Erik Patterson

An encounter between a white, gay playwright and his black, straight “shirtless maid” goes disastrously wrong when signals are misinterpreted, lines crossed. HANDJOB explores the aftermath of their meeting, as it reveals deep layers of discrimination, discord, and discontent among people who should be on the same side. How do you know when you’ve gone too far if no one can agree where the boundaries should be?

A paraplegic woman plays outrageous power games to get something she desperately wants in this dark, twisty, sexy play that takes office politics to new extremes. 

It's 2000. An era when HIV hides from sight behind the closet door. It's an emotional AIDS cocktail of love, sex, and death that pours forth in a dark ride through Internet chat rooms, Hollywood back rooms and nightclub bathrooms. When Ted moves to Los Angeles from the midwest, he's finally able to be himself. But when he has his heart broken, he makes a risky choice to try to win his boyfriend back...with devastating consequences.

How far will you go for love?

How much will you forgive?

Hypochondriac mother Pamela has gradually retreated into a frightening--but oddly soothing--world of fear and illness. The people in her life are also sick in their own ways: David, tired of carrying the weight of both parents, becomes entranced with his sister-in-law, Carla, who has just managed to kick her coke habit and has taken up God. Carla has also kicked her husband, Pamela’s brother Gary, out of the house--so now he’s living with his sister and her family. Even though Gary is still hooked on drugs and alcohol, he manages to see more clearly through the haze of addiction than his sister, who’s so obsessed with her anxieties about disease that she’s unable to ease her own son’s fears when he is diagnosed with leukemia. That’s a lot of sickness going around--and all of their lives are beginning to buckle under the strains of real and imagined illness.

Will 10-year-old Michael get lost in the shuffle, or will his family come through for him when he needs them most?

Part One of An American Family Trilogy

Elliot has gotten lost in a world of sex workers--late night house calls from hustlers and phone calls with call girls. Becky is torn between two worlds. Her day job as a stripper is nothing compared to the role-playing required for her main profession: raising fifteen-year-old Rose, a Goth-obsessed girl who wants nothing to do with her mother. And then there’s their youngest sister Little B, whose stripped away every piece of herself until all she has left is her biggest teenage obsession: she now thinks she’s the Icelandic pop singer Bjork. Their shared past holds unspeakable horrors.

YELLOW FLESH/ALABASTER ROSE follows these siblings as, after fifteen years of estrangement, they're finally able to come back together and begin the healing process.

Part two of An American Family Trilogy

A gay clown. Two lesbian strippers. A pregnant Goth teen. A deadbeat dad. A horny mother. And a girl who thinks she's Bjork...but she's starting to suspect otherwise. Part 2 in the ongoing tragicomic lives of the Silverstein family.

(Note: The play can be performed in repertory with the rest of the American Family Trilogy, but it can also stand alone. It's not necessary to be familiar with Part One to be able to follow Part Two.)

Our lives can change in an instant. One moment you're getting engaged, and a few surreal moments later you're sitting among a group of strangers in a hospital waiting room, praying that your fiance will survive a brain aneurysm. At least, that's what happened to Ada. While waiting for Frank to wake up from a coma, she meets Julia, Paul, and Josh, who are waiting for their mom to recover as well. A tenuous friendship is born.

I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND takes a look at life, death, and recovery, and what all of that means when you step back out of the waiting room and try your hand at living again...

A young Japanese woman is haunted by the loss of two men: her father, whom she barely knew, and cult novelist Richard Brautigan, whom she's never met. Akiko plays out her father/Richard Brautigan fantasies with a new man nearly every night. Each one of her relationships begins in a bar and ends in a bedroom, and she's never satisfied.

She's so lost...can she ever be found?

Tonseisha: The Man Who Abandoned the World.

A play written mostly in haiku verse.

An agoraphobic woman happily shows her body to strangers online -- but
she won't let you know what's going on in her head. A gay escort falls
in love with a client -- but he still makes the guy pay for it. An
unsatisfied housewife finally pursues her dreams of acting -- but her
only experience is pretending to have a happy marriage. A husband
tries to satisfy his wife's sexual urges -- but he'd rather be with
another man.

These four seeming strangers are connected in ways they could never
imagine. But everything will be illuminated in a heartbreaking game of
Truth or Dare, on a night when their lives will be irrevocably changed...

A late night hook-up. A moment of misunderstanding that leads to a deeper connection. A loose adaptation of Kafta's The Metamorphosis. Aka: sex, death, and cockroaches.