive ally, will Corrie take a final, perhaps violent stand against her equally wounded family? Nichiiwad, an Ojibwa word for catastrophic weather, asks: What is the cost in wasted years and collateral damage for the containment of a brilliant yet damaged mind?

2017. Over spring break her last semester of college, 21-year-old Kenzie returns to her New Jersey middle school for a reunion with the principal whose covertly personal attention eight years earlier informed everything Kenzie now believes about education – and power. As Principal Landon Burroway and his devoted assistant Cecile shakily greet Kenzie, all three are unavoidably flooded with nostalgic reflections on the 2009 school production of Revolutionary Woman, a YA history play penned by Burroway himself, in which 13-year-old Kenzie played the heroic title role, NJ’s iconic camp follower, Molly Pitcher. When Kenzie learns another classmate, Liam, is also on the premises, she bolts, the series of emotional run-ins a PTSD trigger, flashing back to events from the spring of eighth grade. As the action shifts to those stressful weeks, Kenzie and Liam rehearse daily with the young drama teacher, Tyler Cline, while being coached secretly by playwright – yet still their principal – Burroway. As opening night draws nearer, Burroway’s fixation on Kenzie’s portrayal of his nubile wartime heroine in the 1770s escalates into obsession, even as Liam faces homophobic taunts from classmates about his crush on Mr. Cline. Finally, a devastating incident four days before the play upends the production and its grip on their young lives. Now, on a chilly March afternoon eight years later, Kenzie returns for a high-stakes showdown, seeking a final victory over her own deeply troubled past.

Over three tumultuous days in October, Rusty Follin, a one-hit wonder children’s book author and former hot-headed kid-lit editor, now a stay-at-home dad, narrates a final chapter in a harrowing tale of parental hell. For Rusty now wrestles both with teenaged daughter Chloe’s escalating adolescent crises and his own related demons. Chloe has psychologically severed the familial cord, to end Rusty’s smothering struggles to raise a textbook example of the progressively-educated child, free and clear of gender limitations and crass cultural influences. A musical prodigy with a multi-octave vocal range, Chloe strongly resents her responsibility to talent – and her father’s hovering ministrations to oversee its development. Her mother Elena, a beleaguered eighth grade science teacher onto Chloe’s manipulation, is both sympathetic to Rusty’s frustration and troubled by his obsession with making allowances for their belligerent daughter. And Chloe’s problems are not minor: she vanishes evenings with weak excuses, ignores school work (leaving assignments to all-too-eager Rusty to complete) – and has likely made drugs the center of her life. Everything Rusty and Elena philosophically endorsed, maximizing independence, minimizing character-deflating rules, is now severely tested by the hostile, all-but-disappearing Chloe. And heart-broken Rusty, gripped with anxiety – what his late mother dubbed “the weak trembles” – cannot cope with mounting evidence of his daughter’s dangerous downward spiral. Has the little girl Rusty raised to be an ambitious high-flier turned sour and nihilistic? Rather than derail Chloe – and finally supply boundaries long feared would put handcuffs on his daughter’s very spirit – Rusty accommodates every setback.

At the story’s start, Rusty is in the grip of insomnia and despair. Exacerbating the tense home climate, Elena’s under new scrutiny in her school, her laziest students’ parents making hourly demands for special treatment. The comparison with her husband’s enabling of Chloe is not lost on Elena. And so as Elena reluctantly heads off to her annual teachers convention in Atlantic City, Rusty is left alone to confront their sullen, secretive daughter. Things reach a nadir during an icy, nor’easter-created power outage. Having long promised never to invade his child’s hallowed personal space, Rusty can’t stop himself from aiming his flashlight toward whatever mysteries are hidden in Chloe’s room. The shocking cache he finally uncovers leads to a violent altercation, one that shatters Rusty’s dreams and alters his family’s future forever. Told via intimate narration in Rusty’s eccentric voice, "Weak Trembles" is a cautionary self-portrait of a contemporary father trapped in his own personal waterloo, facing the cruel disparity between the best laid plans for a child and the sometimes sadly disappointing real-world outcome.

