James Marlow

SETTING
A 1910 hunting lodge converted into a residence on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts; it has remained rustic. The set contains an old-fashioned plank table and chairs, an ancient sink. Only a large, new refrigerator and the lights reveal updates to the 1910 lodge. All action takes place in this setting.
The side walls hold several small paintings. The fourth wall holds the virtual painting by Dietermann. When characters study the painting, therefore, they are staring into the audience. The (unseen) painting shows an unusual pose, with the model leaning forward, her long hair hiding much of her foreshortened body, with her bare knees foremost. Inasmuch as the virtual portrait faces the stage, it is as if the painting were studying the characters in the play even as they study it. Perhaps a giant frame will need to be hung downstage to assist the illusion.
Present time or recent past.
TIME
SYNOPSIS
At her “last” birthday party, painter and model Helen invites all those close to her heart to celebrate at her place on Cuttyhunk Island. She hopes to bequeath her only valuable possession, a painting by the world-famous artist Karl Dietermann, to the loved one whom it will do the most good. Since everyone has a different hole in their lives, everyone has a different idea on how to dispose of the painting. Two uninvited guests add to the uncertainty, including Dietermann himself and his estranged son, Pablo, both of whom claim to own the picture.

What lies in front (of the house) is a car with a dent where a bicyclist was hit and killed.
Eric has been immobilized for weeks by his grief and guilt. Billie, his wife, to provoke
him to react, hires a man, Bill Kane, to work on the yard in Eric’s sight. She did not know that Kane has just been paroled after twelve years in prison for killing his stepfather. Encountering first Kane, and then Lawrence Thurston, the father of the bicyclist, Eric makes many discoveries about himself, human nature and the nature of the world. Only with the help of other characters, including his teen-age daughter Nicole, can Eric hope to find the courage to surmount his dire view of himself and the world.

What lies in front (of the house) is a car with a dent where a bicyclist was hit and killed.
Eric has been immobilized for weeks by his grief and guilt. Billie, his wife, to provoke
him to react, hires a man, Bill Kane, to work on the yard in Eric’s sight. She did not know that Kane has just been paroled after twelve years in prison for killing his stepfather. Encountering first Kane, and then Lawrence Thurston, the father of the bicyclist, Eric makes many discoveries about himself, human nature and the nature of the world. Only with the help of other characters, including his teen-age daughter Nicole, can Eric hope to find the courage to surmount his dire view of himself and the world.

After a futile and frustrating experience in a modern American retail store, angry old man Fred returns home to recover in bed. In the middle of the night, a romantic young couple drive their car through his bedroom wall. After suffering ageist remarks, and learning that his house was at fault for the accident, he is given a ticket by the police for a motor vehicle accident. His son and daughter follow the next morning, and show Fred a way to avoid the frustrations of modern life, but soon after the young couple in the accident return. They are followed by a New Age guru who wishes to grow pot in the damaged bedroom; his idea reaches criminal elements and an ex-con arrives to buy all the illegal product. He pursued by federal agents investigating the illegal growing and distribution of pot, but the NARCs are followed by the agents of several different federal agencies, all of which drive Fred to voluntarily confess to anything, for it seems only jail is a refuge from the madness he is surrounded by in America.

Just graduated with a nursing degree, Suzannah Logan intends to make her
marriage to Art Frazier perfect by assembling all the people she loves and is beholden to.
Adopted at three months, Suzie had never met her birth mother, Judith, and after finding her, she invited her and her boyfriend, Truck, to the wedding. Judith arrives days early with Truck, who appears to be a drug mule. When they move in on the Logans, Suzannah must mediate between her three mothers, the biological Judith, the adoptive Carolyn, and the prospective mother-in-law, Louise. From her desire to want it all, Suzannah risks losing it all.

When Lev leads his terror team into a new city he is confronted by his former lover, who would teach him that love is the greater revolution than violence. Adapted from a 1919 Russian novel with the knowledge that terrorism continues.

When Marcy, who is Chinese-American, learns that her husband, Michael is leaving her, she acts to protect the two children, 17, and 20. She plans to start school and get on with her life. However, her husband is hospitalized in a car accident in which the "other" woman is killed. There is no place for him to recover except in Marcy's home. The whole
family must learn new relationships to each other.

When Marc accompanies this girlfriend Sarah home for Thanksgiving, the ulterior motive is to rescue Sarah's sister Bonnie from the sect that his the Prophets household. The tenets of the sect or so absurd, Marc believes it will be easy to accomplish. However, obstacles appear: Bonnie takes a sudden liking to Marc,
upsetting Sarah, the made Uncle who believes he was Gen. Custer in a previous life threatens Marc, and the two sisters begin to accommodate themselves the household again. Only an explostion in the basement upsets everyone's plans.

Aging and angry Vietnam Veteran Chaz is convinced his son’s autism and his
daughter’s refusal to have children is a curse for his actions in the war. He
has never told his wife all his secrets about the war for fear of losing her love.
When she finds a photograph of a Vietnamese woman and child, it appears
that the curse will have its ultimate result in destroying his marriage as well.

When Carl, 18, and Simon, 16, fail in their effort to save the family farm by robbing a bank, only Carl is caught and sent to jail. Thirty years later, Simon returns from California, after a successful career. What he plans to do, the kind of justice he seeks, is uncertain to him. But others have their own ideas of what his purposes are, his father, him mother, his sister, his sister-in-law, his niece, and his jilted lover. His own intentions develop as he settles in to his home again.

