Barbara Blatner

YEARS OF SKY chronicles the troubled but enduring love of a biracial couple whose love is bound to the Kennedy assassinations and nearly thirty years of American politics.

Part 1: 1963/Time on Fire. The grassy knoll: In love 17-year-olds David and Stace meet for the first time in public to see President Kennedy pass by, and scheme to spend their first night together that night. Stace wants David to rendezvous at her house; he claims she doesn’t grasp the risks of his traveling to her white suburb. She finally agrees to meet at their usual spot behind a movie theatre and David, moved, proclaims he'll come to her house. Believing JFK brings a new era of racial equality, anticipating a night in each other's arms, they defiantly hold each other as the motorcade approaches.

Part 2: 1968/Path of the Sun. The morning of RFK’s death: David, committed to Black Power politics, at his father Ben’s Dallas electrical shop pines for Stace who we learn he abandoned on the knoll after JFK was shot. Ben accuses David of hypocrisy for wanting “that white girl.” Stace bursts in, distraught over RFK; her real mission is to get David back. David thwarts reconciliation by trying to hasten her into bed. When Stace confronts him about why he left her, he insults her. Weeping, Stace rushes out the door, as David faces his father’s wrath.

Part 3: 1992/Years of Sky. The day the Rodney King verdict is announced in LA: David and Stace, both divorced, meet for the first time in twenty-four years “of the same Dallas sky” in a hotel room overlooking Dealey Plaza. David confesses he never got over her, wants to try again, but Stace’s anger about their past erupts. David challenges her white privilege; she demands he explain why he left her on the knoll. They fight their way to understanding and reaffirm their bond as race riots explode in LA.

ACT 1: Princess Mary Tudor, passionate Catholic, daughter of King Henry VIII and the late Katherine of Aragon, is cut by her rejecting father from her claim to the English throne; Mary refused to support the King’s divorce from her mother, his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn, and his Protestant control of the English church.

Chester, Mary’s loyal servant, brings to Mary a “crazy,” starving, compulsively rhyming lame girl named Jane who makes Mary laugh and relates to her anguish about cruel fathers. Most importantly, Jane predicts Mary will be Queen someday. Mary keeps Jane as her “Foole,” the first and only female jester in the English court. Jane becomes a skilled rhymer and Mary’s confidante. Jane is hurt when Mary rejects her as a friend, reminding Jane she is but a servant. But when Mary is forced on penalty of death to sign a document relinquishing her claim to be Queen someday, Jane secures her seer’s status with Mary, predicting all (actual) events that will lead to Mary being crowned.

ACT 2: Seventeen years later, as Jane predicted, Mary is Queen, the first female to govern England. But now Jane now tells Mary truths Mary does not want to hear. She warns Queen Mary against marrying Philip of Spain, but Mary enters into an emotionally disastrous and politically damaging marriage. When Jane humiliates Mary in front of the court by publicizing Mary’s false pregnancy, Mary banishes Jane from the palace. Chester, Jane’s perpetual enemy, names Jane as a pagan infidel and intends to burn Jane at the stake with the numerous Protestant “heretics” Mary put to death. At the last minute, Mary lets Jane go.

Three years pass with no contact between Jane and Mary. Mary, dying of influenza, calls Jane to her deathbed. The two women ask for forgiveness of each other before Mary dies.

Thanksgiving night 2006: In a clearing in the Arizona desert, two years after his honorable discharge from duty in Afghanistan, Kirt reenacts in a full-blown, drug-induced hallucination the events of Thanksgiving night 2004 when he and his best friend Jim were ambushed by Taliban in the Hindi Kush foothills and Kirt “accidentally” killed Jim. Kirt, who has suppressed his memory of this event, is driven to relive it and face the truth of his history.