Semifinalist, 2013 O'Neill National Playwriting Competition

The final week of 1959, the weather's been too balmy for Christmas and the mood is decidedly anxious inside the one still inhabited home on Lake Succasunna, New Jersey's exclusive summer resort community. Ada Willard Romain, infamous second wife and new widow of inventor Heywood Romain, has been unable to pack up their vacation house for the winter. Instead she's languished in the elegant lakeside residence through the fall. Yet as the New Year approaches, snow's in the forecast and Ada's finally made a tentative step forward, preparing to donate her husband's clothes to Milo Hobart, an amiable young man who toils at the local Woolworth's. When a nostalgic swoon at the dime store counter conjured up her colorful romantic past, Ada found herself oddly attracted to the comforting lad. Milo's impending visit has inspired Ada to finally clean out Heywood's closet—and don a black cocktail dress. Why, it almost feels like a date.

But complicating family obstacles loom large: Ada's granddaughter Toni, home from her women-only college spouting Simone De Beauvoir, won't budge and won't curb her non-stop critique of society's—and Ada's—obsession with pairing her with the right man. Worse, Ada's daughter Shirley, a Manhattan divorcée booked on the high Caribbean seas for the holidays, has lost her cruising partner to a hastily rehabilitated marriage, and arrives via taxi from LaGuardia literally starving (her cache of diet pills pilfered in Miami). And so three generations of Willard women, chic, savvy, and sharp-tongued, quickly begin to rub one another the wrong way.

Enter Milo, seemingly only to pick up Heywood's finery. After failing to demonstrate managerial prowess (he just can't bring himself to fire anyone), Woolworth's has put Milo on R&R. Over the next snowbound week the unassuming naïf touches something deep in all three women; as each reaches out to Milo, he responds … in kind. Milo seems so sweetly unformed—or is he? And what about those nagging questions about Milo's oddball upbringing, the much gossiped about yet never seen mother? Who is this Milo? Why do Ada, Shirley, and Toni all want to smother him with maternal affection one minute and make love to him the next?

As the blizzard of '59 hits Lake Succasunna, so do near-farcical romantic entanglements, long suppressed secrets, and overdue confessions. Set against the waning days of stifling conformity and rigidly observed gender roles, Wooing Milo comically illuminates three singular women and the man who dares to woo them simultaneously—all poised provocatively on the cusp of a brave new era.

During the devastating waning days of the First World War, wistful Fanny, a great stage diva, sorts through a found trove of souvenirs when her first love, George Atcheson, suddenly appears. Once a handsome actor of modest talent crippled by stage fright, George is now staid, married, the father of two sons and, to Fanny’s surprise, an Anglican Bishop. George is desperate to safely bury an earlier chapter of his life—his youthful backstage romance with a glamorous actress. When Fanny's questions trigger a flood of shared memories, we vividly flash back to a life-altering final dress rehearsal in chilly, rainy Brighton, where younger versions of both characters lead a ragtag band of actors through a defining moment in the bittersweet love story. As they comically stumble through a 19th century melodrama, offstage rivalries and jealousies surface, fatefully separating George and Fanny. Now, is it too late, or will these two star-crossed lovers create an unexpected happy ending? An affectionate portrait of the theatre and two of its inescapably intertwined players. Adapted from a sketch by acclaimed author Thornton Wilder.

Anna Marie has raised her surly, contentious son Micah alone. Though Micah has long been pharmaceutically treated for his O.D.D. — Oppositional Defiance Disorder — she's desperate to introduce a paternal influence. Anna Marie hires Joe Eskin, an itinerant waiter with a vague past and take-no-prisoners tutoring style. Over one critical autumn Joe brings focus and structure to Micah's daily life. But as he opens incurious Micah's eyes to a world outside his sleepy New Jersey suburb, Joe ingratiates himself into the family and inadvertently stirs in Anna Marie dormant romantic longing. In a revelatory battle royal, Micah realizes that equally combative Joe is a kindred spirit — likely "O.D.D." himself. When Micah attracts the brilliant but volatile Ilona, Joe's Cyrano-like coaching to help Micah romance the older girl segues into near obsession. Though smitten Anna Marie remains oblivious, Ilona slowly realizes that Joe's emotional investment in Micah is invasive and threatening. During a Halloween trip into rain-drenched New York City, Ilona ends Joe's control by confronting him in front of Micah, with life-altering results. Exploring the challenges of teen isolation, single parenting, and our dependence on drug therapy as a panacea, ODD illuminates the terror and heartbreak that bind a unique quartet.

