Mark Mason

It's five minutes to midnight on December 31st, 1959, A scream echoes in the dark: two Chicago cops are torturing a young burglary suspect named Jimmy on the North Side. Miles away a beautiful woman with bloodshot eyes stands at a microphone reciting a Love Song for a new age: her name is Eve Slaughter, and before she's through the Sixties will be born in baptismal blood, a tide washing over the sinners who begat the biggest scandal in Chicago police history. Co-written by well-known poet/actor/model/activist Elizabeth Kay Kron.

July 1960: in various rooms at the infamous Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas stay four extraordinarily damaged souls nearing the end of their rope; a self-loathing, past-her-prime Italian-American woman with a mysterious past; a lonely young soldier on his own for the first time; a married-but-straying Illinois delegate to the Democratic National Convention; and a cocaine-snorting Englishwoman taking snaps of atomic tests and hiding a dark, devastating secret. As the neon night wears on, terrifying confessions and tantalizing sexual connections will be made, as personal nightmares blossom into the American dream at the dawn of the most cataclysmic decade in American history.

Chicago, 1919: the troops have come home but the war is just beginning. An oppressively hot summer is the spark in the powder keg of race hate, jealousy, trauma and fury called the South Side. An alcoholic black war veteran pulls a knife on a bigoted union organizer in the Stockyards...a fiery-tempered orator with a well-hidden secret calls for blood in Hyde Park...secret passions, old-time religion, illicit sex and buried histories all threaten to doom the combatants, black and white, as the baseball season gets underway and two teams take the field. All that's real is death and the heat.

Over the past thirty-five years, the Macauleys have witnessed countless disasters, little miracles of hope, and the epic political nightmare of unfolding America history, all centered on a bedroom in a tiny Main Street house in Morris, Illinois where this dysfunctional family is slowly disintegrating. A love-struck young real estate agent fills us in on the beautiful, lyrical love that birthed this shoddy dynasty, a love that began in a ’74 Dodge Challenger with Elvis Costello on the radio and would end with blood coughed by a woman surrounded by plastic angels while her daughter in the Marines lies bleeding, covered in Iraqi dust. Love is fulfilled: trust is betrayed. Resentments, dreams and yearnings are pursued by the ashes of the past, miscarriages and zombie movie marathons the chasers for terrorism and war; cancer, rage and adultery the blips on a television set to Cubs games and Hurricane Katrina. Welcome to A Family Emergency, a comedy about the worst memories of all the best people.

Shady Russian bad guys, political espionage, treason, terror and deception: if only it were timely! But it's June 2010: two bedraggled and angry young women are waiting in a government basement for the arrival of FBI agents on the treason beat. When the questions start, the women (an American high school valedictorian with a drug problem and a Russian-born real estate agent soon to become the most famous spy of the twenty-first century) spin a tale of illicit sex, high-grade cocaine, purloined envelopes and politically-sanctioned murder, the hallmarks of life on the international edge in a seemingly sterile, Internet-dominated life in the American suburbs. As a nameless voice on a monitor questions relentlessly, the investigation uncovers a secret realm of long-dormant espionage agents hiding in plain sight, and when love enters the picture, the spy games go into dangerous overtime. A roller coaster ride through the Russian invasion of Georgia, shady New York nightclubs at New Year's, the Putin-ordered assassinations of dissidents and the tense "final drop" set for a hamburger hut during the Obama-Medvedev summit, RED THUNDER AND THE VODKA MARTINI SURPRISE tells the story of a "little red-haired girl" whose espionage exploits turned up the heat in a new cold war.

The Aaronow brothers are New Yorkers to the core and rich scions of modern America: Allen is a criminal cocaine addict and Elliot a rising corporate hotshot, both struggling with the dark legacy of their family's investment securities firm as the nation's economy faces collapse in September 2008. As the crash looms, Sylvia, a beautiful young FBI agent who has a complicated history with Elliot, launches an investigation into a brutal series of home invasions, a line of small-time terrorist acts committed by Violet, a dirt-poor Brooklyn barista with a sideline in uprisings by podcast and a thirst for economic revenge playing out in her seduction of Allen Aaronow. Violet's revolutionary destruction and calculated sexual espionage unexpectedly uncovers the biggest swindle in American history, an epic crime that answers some fatal questions: what happens to a country when the money runs out? Do all revolutions devour their own children, and is suicide a political act? Based on the Bernard Madoff scandal, the music of Haydn and the philosophies of Adam Smith, PRIVATE FAMILY CONDUCT tells the story of how, for forty years, it seemed like the Aaronows ruled the world. But in 2008, they lost New York City.

ANGEL DOWN AT LOVE takes us to Dallas, 1963, and tells the story of teenage lust, racial violence, illicit sex, high art, innocent romance, Jack Ruby, Lee Harvey Oswald and the other desperate, clawing, loving, bleeding, dying, hurting & hopeful citizens of Big D as they prepare for the long-awaited visit of President John F. Kennedy.

