David Simpatico

That Hellbound Train (blues opera)
Music by Lisa DeSpain
Adaptation of the short story, That Hellbound Train, by Robert Bloch
Cast size: 12-30

Martin, a young hobo, wanders the rails seeking happiness. One night, “The Conductor” arrives and offers Martin his heart’s desire – in exchange for his soul. Armed with the power to stop time and live forever in a moment of perfect happiness, Martin begins his search. Is happiness found in a bottle of muscatel and a dry cot in a flophouse? In a series of one-night stands? The moment Martin meets his wife or holds his newborn son? Is happiness found in wealth, status, or the arms of a mistress? That Hell-Bound Train is a distinctively American take on the classic Faustian myth.

Full-length grand opera
Cast size: 7 principals, large chorus

Commissioned by American Lyric Theater in 2012 to commemorate the Turing Centennial, The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing is a two-act opera inspired by the life of the groundbreaking computer scientist, Alan Turing.

After saving England in World War II by cracking the Nazi U-boat code, he was found guilty of gross indecency for a homosexual relationship and was chemically castrated. Two years later, Turing was found poisoned near a cyanide-laced apple with a bite taken from it. The apple is believed to be a reference to his obsession with Disney’s Snow White, and an image rumored to be the inspiration for Apple Computer’s logo.

Turing’s mysterious death was labeled a suicide – but there are several other theories. The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing is a historic-fantasia on Turing’s life.

The Last Supper: a grand guignol love story

A grand guignol farce about the end of the world, and how we get there.
Cast size: 8 men, 5 women; puppet zombies

MANNY, a comfortably retired gay man in the Hudson Valley, and MAX, his socially catatonic playwright/husband, are hosting an assisted-suicide, end-of-life dinner for 99-year-old patriarch, EDGAR, whose retinue includes RAMONE, a 27-year-old tantric masseur, and MORTY, professional death-doula, to prepare the fatal Seconal cocktail. The guests are late, the grid is on the fritz, and sirens blast out dire warnings of impending doom. Wine-wrangler PATTY RUE runs into trouble when recently deceased corpses rise from the grave as UNDEAD CANNIBALS, devouring humans and spreading the ZOMBIE VIRUS.

Despite the zombies, sirens and disinformation spewed by SIRI, the malfunctioning smart-house computer, Manny and his guests finally sit for the Last Supper. But each time Edgar raises his glass for his final, farewell toast, he is interrupted by desperate intruders seeking sanctuary from the Undead: KAREN PICKLES, local right-wing MAGA Town Supervisor; BLACK DAHLIA, African American performance artist and LESLIE DUKE, her trans husband/carpenter/activist. And finally, they are joined by FRED CHRISTIAN, the new next-door neighbor, a God-Hates-Fags ordained minister come to spread the hate of Christ.

This aggressive black comedy explores the Great Replacement Theory to its logical, self-destructive ends. The desperate survivors band together in the flux of what’s real and unreal, fighting for their lives against the undead, against the machines, and against each other.

Trigger Warnings:
Please be advised, this story involves references to, and representations of, the following issues that may cause discomfort: Slavery, Racism, Gore, Assisted suicide, Graphic language, graphic subject matter, graphic violence, Political satire, Abortion, Gun shots, Impalement, Nuclear bomb, Woke, MAGA, Zombie Apocalypse, Flagrant sexuality, Castration, Fellatio, Cannibalism, Child birth, Eye-gouging, Branding, Vivisection, Animal cruelty, Homophobia, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Christian bias.

Oratorio; music by Will Todd

Cast: Virtuoso actor; four-part choir; orchestra (piano, bass, accordion)
Designed as a theatrical oratorio for orchestra, virtuoso actor/actress and four-part choir, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is intended for both theatrical and/or choral presentations. The 70 minute adaptation, told by Christmas carolers, can be done simply with a lectern and music stands, or can be opened up to accommodate the needs and creativity of the individual productions.

A dark comedy/drama set in a sports bar for the ex-gay crowd. Part satire, part horrific exposé, Ex-Gay Bar explores the world of gay conversion therapy, and the pain it inflicts on thousands of gay and lesbian youth. A call to arms.

EX-GAY BAR received the ArtsWestechester Voices for Change Grant, Fall, 2021. It also received Honorable Mention in the 2021 Carlo Annoni International Playwriting Prize.

Oscar Wilde, unpublished at only 27 years old, had an eye for the boys and ‘nothing to declare but his genius.’

Walt Whitman, penniless at 62, looked 72, and was banned in Boston for his ‘pornographic’ homoerotic poetry.