Dramatic Comedy / 2m, 1f / Interior An eccentric widower, Mack has been a stay-at-home dad for twenty years, his daily existence revolving around his son Billy. Not only can't he let go, Mack's convinced he's more needed than ever. First up is pulling Billy from a dead-end copy shop job and enrollment in culinary school-after all, he was a finalist in the Pillsbury Bake-off. Then Mack discovers that Billy, adopted from infancy, has contacted his birthmother, a Washington, DC secretary about to make a first trip to New York City. Panicky Mack spends a sleepless three days coaching his son, determined to impress Adela with Billy's upbringing-and their indestructible father-son bond. Over a snowy Easter weekend, these three square off. Confronting timid Adela, Billy's romanticized ideas about his identity are turned inside out, as Mack's deepest insecurities surface. Mack is convinced the woman will psychologically lay claim to the child she gave up two decades earlier. Yet for Adela, a lasting reconnection with the boy couldn't be further from her mind. With abundant humor, Easter Monday addresses what it means to be a parent, and to be parented, illuminating both the pain and joy in finally saying goodbye to childhood. "....An interesting examination of an unusual father-son relationship... The Sondheim lyrics 'stay a child while you can be a child' are embodied in Mack, the overprotective father. In his eagerness to keep his adopted son Billy with him, Mack has in essence tried to keep him a child. He creates a wonderful world of nostalgia that is very moving... Easter Monday holds our interest, and Corley has written some beautifully evocative lines ... " -Connie Meng, NPR Radio

In the summer of 1969, Beau Stanley's last hurrah before heading off to study architecture in college, doting Mama Lillian vows to help him finally lose his baby fat. Armed with a supply of diet pills and a food-free regimen that includes tearing down a family room wall, 3 a.m. trips to Dulles Airport and blazing, amphetamine-fueled days on the beach, mother and son spend a memorable vacation together. But Beau's weight loss isn't restless Lillian's only project, and in an unguarded moment, she reveals her just-begun affair with a travelling defense contractor, Jack Carew. Once Lillian introduces son and lover, Beau's caught in the oedipal crossfire of a covert and explosive new alliance, forced to cover his Mama's many absences from home. Over the next decade, Jack's repeated pledge to end his own loveless marriage and sweep Lillian away proves a hollow promise. As increasingly beleaguered Beau sacrifices his own independence to help his mother confront her disillusionment and finally, betrayal, parent-child roles are turned upside down. Mama and Jack Carew is a harrowing, oftentimes black-comedic portrait of an unlikely triangle.

En route to their first Broadway show, two tourists start out across uncharted terrain: Times Square. Like Hansel and Gretel lost in the forest, expectations and anxieties surface, and a marriage's past and future come into sharp focus.

Included in Walking Plays 2021, a collection of 28 10-minute plays, Claudia Haas, Curator

At a sparsely attended concert at a “Fall Festival of the Spirit” sponsored by the New Vista Church and held in a vast municipal park in northern New Jersey, two unlikely people are inexplicably drawn to one another. For Marianna, a curator with the Smithsonian’s Indian Museum in Washington DC, home for her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, a much younger man nervously coaching a pop-gospel singer from the wings mysteriously grabs her attention. Killian, one the church’s young deacons, makes his way onto the lawn to pass out water bottles (labels adorned with New Vista’s logo), and can’t help but feel a powerful pull towards Marianna beyond pastoral duties. Their attraction palpable to both, they head out for a walk and to share Killian’s picnic supper. As they move deeper into the densely wooded Lenape burial grounds in the moonlit September air, despite contentious sparring over their differences, the erotic pull intensifies. Killian, a married construction supervisor by day, wannabe Christian Contemporary songwriter by night, is profoundly enmeshed in the New Vista’s targeted mission, the magnetic young minister’s true right hand man, perhaps too much so. And Marianna, fleeing a suffocating relationship, burnt out from the historical gravitas of her career, is desperate to connect to an alienated past. After some charged al fresco lovemaking, the two circle, wary, convinced they’ve met before, their age difference adding provocative implications. When a shared, unbidden memory surfaces (triggered by the Go-Go’s 1984 hit “Cruel Summer”), their startling past connection – and karmic destiny to reunite? – are unavoidably revealed, with life-altering repercussions.