Members of a bi-racial family of Sioux and white attempt in different ways to come to terms not only with the community but with the demands of a mother who expects them to carry on her father's legacy.

For fourteen years, ever since Hermione left him, Jake Ponte has run the inherited Scene of Dreams Bar and Grill, which he has renamed the Tchoupitoulas because it was not his dream in life. He had to run the bar when his father died and his mother had no other means of support and his older brother had vanished. Now he wants to sell it in order to do what he has always wanted to do, to read and write. Before he can sell, however, three people arrive. A descendant of Marie Laveau, Francine Glapion sells ju-jus and powders, including Come-Back-Oil, which she claims is sanctified by the Santeria orisa. She has come to do business with Jake’s friend and the cook, Elias, who also wants his woman back. Jake does not believe in the magic she sells, but Elias does. Francine believes she can help Jake. Next to arrive is his ne’er-do-well brother Bernard X., who now fancies himself an artist. He arrives straight from a half-way house and plans to use the space in the rear of the kitchen to build a float for the next Mardi Gras parade. Fearful of being forced to stay again, Jake calls a real estate agent. But when Jake’s ex-lover, Hermione, also arrives, she complicate the situation even more. Jake wants to leave but the others need him to stay in the Tchoupitoulas Bar and Grill in New Orleans.

Stranger on the Red Horse
SYNOPSIS
Stranger is based on the very spare 1919 (out of copyright) novella The Pale Horse by the Russian terrorist, Boris Savinkov. The titles of both the novel and the play are drawn from the reference to the four horsemen in the book of Revelations.
The play details the attempt in 1905 by a cell of five people to assassinate an important Regional governor. The cell is led by Lev, who is a cold and calculating anarchist. He admits to being more on the side of Smerdiakov than on that of Christ. Everything is permissible. Colleague Vanya is a Christ-haunted assassin, who knows that to kill is a very great sin. He wishes to live or to die for love but suffers from the belief that he has not the strength to do so. Svetlana is the bomb-maker; she loves Lev but is unable to get him to love her. Who does love Svetlana but in vain is Heinrich, a radical ex-student, who seeks to live by his principles and bring justice to the world. The last member of the cell is Fyodor, an ex-peasant who, after the death of his wife, wants vengeance on all those in power. Behind them is Andrei Petrovich, much older than the others, who is the liaison with the Central Committee, and its contradictory messages: kill, don’t kill, kill more vigorously. Their dictum is that political murder is the only permissible murder.
Finally there is the beautiful Elena, 20, always dressed in white; she is the reason Lev chose this town for the act of terrorism. They were in love the previous year, but she has since married another man, an Army officer. Elena loves both men, and sleeps with both men, and wishes only to be happy in life while it is possible. Lev demands she choose between them; it is shameful for her to keep both men in her life. She jeers at his illogic: “You say there should be no limit on murder, but there should be a limit on love, Lev?” Her view of life confounds Lev’s cold logic and strong will. Eventually, a duel with the husband makes the choice that Elena refused to make. But that he would kill for personal instead of rational political reasons forces Lev to examine his life and motives, and this undermines his belief in the purity of his nihilism and loosens his grip on a sure purpose for his life.

Cynthia Harrington’s son, Frank, has had problems since his father and mother divorced. After he has loses both his job and his girl-friend, he becomes even more of a problem to his father, sister, mother, and the police. Although advised by her daughter and her ex-husband, not to let him move back in with her, as a mother she cannot deny him, and he moves in. After many provocations, including selling drugs, she throws him out, whereupon he camps under the bridge she drives across everyday. He thus becomes a troll, and draws public attention to his situation. The same people now ask Cynthia to take him back into her home. What will she do now?

When second wife, ROXANNE learns that her husband FRED plans to divorce her, she must use all her guile to make sure her three children are not disinherited, even at the risk of alienating them from her.

Freud never said truer words than when he said the patient always gets something from his illness. The same is true of resentment. In the world of Accidents the major character. Ruth, has not, as most of us have not, articulated the benefits she derives from her cuddled anger.
Over the years since the accident that took her elder son’s life, a distance has grown between Ruth and her husband, and between Ruth and her surviving son. She is aware enough of the rift to wish it gone, but the truth is that it is more than compensated the gain she achieves. The benefit is even more deeply rooted than family.
If Ruth can, against all the facts, keep hold of the idea that the accident which killed her oldest son was no accident, if she can secretly hold on to the idea that her husband is responsible for the accident which everyone—from her youngest son, her husband, and the police investigators—agrees he is not at fault for, then she can keep hold of a belief in the nature of the world that prevents the plague of randomness from descending upon her, a plague which undercuts all meaning in life. The guilt of another obviates meaninglessness. In that way, her son’s death acquires meaning, and even a dark meaning is better than no meaning at all.

When Marc accompanies this girlfriend Sarah home for Thanksgiving, the ulterior motive is to rescue Sarah's sister Bonnie from the sect that his the Prophets household. The tenets of the sect or so absurd, Marc believes it will be easy to accomplish. However, obstacles appear: Bonnie takes a sudden liking to Marc,
upsetting Sarah, the made Uncle who believes he was Gen. Custer in a previous life threatens Marc, and the two sisters begin to accommodate themselves the household again. Only an explostion in the basement upsets everyone's plans.