In Kirt’s reenactment, he and Jim fight, and Jim runs off into the darkness. The ghost of Kirt’s Vietnam War hero father Erwin appears, pushes Kirt to avenge a mysterious betrayal that occurred in Arizona before Kirt and Jim went to war. So begins Kirt’s journey into the deep past where, with his parents Erwin and Emily, he plays out conflicts that lie at the core of the family’s unhappiness.

Reliving the ambush, Kirt moves toward a revelatory, near-tragic end in the desert, as Erwin’s ghost compels him to remember how Jim replaced him in Emily’s affections. As past and present converge, Kirt wounds an innocent passerby, Larsen, believing him to be enemy Taliban. Remembering that he shot Jim, Kirt moves to cut from his chest his tattoo of Chochise, the Apache chief whose “truth and goodness” he strongly identifies with. At the last moment, Lisbet and Emily rush into the clearing and save Kirt from self-destruction.

ACT 1: SUN.

Marilyn Monroe, dreaming, is conflicted between continuing with her made up onscreen, eternal “Marilyn” persona, and her “real,” mortal, aging self. “I have made a desert of my life,” she says and, magically, finds herself alone in a terrifying desert. She encounters two very aged Blind Persons who have developed supernatural sensory powers to survive but who have forgotten that they love each other. Offended by what she sees as their ugly agedness, and by their imperviousness to her beauty and fame, she dismisses them.

She spies a handsome Miner (Death) and employs “Marilyn” wiles to attract him so he will take her out of the desert. When the Miner saves Marilyn from a rattlesnake he secretly summons, she falls for him and agrees to stay so that he can feed “his mother the desert.” The Miner hopes that union with the stunningly alive Marilyn will allow him, finally, to “feel love” as humans do. Marilyn and the Miner encounter the Blind Persons and command them to build their desert love nest.

ACT 2: DUSK.

The Blind Persons officiate at Marilyn’s desert wedding to the Miner. She grows increasingly thirsty but instead of offering water, the Miner promises that if she “crosses over” – i.e., allows herself to die - at midnight, his “mother the desert” will bring her back as his forever young immortal bride. Seduced by the thought of an eternal “Marilyn,” she stops drinking water. But when she saves the female Blind Person from the rattlesnake and is moved when the Blind Persons “see” beauty inside her, she takes the water they offer and begins to admire them and helps them recognize their devotion to each other. The Miner leaves Marilyn, dangerously dehydrated, to die on top of a mesa, but she now resists death, and with the Blind Persons digs a hole in the sand to find water…

ACT 3: MOON.
… but finds none. Delirious under the moon, she hallucinates a nightmarish vaudeville that shows her that if she chooses to be “real,” she must relinquish glamour and fame, age naturally and grow inwardly. She rejects the Miner and his demand that she die to her mortal life, and wrestles with him to save the Blind Persons; the Miner becomes a vulture and flies away. The male Blind Person dies, but not before he reunites in love with the his partner. Finding an inner self through acts of love and self-love, Marilyn claims life and intrinsic worth, and strikes out into the desert with the surviving Blind Person to find water and save them both.

In WHITE ASHES, a tragi-comedy, the madness of history is alive in the riotous psyche of a woman striving to extricate herself from incest.

Esther Golden, on leave from White Ash Psychiatric Hospital, visits her father Abe and mysteriously sequestered, off-limits mother. When Abe, with whom Esther has an unmentionable sexual relationship, says he intends to bring her home for good, she escapes into habitual madness, claiming to be a victim of the Nazis who killed her grandparents. Promising to bring Esther home, Abe drives her back to White Ash where she resumes a love-hate relationship with John, a hilariously guitar-slinging inmate. At White Ash, Elinor, an irreverent street person who has landed on the ward, promises emotional refuge to Esther, and seduces John.

A new surrogate “family” of Esther, Elinor and John forms, but Elinor soon runs away from the institution, an abandonment that provokes Esther to relive her relationship with her mother. She attempts suicide, but Katy saves her. Abe at home, agitated when Esther avoids his phone calls to her at White Ash, is flooded with Holocaust memories.