Set in over four late summer days in 1989, "Finding Donis Anne" is a bittersweet odyssey of Rachel Thornton, an impoverished nurses aide from Dalton, Georgia in desperate search of her runaway daughter. A sharp-tongued young widow almost squeezed dry by life, Rachel has sacrificed everything she has for her mission -- a last ditch effort to bind together her family, now reduced to her troubled, absent child and demanding, mentally-challenged nephew, Darryl. Stranded with dwindling resources on the outskirts of Washington, DC, Rachel and Darryl are befriended by displaced fellow Georgian Luther, a burnt-out Civil Service teacher, whose own splintered family is a deep source of loneliness. Luther's caring intervention helps Rachel hold a mirror to her wounded past and move toward healing. And it's with his paternal-like encouragement that Darryl, whose symbiotic attachment to Rachel has been profound and disturbing, finally takes a clear step toward manhood. "Finding Donis Anne" is the story of the price paid for family secrets, and the pain and ultimately triumph that results from confronting them with honesty, courage, and love.

We’re in Northern Virginia, a few miles from Washington DC; a stifling August morning in 1959. Bucky Ray Smoot, an ambivalent but prescient post-war vet – anticipating the sociopolitical tumult of the next 50 years – disillusioned with career prospects, grey flannel suburban malaise and a range of oppressive institutions, has a life-altering meltdown teaching a final boys Sunday school class, using a biblical story as a basis for a no-holds barred attack on the staid Eisenhower era’s failures, and indeed the emptiness of the American Dream.

On a rainy night in November of 1959, Ina Jean Smallwood, beleaguered drama coach at Virginia’s Patrick Henry High School gives her restless students a final set of notes after a rocky dress rehearsal for "A Midsummer Night’s Dream," the stakes for the production aligning with a critical turning point in Ina Jean’s own life.

On a subway ride between Brooklyn and Manhattan a man spots his boyhood crush, child actress Hayley Mills, now middle-aged, and stealthily follows her to another car, to the consternation of his high-maintenance younger boyfriend.

Still mourning her recently deceased mother, Rena makes an impulsive detour from a day trip to Annapolis to locate her childhood piano teacher, Mae, now retired and living alone in a quiet Maryland shore town. Surprising the reclusive former next-door neighbor taking the September sun, Rena peppers Mae with questions about her own musical abilities. Mae is thrown seeing her old pupil but does nothing to sugarcoat memories of Rena's mediocre playing, including an infamous recital when stage fright kept Rena from performing at all. Mae's harsh deduction that Rena was diligent but innately untalented isn't a shock, yet still has the power to sting. Mae makes it clear that she continued to teach the withdrawn Rena to accommodate the dreams of Rena's mother, Betty Anne, an uneducated woman obsessed with providing her daughter with the enriching opportunities she never had. Rena seizes the candid post-mortem on her limited capabilities as an opening for a far more personal query into those unhappy days — in particular, details of Mae's intense, symbiotic relationship with her mother. As Rena probes deeper, saddened Mae's well of regret surfaces until Rena finally must ask what she's long wondered: were the two women covert lovers all those years? The Imaginary Orange is about the gifts of music, memory and devotion.

In late autumn of 1973, two WW II vets reunite at the recently restored, vintage cast-iron ice skaters' shelter atop a rock promontory in New York's Central Park, the one-time spot for their covert assignations before shipping off to fight in the Pacific. Now, after tumultuous decades apart, Bronx-born Dov and Carolina tobacco heir Archie Ray arrive with potent secrets to share, and decidedly different hopes for the impromptu reunion. Yet after contention and bitterly voiced disappointment, a transcendent moment mysteriously, even magically, allows time truly to collapse.

The most casual intellectual debate imaginable between a young man and woman with an otherwise easy rapport quickly escalates into a decidedly high stakes confrontation. The trigger? Betrayal? Differing politics? No, the volcanic over-reaction is to an innocuous question about ... the evolution of font use. A black comedy of manners about hot heads and cool type.

After a hurried commuter takes an unexpected tumble, landing flat on his face, he imagines the myriad ways the mysterious woman witnessing his sudden loss of equilibrium and grace might react. A layered, impromptu rumination on how ego views our calamity and our humiliation.

Two people, strangers to one another, are haunted to the point of emotional paralysis by a seven year-old boy's hysterical meltdown on a September afternoon; though they never meet, a duel ensues between their subconscious minds as each grapples with the deeply personal implications of the child's trauma. A tale set in the challenging autumn of 2020

On a blustery night, a mysteriously enraged stranger has tried to break into an apartment and smashed through a window. As she nosily sleuths and examines the bloodied crime scene, the building’s eccentric "sentinel” chats with a quiet new tenant and uncovers startling clues. Could the culprit be connected to one of them? Has the tenant actually sought anonymous refuge in the in building, possibly fleeing a jilted romantic partner with a terrifying agenda? Or is all of this mere speculation on the part of the bored and lonely long-time resident? As the women's contrasting backgrounds and values come to the fore in an intense showdown, "The Sentinel" explores issues of privacy and community.