9/11/2021- Jenny is a heroin addict in Illinois "celebrating" her 22nd birthday with her loathsome drug dealer boyfriend and dreading the prospect of singing at a memorial service for her aunt who died of COVID complications, when her grief about all the myriad tragedies of her young life propel her Wonderland-style back into the childhood fantasy-land she created with her vivid imagination long ago.

A closeted political speechwriter visits the dilapidated Chicago apartment of a tattooed and heroin-addicted combat reporter to offer her a job with the Kennedy campaign on June 5th, 1968.

April 1961: In an abandoned warehouse in South Florida, three CIA assets are tied up and about to face punishment for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. But one of them, the only woman in the room, is about to show that she's much, much stronger than she looks.

Christmas Eve, 1959: a shy Washington secretary gets off the L train in Chicago and gives a top-secret assignment to a competitive group of CIA employees, all of them blacklisted lesbian former TV writers now working for the Agency's Psychological Warfare Unit. The assignment? Kill Fidel Castro or Vice President Nixon will turn the job over to the Chicago mob.

Based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story "Winter Dreams"

The Helpless Eyes of Judy Jones is a stripped-down deconstructionist vision of Fitzgerald's work, utilizing Brechtian and Beckettian ideas to tell the haunting tale of how, for two young lovers in Minnesota around the turn of the twentieth century, the idyllic pasture of the Midwest was overrun by a parade of nightmares that marches to this day, where love has only dreams to remember.

2018: A young African-American woman reacts with a curious bemusement to the moment in history when white people everywhere seemed to get on their cell phones with racist rage.

In 2016, well-known and critically-lauded storefront theatre company called Profiles Theater closed following the Chicago Reader's revelation of years of sexual and physical abuse during Profiles productions. But before that they had been one of the most acclaimed small theatre companies in the nation, awarded multiple Joseph Jefferson Awards for their shows. The Jeff Committee remained deadly silent on the topic and has till this day.

2015: A Grindr connection on the Brown Line train turns into a tense encounter for Chicago citizens and their thin-skinned, foul-mouthed one-percenter mayor, Rahm Emanuel.

2015...or 1915, or now, or then...two white police officers sit in an apartment basement staring at the bodies of two black teenagers they've just shot dead.

2014: the famous water tower tank emblazoned with the flag of Sweden has been taken down from its perch above the Swedish-American museum in Andersonville, the formerly Swedish and now largely lesbian Chicago neighborhood, because of the cripplingly cold weather that winter and the tower tank being almost 100 years old...but someone is inside the tank and only true love can get her out.

Winter 2014: A Wisconsin-born punk girl named Kelly carrying just a bag full of Mountain Dew tallboys storms onto a midnight Greyhound headed from Chicago to St. Louis and changes the world forever.

January, 2007. Three young women-- a Jewish punk-rock princess from Michigan, an African-American combat photojournalist from Brooklyn, and a US Army casualty notification officer from Illinois-- become stranded by a snowstorm in small-town Minnesota at the beginning of the bloodiest year of the war in Iraq. JUNK GIRLS is about the horrors of way, the terrible beauty of love and the loneliness of being lost forever in America. It's a play about how memories mix with longing and make the future a terrible place to die: it's about life, it's about death, it's about listening to The Misfits while making TV dinners, it's about Nat King Cole songs in dive bars and dying Christmas trees, it's about the smell of Virginia Slims and erotic photos taken in an Army base, it's about speeches by President Bush, children without mothers, dancing in airport bars and flag-draped caskets coming home, it's about hope without meaning and dreams without waking, and about finding hope in the ashes of America, and it's also a comedy about getting the worst news of your life.

It's December 1969 and the members of the Joliet Drama Guild are preparing for their grand
premiere of their painstaking production of A CHRISTMAS CAROL, none more so than Everett
“Evvy” Schupolsky, the austere actor playing Scrooge, who wants this to be a CAROL for the
ages. But panic sets in as spaced-out stage manager Tinkerbell Pavasovic stumbles in saying
that a terrible accident occurred with the Guild Magic Bus the troupe's more political members
borrowed for an anti-war protest at the Ammunition Plant...seems there was a little problem with
their fireworks that blew up not only the bus but the costumes for the show. Everett is devastated,
saying that the freaks and weirdos have ruined his Christmas and the show should be cancelled,
but the hippies, Vietnam vets, Black Panthers, elderly beatniks and tap-dancing activists
assembled at the theater have another idea. With these fabulous flower children bringing the tale
of Scrooge, Bob Crachit, Fezziwig and Tiny Tim (not THAT Tiny Tim) up to the minute, spinning
psychedelic platters and preaching peace on earth, anything can happen...will Everett
Schupolsky and the Joliet Drama Guild learn the real meaning of Christmas and feel good
vibrations before the Swingin’ Sixties come to an end? Sock it to me, baby!