January 18, 1882 - On this fateful day these two literary giants spent three hours together behind closed doors in Whitman’s home in Camden, New Jersey. Walt faces an auspicious deadline: He must cut his best 25 poems from Leaves of Grass, or his work will be criminalized and banned forever. Oscar, who came looking for approbation from his idol, fervently dedicates himself to saving his hero's poetic legacy. Will Oscar convince Walt to stay true to his vision and share it with the world, or will Walt sacrifice his best poems, and lose his pivotal role in literary history?

This play is equal parts historical record and theatrical conjecture, of what they said, and did, behind those closed doors.

Waiting for the Ball to Drop examines the lives of seven friends over six holidays in 2001. The central character, Max, a pot-smoking, cybersex-addicted playwright, is writing the play we are watching; he struggles with issues of intimacy with his lover of 14 years, Bert, a retired financial risk manager looking for the ‘next thing’ in his life. We are introduced to his best friends at a big New Year’s Eve party: Wally, Patty Rue, Mickey and Mikey, all of them New Yorkers in the arts and food service industries; and all suffering from some form of addiction and stagnation in their lives, despite their jovial, contented masks. Shamus, Max’s ex-roommate and a meth addict/masseur, upends the party, spewing ugly truths as he spirals out of control. The friends stage an impromptu intervention, but Shamus runs out before the stroke of 12, only to suffer a violent gay bashing down in the street. By Valentines Day, Shamus is convalescing with Max and Bert, where he will wind up staying through the end of the year; he lost an eye in the gay bashing, but gained a psychic third eye. Shocking his friends, he reveals their deepest secrets and as well as their futures. By the Fourth of July, tension threatens to rip apart all the relationships. Bert discovers Max’s violent cyber sex addiction and smashes his IMac before heading up to the Catskills by himself, feeling betrayed by his lover. Act One ends on the morning of 9/11: Max is newly sober and doing a sun salutation when the first plane slams into the World Trade Center, directly downtown. Max and Bert stare in shock: black-out.

Act Two picks up immediately where we left off; Max and Bert staring in shock. When Bert runs out to pick up some food for his stranded friends, Max and Shamus have a fist-fight. Despite their differences, all the friends gather in the loft to comfort each other while the world turns upside down. By Halloween, Bert has found a place up in the Hudson Valley, and Max must decide if he is going to move with him, or stay here in the city. By this point, he is finally able to deal with the underlying issues of maternal incest that may have impacted his self-abusive behavior as an adult, and takes the first necessary steps in forgiving her, and himself. A month later, death intrudes upon the enclave of friends; Max and Bert work through their problems and sign a marriage agreement, deciding to stay together, warts and all. By New Years Eve, all the friends move forward in their lives, in small steps, out of stagnation. Max and Bert are packed and ready to move up to the Hudson Valley. Max finds forgiveness for himself, forgives his mother, and embraces the love he has with Bert. He finishes his play, looking out into the future with his friends, as the crowds in the street below count in the new year. Lights slowly fade to black. End of play.

CRUEL SHOES, the whacked out backstage musical satire, is the story of Glen Bob, a fresh-faced country boy in the Big Apple chasing his dream to be a Broadway Star. Glen Bob climbs the show-biz ladder of success, rung by bloody rung, driven by his multiple homicidal-trans-gender split personalities who murder the men standing in his way. CRUEL SHOES is a backstage-slasher-musical-mystery-comedy about a triple-threat, serial killer Broadway star.

A waiting room for a popular orthopedic surgeon in Poughkeepsie, New York.

MACS examines the story of an Italian-American family's denial around the death of the youngest son, told through a solid mix of laughter, tears and rigatoni. Through the course of a Sunday dinner, the suppressed family dynamics build to a head and explode during a furious word association "exorcism", which forces the family to come together, accept the tragic death, and ultimately, embrace life and each other.

Short full-length spiritual sex-comedy
A spiritual burlesque about the President, his Intern and a blow-job, which transforms into the story of God seducing Mary, and the creation of the new millennial savior. This time, Mary takes things into her own hands (sort of).

A Father visits a powerful psychic in order to call his gay-bashed son back from the dead
to deal with unfinished business. With a structure inspired by Dickens’ A CHRISTMAS
CAROL, this play uses liberal doses of magic realism to explore one man’s journey as he
chooses between what he’s been taught, and what he truly wants: to love his son.