Awaiting a late commuter train on an eerily snowy April morning, two estranged friends at individual crossroads bump into one another and unavoidably revisit a harrowing, secretive chapter of their high school days, airing long-delayed, and damning personal accusations.

Tonight. Right here. Just before this play festival’s start or during its intermission, a man only moments before very publicly humiliated by his angry girlfriend's stormy exit desperately seeks a witness to the falling-out. Could anyone tell him what the hell just happened here? When a stranger comes forward from the back of the house and shares her pithy impressions, some welcome, some mightily resented, both end up schooled in the limitations and pitfalls of language, politically correct or otherwise. A post-millennial tale of romantic words: sometimes weapons, sometimes shields.

On a suburban commuter train, an unemployed mother fields phone calls about job prospects while simultaneously supervising her teenage daughter from afar, unavoidably sharing her efforts with fellow passengers. Fuller, an eloquent bon vivant improbably turned out in overcoat and beret, feels assaulted by Christina's noisy handling of her work and domestic crises. Bristling Christina takes umbrage and cannot help but notice Fuller's strong-scented cologne, strategically masking more pungent odors. The resulting strife over personal boundaries, etiquette and the disparity between perceived haves and have-nots leads to a startling showdown over the ugly culturally-endorsed intolerance of the homeless.

Three distinctly different ornaments -- a hand-carved St. Nicholas figurine, an all-American angel, and a mass-produced snowman -- relish the first night of their annual re-appearance on the family Christmas tree. When news of a potential divorce in the family threatens their status as beloved decorations, anxiety and conflict begin to upstage the celebration.

The reluctant heir to a handful of beloved Italian restaurants in the title city, Phil DePasqua is bewildered by his inability to alter the sheer predictability of the days ahead. Yet for once Phil dares to step outside his comfort zone. On a muggy June night, Phil brings home his quirkily loquacious former classmate, Burdett Peake, an edgy, unemployed electronics repairman who befriended him at their recent, otherwise unmemorable high school reunion. Phil's last-call invitation may be uncharacteristically bold, but has the decided air of desperation about it, too, built on a bogus premise — getting Burdett to fix an ancient, grime-encrusted VCR.

And so on a screened-in porch more homage to a childhood bedroom than a spot for summer cocktails (gingham covered daybed, rusty Flexible Flyer, vintage comic books), rum is served neat and thunder rumbles in the distance. Seizing the rarest of moments — his ailing mother out of town, and their mutual home, for the first time in years — Phil is able to tune-out an evening's worth of aggressively invasive phone messages from his ambitious young protégé, Robert. As they loosen up, Phil and Burdett uncover some lingering class warfare-infused slights and a shared loathing of the cruel vagaries of midlife. The VCR is beyond repair, but as a gentle rain falls, against many odds, a tentative emotional connection takes hold.

Or does it? In an era of dire economic downturn, the bitter and penniless Burdett is palpably eager to jump-start a late life career change. He perhaps too smoothly plies his charms on lonely Phil, hoping to win a job by making an indelible impression. Sadly shackled to a dying mother and a demanding business he has no interest in (or talent for) expanding, beleaguered Phil aches for any existence brighter than the chronically empty one he's known. And yet vulnerable, even needy as he is, Phil proves no pushover. Shakily confronting long-denied dreams and desires, he has zero patience for a manipulative opportunist.

The two circle one another, warily adjusting strategies. A jar of .240 shotgun shells found in the dusty detritus of Phil's boyhood provokes the disclosure of tragic secrets. As incriminating accusations mount without resolution, the atmosphere grows ominous. Is this a promising start for the unlikeliest of friends, or a disastrous, even dangerous one-night misfire both men might regret forever? Peoria is a funny, poignant, and ultimately hopeful pas de deux between two stranded men in an ever-evolving American landscape.

After years of struggle in a rural community, the loss of a distant husband, and watching her only daughter marry and move to another time zone, Greta Stumpf Morton finally has a shot at a life once only dreamt of. With funds from the sale of her husband's land — vacant but precious property long a bone of contention in her ebbing marriage — Greta's bought a shiny new home and decorated it with the zeal of a young bride. With pale sandalwood furnishings and the blinding yellow kitchen coveted since childhood, the pristine colonial is a symbol of better times in her golden years. But as a late-life reward for immeasurable compromises, the house is a Pyrrhic victory. Greta is desolate. She rattles around the too-empty rooms haunted by past mistakes and sadly estranged relations. Even the bucolic new subdivision proves jarring; the people next door have taken in an aging relative whose dementia-fueled wailing unnerves Greta, a portentous preview of her own lonely twilight years.