A mysterious young woman named Melanie checks into a seedy Illinois motel on June 25th, 2009 carrying a suitcase and a camcorder and proceeds to weave a story of haunting secrets and nightmarish confessions, an epic tale of love, lies and the decay of the American dream writ large in a place called the Hideaway.

Based on both Friedrich Schiller's nineteenth-century poem Die Ideale and the infamous Third Reich art triptych "The Four Elements," POSIN' is an attempt to explain our present America with disturbing parallels to a time ruled by darkness. During an evening in 1938, in the middle of the Atlantic aboard the German ocean liner S.S. Bremen, dedicated Nazi art minister Adolf Ziegler is preparing a quiet young woman named Kirsten for a modeling session when their afternoon is disrupted by a shy and stuttering visitor, famed Saturday Evening Post cover illustrator Norman Rockwell, en route to London for a mysterious purpose. As Rockwell speaks with both the artist and the model, some dark truths about America, fascism, sexuality, painting and politics will be revealed, along with a haunting secret about what it means to truly give your all to art.

FROZEN FIRE takes place in 1948 within a dank police interrogation room on the North Side of Chicago, where a beautiful nightclub singer under the watchful eyes of a bespectacled young stenographer casts aside a LIFE magazine and picks up a dusty poetry volume...but before she can get more than a few stanzas out, the questions begin. Questions about flames, torture, crime and Hell: she would do anything to die rather than talk, but the man asking is going to make her answer for her guilty past and possibly deadly future. Inspired by Amy Lowell's haunting, elegiac poem "A Fairy Tale," the music of Duke Ellington, the film noir classics of the 1940s and the real-life murder of Chicago showgirl Estelle Carey, FROZEN FIRE is about a christening amidst the darkness, nightmares of being alone, and what we're capable of when we lose our innocence.

1963: in a small-town Ohio high school, a group of bored and disaffected American teenagers and their passionate drama instructor run through what turns out to be the final Friday rehearsal for the annual school “Tribute to American Poetry,” a devised piece composed with excerpts from the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay and news articles, editorials and ad copy from the current Life magazine, one that just happens to bear the date of November 22nd. Over the course of their rehearsal, a romance will disintegrate, a different kind of passion will be born, and the news will bring a tragic new understanding to the line “death devours all lovely things” for the students and their teacher.

A morning make-out session between a married investment banker and a bohemian photographer trying to stop time itself stalls as our two star-crossed lovers argue, kiss, plead, hurt, insult and undress in a skyscraper office break room on a sunny September morning.

1944: In war, sometimes you have to kill to keep love alive.

Welcome to the Victory Canteen, a run-down serviceman's bar in Poughkeepsie, New York, staffed by two young American women scarred by loss and burned by love. They're Francine, a quiet bartender who makes a mean gin rickey and carries a dark secret, and Virginia, a promiscuous hostess on her fifth husband and hungry for more. As they practice Nazi-stabbing and throat-slitting with a cynical teenage Western Union messenger, their five o'clock whistle-lives explode into swingin' romance with the entrance of a dashing Army Air Force pilot and a womanizing Pennsylvania paratrooper. But when a harebrained war profiteering scheme turns to sex, betrayal and murder, our hometown heroines learn what really happens when you give your all to Victory.

At the sleazy Hideaway Motel in small-town Illinois, a different drama unfolds in every room: a bride-to-be waits not for her wedding but for a male prostitute, the lead singer of an all-female Sam Cooke tribute band wakes up next to a stranger, and a wealthy conservative pundit concocts sinister plans for the next chapter in American history. Filled with sordid sex, lost loves and shattered dreams, Rest For The Weary Spirit is a grim snapshot of modern America aimed at mature audiences.

London, 1893: insanity is spreading like a red infection over the East End. Human ashes spill from an abandoned ship. Wild-eyed streetwalkers recite Shakespeare sonnets to feed their starving children, and mad killers send bloody notes to newspapers promising a flood of innocent victims. Through the dense fog in the dark streets of a dying city, stalks a force of monstrous evil, as a bloodied band of outsiders sacrifice all to save their country from an unspeakable fate, that of its nightmares coming to life. Based on the novel by Bram Stoker

A Chicago corporate headhunter/new mother whose day-trader husband committed suicide as the economy imploded in 2008 falls desperately in love with her latest interview, a drug-addicted puppeteer with a soft spot for kids.

January 2007: it's ten till midnight at a dive bar in northern Minnesota, where a hard-drinking young construction worker (with a wife serving in Iraq) chats up the attractive, quiet young woman who knows the charming young man and the military better than she initially lets on. A romantic tragedy inspired by the classic episodes of The Twilight Zone and the U.S. Army casualty notification process

Chicago, 1930: booze is illegal, sex is a racket, and murder is the city's favorite ballgame. When mysterious Tribune reporter and alleged mob bagman Jake Lingle is gunned down, a city in the midst of the Great Depression starts spiraling out of control. Starving for luxury and thriving on violence, all of Jake Lingle's friends and enemies are either going to end up guilty- or dead.