Full-length comedy/drama, infused with magic realism
Cast size: 1 man, 2 women
An 88 year-old woman comes back from the dead to settle some unresolved issues with her grandson, but along the way, examines her own history of child abuse and her role in the intergenerational pathology of incest. Part sex comedy, part Greek tragedy, NANNA uses black comedy to examine the intimate turmoil of intergenerational incest, and to find a potential happy escape from the cyclical prison of abuse.
NANNA is a deceptively subversive play. It is an overtly sexual comedy about the covertly cyclical topic of sexual abuse, the combination of which tends to make an audience a bit nervous. Additionally, it presents the male protagonist as the victim, which I have discovered hits many buttons of learned, or perceived, “gender authority,” especially among men in the audience.

In dealing with the horrifically absurd torture of childhood sexual abuse, I wanted to show that abuse, to speak to it directly. And I wanted to make the audience comfortable enough to sit through the dark tunnels underneath the farce. My instinct to blend the seductive, heightened and fanciful surface of comedy with the toxic underbelly of childhood sexual abuse, provides the audience with a familiar safety net from which they can chart the rocky waters of that abuse.

The play focuses on the mute witness of abuse, the people who allow it to continue by turning a passive blind eye. And it burns through the pain of betrayal, to allow a healthier future by tackling head-on the endless cycle of intergenerational abuse.

PEOPLE PEOPLE: NYC, 1992: Eight waiters in a trendy restaurant cash out and lash out as tally up their tips at the end of a very long night. Liquor is consumed, drugs are inhaled, lines are drawn and alliances shift and turn at the expense of the waiter’s toxic humanity. Decaffe coffee and a fight to the death highlight this savage, 60-minute, comedy of manners.

Seven short contemporary comedies; Two acts
Cast size: 4 men, 4 women (cast is open)

PERFECT FOR COLLEGE AND HIGH SCHOOL AGE ACTORS

Seven comic pieces ranging in length from one to 20 minutes. See aliens conquer the Earth! Prom Queens living it up! Dancers slugging it out! And watch a young man come out to his father...12 different ways! These and other dark comedies shine a spotlight on the darker side of comedy.

A collection of monologues examining six thematically connected characters as they take tiny, momentous steps forward in their lives.

Irene: An ex-junkie gourmet deli owner meets her old best friend and searches for the secret of life. (Published in One-on-One: The Best Women’s Monologues for the 21st Century; Applause Books, 2007)
Carla: A self-help fitness guru pitches her unique diet plan, ‘Shit or Get Off the Pot’
Robert: A painfully shy man engages in a sexual relationship with a woman with the help of binoculars.
Cherry Bomb: A stripper memorizes Lady Macbeth’s speech for an upcoming audition and weighs the balance of her existence while tantalizing her audience.
Bess: An abandoned mother of two contemplates her life in the midst of aborting a third child.
Sterling: An ‘over it’ gay man waits for his Prince Charming in a blowjob parlor.

Full-length comedy/drama
Cast size: 4 men, 6 women
WAITER, WAITER (part one) and PEOPLE PEOPLE (part two) takes place in two different parts of a restaurant at the end of the night. A blistering comedy with a ferocious use of language, WW looks at the desperation behind the “service smile”, and the deep insecurities hiding just below the surface of contemporary life. Eight waiters cash out and lash out as the evening wears on, and alliances shift and turn at the expense of the waiter’s humanity. Decaffe coffee and a fight to the death highlight this savage comedy of manners.

LIFEafterLIFE is a two-act musical/opera/drama hybrid, exploring the lives of two individual, but tragically connected, characters, one in each act, backed by a four-piece band. The two solo musical-dramas examine the heartbreak of loss, the obsessive burden of guilt, the anger of grief, and the essential hope that enables us to rise up from the depths of unbearable tragedy. While drenched in death and loss, with occasional, unquenchable pools of humor, LIFEafterLIFE ultimately celebrates life, and the human capacity to change.

Act One, Virtuality Sal, looks at the broken life of a former bus driver recovering from the trauma of accidently running down and killing a pedestrian, funneled through the musical lens of electronic/punk pop (accompanied by an all female (at least in appearance) trio of musicians.) His mindless, work-at-home job keeps him focused in the computer, as do the online games he plays during the slow periods; yet each moment is filled with the blood-soaked memories of the bus accident. Eaten away by the guilt he cannot bear, Sal chooses a life that is virtual, rather than literal, finding his solace in the avatar that allows him to function via a second life within the computer. By the end of the act, Sal is a shell of himself, locked behind his door, bathed in the glow of his computer as he finds a virtual happiness in a different world.