Only one bright spot has loomed large on Greta's horizon: A visit by her daughter and her successful husband, Nick. Yet even that promise of a joyful reunion has turned sour. On the day of their arrival, appendicitis has landed daughter Kate in the local hospital. Greta is forced to entertain her son-in-law by herself. It's midnight when they return, exhausted — and more at one another's throats than ever. For Greta and "Nicky" have been oil and water since he married into the family (he's a designer clotheshorse and drives a vintage '73 Masarati) and for the first time faces a future as uncertain as Greta's once was. Nick, a self-made Italian-American with an acid tongue, has long felt judged by Greta's rigid, heartland-based beliefs. And Greta has always felt belittled by Nick's arrogance and barbed put-downs. Battle lines are drawn: Each sees the other as implacable, controlling, and narcissistic.

And so as Nick's housewarming wine is uncorked — critically, without Kate on hand to referee — Greta and Nick face an inescapable showdown. Greta has always felt that the brutally manipulative Nick changed her daughter, alienating Kate from her values and family. Nick has long resented his "Suocera's" condemnation of his elite pretensions — and role in tamping down the ambitions of the brilliant but under-achieving Kate.

Nevertheless, as Nick cranks up Greta's new stereo and beckons the one-time ballroom dance instructor to show him some steps … toxic competition gives way to an underlying mutual dependence — and more than a hint of attraction. As buried revelations are aired, two adversaries find cold comfort in one another's company.

“Disturbing shenanigans. The title character hosts an excruciating reunion with her son-in-law after checking her daughter into the hospital with appendicitis. Greta is lonely and bitter, Nick a macho metrosexual … but the tension in her living room isn’t just a stereotypical in-law feud. Corley’s high-octane dialogue has a muscularity that recalls Aaron Sorkin’s rapid-fire repartee, and his characters are well-drawn and complex. Richly entertaining, the emotional journey is affecting … an impressive feat.”

Kerry Lengel
The Arizona Republic, 1/23/2011

As distinctive parade sounds ebb and a light November rain falls, an eccentric woman in a black vinyl raincoat and fedora snaps a succession of photos, mesmerized by the sight of the annual Thanksgiving balloons being folded and stored for another year. Watching from the shadows with a keen eye focused on her almost reverential appreciation is a young man in his 20s. He finally speaks, quickly making it clear he's almost as informed about parade history as she. Within moments Vivian and Charlie recognize one another, their history a decade earlier instantly shorthanded. For Vivian was once Charlie's beloved babysitter, and always promised to take the boy to Herald Square to witness the less-observed deflation; to a puppeteer and artist like Viv, rather than the blowing-up, the balloons' entry into hibernation is the more compelling ritual. Yet as these former pals catch-up, a traumatic event in their past and its life-altering ramification must be aired. "Deflating" is about a loss of innocence and the healing power of art and time.

Within the walls of a secluded suburban New Jersey monastery, an intrepid young nun boldly challenges intra-order politics to earn a chance at a highly coveted task: making hand-milled soap for the soon-to-visit Pope. Internecine power play ensues, about scents and sense.

In a middle school parking lot, a father aggressively ambushes his daughter's English teacher over a grade given for a provocative book report on Anne Frank's Diary, with life-altering consequences for both. When helicopter parenting crosses a startling new line.

In dingy eerily darkened fringe theater on a chilly autumn night, a frustrated young man holding as yet unsuccessful auditions for his new, hush-hush, highly-experimental play is suddenly forced to read an aggressive and oddly mysterious young actress, one with preternatural knowledge of the script's truly shocking content. What follows is a psychological cat and mouse, until it’s clear that there are no accidents. Even in the New York theater.

inspired by a recent two-character play that, with cheeky insouciance and kinky eroticism, caught the lurid imagination of critics and theatergoers alike. "Hansel in Lederhosen" is a kind of …. what? … homage … yeah, that’s it, “homage!” … to that now popular other piece.