Pulling himself together, Abe picks up Esther at White Ash. When the two arrive at Abe’s apartment, Esther, identifies Abe as “the Nazi,” and stabs him with a kitchen knife. Entering her mother’s room at last, she finds it empty except for prewar photographs of her parents. Dying, ABE confesses that his wife killed herself – “the Nazis did it” – years before. Esther, clutching her mother’s photo to her heart, acknowledges that “war may be over.”

HEARTSONG

A Family Musical

Music and Lyrics by Barbara Blatner
Book by Barbara Blatner and Lin Snider

The Heartsong Band, a diverse group of middle-school musical instruments who make music by listening to each other's hearts, overcomes the lures and pitfalls of promised solo celebrity and reclaims the empathy that is the source of their joyful sound.

The band’s cohesion is threatened when the conniving talent agency, AJBC (Always Judge a Book by its Cover) undermines Heartsong for its own gain with phony promises of fame and fortune. When AJBC sets up competitive auditions to select the one “star,” hostility, bullying and loss of empathy among band members ensues.

Ultimately, the instruments realize that their connections and unique way of making music are more important than winning at each other’s expense. Reclaiming each other and shared stardom, they help the CEO of AJBC and his assistant awaken to their long-lost joy in engaging with others.

Cage explores our relationships with non-humans and with each other in the shadow of the climate emergency.

Thirteen-year-old George, obsessed with the ecological crisis, anguished about her parents’ divorce, needs her mother. Bobby, furious at George’s abusive father, overwhelmed with single parenthood, cleans compulsively and distances herself from George.

George catches a large black rat snake near the Hudson River and brings it home as a pet. Bobby demands that George release the snake, but George refuses and further provokes Bobby by enlisting her father to help her build a snake house in her bedroom. When George tells Bobby she might want to live with her father, Bobby’s anger explodes. She reveals difficult things to George about the divorce, grieves in her room and thus begins her journey back to her daughter.

The snake escapes in the house and George feels her own grief about the divorce and her inability to keep her pets alive. When the snake turns up in Bobby’s laundry basket, George realizes that keeping the unhappy snake enacts the “human supremacy” she accuses her mother of. Having won her mother back, George lets the snake go at the river.

Cage explores our relationships with non-humans and with each other in the shadow of the climate emergency.

Thirteen-year-old George, obsessed with the ecological crisis, anguished about her parents’ divorce, needs her mother. Bobby, furious at George’s abusive father, overwhelmed with single parenthood, cleans compulsively and distances herself from George.

George catches a large black rat snake near the Hudson River and brings it home as a pet. Bobby demands that George release the snake, but George refuses and further provokes Bobby by enlisting her father to help her build a snake house in her bedroom. When George tells Bobby she might want to live with her father, Bobby’s anger explodes. She reveals difficult things to George about the divorce, grieves in her room and thus begins her journey back to her daughter.

The snake escapes in the house and George feels her own grief about the divorce and her inability to keep her pets alive. When the snake turns up in Bobby’s laundry basket, George realizes that keeping the unhappy snake enacts the “human supremacy” she accuses her mother of. Having won her mother back, George lets the snake go at the river.

LIGHT

The Christmas/Chanukah holidays; workaholic scholar Anna, recently left by her husband and officially divorcing, has withdrawn from the world and from her adult children, Casey and Paul.

Casey, a medical school student home for the holidays, tries vainly to get Anna to take her head out of her books and connect. Paul, Casey’s older brother, a peripatetic poet-songwriter, shows up suddenly and refuses to speak at all. To poke the bear that is Anna, he pulls from his backpack a menorah given to him by his father who, Paul reports, left Anna because he, too, felt second to her work.

The menorah unleashes Anna’s rage and grief about her divorce, opening the door to more realness with her kids.

The family comes together in their new configuration, as Casey and Paul light the menorah and Anna joins in to eat a meal of latkes.