Act Two, Whida Peru, explores the plight of Whida Peru, a Puerto Rican transsexual shut-in agoraphobic psychic, as she is forced to break up with the ghost of her dead boyfriend and rejoin the world on the other side of the door. Juannie, the dead boyfriend, was accidentally run over by a city bus, driven by Sal, on the morning of Whida’s reassignment surgery; Whida has been shut in the apartment ever since, supporting herself as the most powerful psychic on the Eastern seaboard. Whida manifests all the invisible ghosts that fill her tiny life, but is not ready for the big change that greets her this night: Juannie wants to break up. Whida rages through the five stages of accepting death, and with the help of the ethereal spirit of her dead lover, and the physically omnipresent Pianist (apparently male, providing both the musical accompaniment and soundscape vocalizations of the score), along with a trio of paranormal, poltergeistic sisters (the musicians from Virtuality Sal, who now migrate over to manipulate Whida's environment as if from the beyond), she finally unlocks the front door, ready to step back out into the land of the living.

Together, Virtuality Sal and Whida Peru take us on a journey that retreats from the pain and brutal realities of the real world, yet allows us to find a way out at the end of the long, sheltering tunnel. Ultimately, LIFEafterLIFE celebrates the journeys of two people connected by the same tragedy: one shutting the door on the world, the other, finally opening it to start her life again.

A nefarious alien plan to take over the world through Starbucks and Facebook threatens the planet! A tribute to the classic film by Ed Wood, this is ten minutes of bad theatre...and a lot of fun! Note: This play features a series of Mad Lib-ish [FILL IN BRACKETS], to make the story completely local to each producing theatre.

THE SCREAMS OF KITTY GENOVESE
A Thrilling New Rock Opera by
David Simpatico and Will Todd

New York City, 1964: Kitty Genovese is brutally attacked on the steps of her apartment building while thirty-eight of her neighbors watch and/or listen – yet no one helps, no one calls the police. Inspired by the true story that shocked the nation, British composer Will Todd and American writer David Simpatico slice through the silence of a city stricken with fear in the musical drama The Screams of Kitty Genovese. The New York Times says, “hold the hand-wringing over the precipitous decline of the American musical theater, please.” Keep your eyes and ears open – The Screams of Kitty Genovese will have you on the edge of your seat.

This is the demo recording we cut in Edinburgh in 2010 at the Fringe Festival; David Edwards directed the production, which featured Sarah Applewood, Darren Charles, Steve Devereaux, Ben Dunwell, Robert Irons, Waylon Jacobs, Claire Platt, Jessica Ridley, Caroline Sabiston, Susie Self, Bradley White-Dale, Sophie Tehrani. The production was produced by Staci Levine and Michael Nassar.

Against all odds, a man and a woman find their perfect mate in the jungle of contemporary dating.

Religious freedom vs. Civil Rights, as a Pastafarian mobile chef refuses service to a gay Christian couple, fanning a national firestorm of political controversy

A year after the World Trade Center falls, an eyewitness reflects on the world, and on the friend he lost in the attack. Published in One-on-One: The Best Men’s Monologues for the 21st Century; Applause Books, 2008

Two alcoholic ghosts spend every Halloween sitting in the same bar, parched for a drink they can never have, reminiscing about their toxic past.

Three NYC copy writers struggle to create a new Diesel Jeans ad, while London riots explode on the internet.

A couple celebrating the fullness of their empty lives on their 18th anniversary, debates bringing a child into our current world.

An innocent brother and sister struggle to escape the hunger and pain of their dilapidated trailer park in Scrotum, Pennsylvania. A modern tale of horror!

While Kevin, a fag-bashing garbage man, anxiously awaits the results of his HIV test at his doctor's office, he engages in a fierce polemic battle with his streetwise savior, Jesus Christ.

Mona and Bernadette are two high school bffs in Lodi, New Jersey, getting ready for the Prom. One of them will be crowned Prom Queen. One will not. As they dress, they share the secrets of their special diet: vampirism.

A mismatched dance team prepare for a nationally televised talent competition.

Satire of homophobic, on-air hate-mongers.

Satiric ten minute monologue/sermon for one man. Rev. Jimmy preaches the love, and hate, of Christ on his live-streamed pod cast, THE LAKE OF FIRE.

Two heterosexual men abduct a drag queen and subject her to conversion therapy. The tables are turned, however, when the shoe gets put on the other foot, and that shoe is a three inch high heel.

A team of exhausted copywriters struggle with their new jeans campaign deadline. Meanwhile, they can't stop watching footage of the protests and riots in the wake of George Floyd's murder. Find out who's zooming who in this hilarious and provocative, ten minute play designed expressly for Zoom. Support video clips available from author.

Two couples fight over paying the bill after a night out.

A Son comes out to his father...13 different ways.

A scribe and a censor revise recent world history for kindergarten textbooks, controlling the future by rewriting the past. A chilling blast of the not-too-distant future.