On an early Sunday morning in October, two women geographically miles apart grapple with sudden states of emotional paralysis, each haunted by troubling dreams of trips along a desolate stretch of two-lane rural blacktop. For Geneva and Katy, an estranged mother and daughter long separated by traumatic circumstances but today anticipating a high-stakes reunion, unbidden Rashomon-like accounts of both poignant and terrifying past events on NY Route 13 create palpable states of anxiety, and ultimately inspire new resiliency.

Two childhood friends now in their 20’s hitchhike to California's Mt. Shasta to participate in 1987's collective New Age epiphany, "The Harmonic Convergence." For Oregon-raised Ruth, a restless library worker, and Darley, a wannabe dancer, each facing recent, soul-deflating crises, an impromptu 11th hour pilgrimage to a millennia-old natural Mecca provides a chance to sort through much unfinished business. A wild card presents itself within minutes: Travis, a devilishly handsome if visibly haunted 30-something Virginian, in a just-purchased ’79 Ford pick-up after a mysterious sojourn in Minnesota and a mind-blowing final leg of his journey west transporting a dying homeless woman. A one-time divinity student turned nomadic photojournalist, the charismatic Travis is eager to share his French wine, gourmet snacks and boom box spewing classical music, and to seek metaphysical bonding. Will this young couple prove to be the troubled Travis's saviors – or something more complicated, even dangerous? As the golden day gives way to a night of 'round-the-campfire flirtation and wine-fueled revelation, the trio shakily proceeds on a nocturnal hike to a remote alpine lake. Beneath a starlit sky, need segues to desperation. Before long, a convivial new three-way friendship darkens past the point of no return, inspiring a brutal, take no prisoners tug of war. As each member of the triangle stakes a fantasy-driven claim on deeply personal emotional grounds, three wounded lives all turn the sharpest of corners A story of inexorable obsession, both spiritual and physical, "Convergence" is about the many forms of survival and the equal number of unexpected avenues to salvation.

Over five spring mornings depicted in short blackout scenes, a questioning young woman creates slowly escalating contention with an affable commuter train conductor. Initially to stimulate agreeable small talk, their exchanges intensify, centered around her unbidden appraisal of the shifting demographics in a New Jersey Revolutionary town; the young woman takes umbrage that the quiet berg she loved in the halcyon days of her childhood has slowly become unrecognizable: it’s now unknowable thanks to visible diversity. She is the unwelcome interloper rather than the “imported” shopkeepers and residents, their presence challenging the young woman’s long-held beliefs about geographic and racial privilege. Though the conductor attempts to disengage from the increasingly tense conversations, the young woman presses relentlessly, finally directing her diatribes at an unapproachable young man who silently traverses her car every morning. She pulls the man into the imbroglio with the hapless conductor, with a startling twist and devastating consequences. A small canvas tale of the cruelty in entitlement, "Five Trips to Morristown" is a snapshot of an anxious, threatened swath of America, and the desperation defining their outrage.

For a politically progressive young suburban couple (music teacher entering grad school, successful Manhattan paralegal), new neighbors in the recently renovated apartment one floor below stir up unexpected anxiety and dread. To Cole and Meg’s astonishment, their often absent, Albanian-born building superintendent, heretofore relegated to far smaller quarters on the back, has miraculously engineered a move for his family into a coveted (and rent-free) six room, pre-war beauty. Everything Meg and particularly the shaken, palpably threatened Cole have long embraced about immigration, cultural assimilation, work ethic and entitlement is suddenly called into question. Yet for Skënder and Gentiana, who escaped their homeland’s financial collapse in the late 90s, a post-millennial flavor of the American dream finally seems within their grasp. As the starkly contrasted lives of the members of this quartet collide, self-interest trumps ideology, until a final devastating standoff in the psychological turf war, with life-altering implications.

Finalist, Premiere Stages New Play Festival Spring 2015

On a rainy spring night in rural Virginia in 1961, a teenage son plies his exhausted and beleaguered mother with black coffee and forced small talk, desperate to keep her awake during the final, heart-stopping moments of his favorite annual event, the Oscar telecast. The country is on edge over Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, but to Buddy, another crisis is more immediate: Will Elizabeth Taylor, recuperating from near death, win Best Actress? For isolated Buddy, a rudderless student with a singular obsession if an unfocused dream, Hollywood’s biggest night offers a sliver of a glimpse of an entirely different life. Yet pragmatic Nora Lee can only fret about her son’s prospects and perhaps, ironically, her own. "After the Hersholt" is about the surprising inspiration in winning, even when only framed on a black and white TV screen.

On a snowy Sunday, Riley, a bored, wealthy almost 18-year-old returning from a college look-see with her tutor and confidante, Helena, holes up in the corner of a turnpike rest stop, next to a 30ish traveler, Nicholas. Overhearing Riley’s conspicuous disinterest in the niche school just visited (for the mildly learning disabled), Nicholas offers his own fresher-brewed Starbucks and, to help Riley: to connect her with the professional services of a college search coach. After he leaves, Riley impulsively decides to text him, yearning to demonstrate her cool. Despite contentiously argued reservations, beleaguered Helena drafts a wittily poetic thank-you on Riley’s behalf. Thus begins a three-week volley of pen pal-ish exchanges, expanding from terse texts to ruminative emails. Though innocuous, the communiqués grow increasingly introspective. Riley’s forced to share musings that match the probing if gentlemanly Nicholas’s, drawn into an epistolary friendship with a man ten years her senior. Her need to self-present as deeper, more intellectually curious inspires Cyrano-like dynamics: only Helena, a borderline impoverished, wannabe young adult novelist, can find suitably evocative, intimately revealing words. Nicholas rashly arranges a secret get-together with the besotted teenager. Covert plans are finalized, until a cascading series of showdowns raises genuinely startling stakes – and questions: who is driving this trio’s internecine communication? What’s the calculated agenda? Tackling class envy and privilege, Cotillion presents a provocative, impromptu triangle of slowly shifting allegiances, illuminating a damaged young woman’s belated coming of age via an unexpected ally.

"Ragged Horatio" is a partial biography of Horatio Alger, Jr., covering the middle 20 of his 67 years. We first meet bookish, brooding young Horatio living in Marlborough, Massachusetts, struggling with an unresolved, long-distance romantic infatuation with his former Harvard roommate. In order to be closer to his obsession – and curry favor with his father, a minister – he returns to Boston and enrolls in the Harvard Divinity School. Feverishly distracted, he stalks and is rebuffed by his roommate; his academic failure leaves Horatio without a vocation or – a lifelong quest – his father’s approval. Originally trained as a schoolmaster, he privately tutors young men, often fighting strong attractions. To flee his own desires, he re-enrolls at Harvard, completes his divinity studies, and with adventurous young male relatives, sets sail for Europe. While in Italy, young Horatio meets Charles Edward Paine, a dashing, guileless American soldier, and with him spends a dream-like two-day sojourn on the Isle of Capri. During a row-boated nocturnal expedition into the infamous blue grotto, the wine-fueled Paine strips off his uniform and invites Horatio to swim naked with him in the flickering azure light of the underground cave. The flirtation’s intensity is acknowledged but finally unrequited. A haunted Horatio returns to the Civil War-torn homeland and begins to pen poetry and fiction. A doomed Union soldier, Joe Dean, captures his fancy, but Horatio resists his impulses and buries himself in his search for a ministerial position. In 1865, he is finally made pastor of the First Unitarian Church of Brewster, Mass. One rainy afternoon, an older teenaged boy comes to Horatio for spiritual counseling. Stealthily sipping brandy, Horatio is beset with unbidden flashes of Charles Paine and the fraught night in the blue grotto; within minutes, a seductive move changes Horatio’s trajectory forever. After only a year and a half as a pastor, Horatio is run out of Brewster on a rail, for “the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys.”

Shamed and destitute, Horatio moves to New York City, where he develops a coolly detached fascination with street urchins and their underworld. Advised by an enterprising publisher, Aaron K. Loring, he begins to create a body of work that exploits his new observations: a series of juvenile novels venerating the underclass boy’s plight and his station-transcending industry and rewarded ambition. All are sentimental tales involving young men who benefit from the kindly ministrations of a charming male mentor. As Horatio inches steadily closer to middle age, he becomes an urban loner, his literary re-invention unable to fill the growing emptiness inside. Ever seeking his judgmental father’s approval, he uses his new wealth to take his family abroad for an extended tour. In Vienna, his brush with a striking male couple in the throes of a covertly erotic outing reminds Horatio of all he’s missed yet cannot justify existing in himself. On the return home, Charles Pratt, a sharp-tongued student, attracts Horatio’s attention. Their provocative encounter on the ship’s deck is witnessed by the elderly Reverend Alger. The result is an overdue and life-altering father-son showdown. Will Horatio Alger, respected author – with an unformed queer identity – make peace with his demons, familial and personal? In the sea air and only a day from port, Horatio finally confronts who he is, and what years of subjugation and suppression have cost him.