Jay Alan Quantrill

An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, known for his charming, passionate if madcap eccentricities, sets out to apply an originalist legal philosophy to a quadruple murder case intending to deny a stay of execution, reveling in the intellectual battle with his clerks and against his liberal colleagues, until his own emotions and the possibility of becoming Chief Justice turn an easy decision into an agonizing pain-in-the-ass.

Dorothy Rothschild makes herself into the notorious Mrs. Dottie Parker with the wit of a rye sense of humor, living it up amongst the Smart Set of the Jazz Age and Hollywood's hey-day, guzzling a river of liquor and wasting three beautiful men, never noticing that Robert Benchley, the pal hidden under her neglect, was the one fun guy who could give her the true love she spent ten thousand words searching for.

Twenty-First Century Professor Nate Faust, needing help with a grant proposal to develop a program to answer the ultimate questions of mankind, conjures representative of the deity and the devil for a game show test of their knowledge, provided by Faust's liquid bubble computer named Wagner. Their responses shatter Faust's long held system of beliefs, confronting him with a scary but a deeper understanding of man's place in the scheme of existence.

Jennifer is scared.  A thirty-something social services lawyer, she is dragged out of Children’s Court by Homeland Security agents and interrogated. Meanwhile, DHS's Chief of Investigations watches surveillance "tapes" to discover and evaluate her activities. We flashback through those tapes to watch:
At her office, an email arrives from her Saudi Arabian brother-in-law, Jibril Haziri. He reveals Jen’s husband, Da'ud, is locked in Guantanamo Bay. Wanting Da’ud out, Jibril insists Jennifer to get him into the U.S. She shares the email with her girlfriend, Akiko Meko (a UN Human Rights official with hidden motives), who says “Ignore it!”
Akiko recommends going to Sam Purcell – a Justice Department lawyer Akiko is just now divorcing. Jen's uneasy because Jen and Sam were once college lovers, but determined to free Da'ud at all cost, Jen meets with Sam. His advice: "Do nothing!" He gives her a file of legal precedents to prove his point.
Undaunted, Jen meets a Washington Post journalist, Nessim Baladuri, an Egyptian-American with major Islamic connections. He too warns her against pursuing the matter, slipping her a stolen copy of the secret, even more draconian Patriots Act II, which he warns her is not yet operative - officially, anyway.  It's proof of what can happen to her if she persists. Does she suspect that Baladuri has another agenda? Is Sam falling in love with Jennifer all over while hoping to make his marriage work? Jennifer stays focused on Da’ud.
Watching all this on tapes, the DHS Chief ferrets out video of Jen with Da'ud in Saudi Arabia, and of Da'ud alone trying to save abandoned orphans in Afghanistan only days after 9/11. The Chief decides that Jen is working with Baladuri on a secret invasion to free the prisoners from Guantanamo. She’s a security risk. He sets out to interrogate her himself, but finds she's been released. He orders her brought in again.
This time Jen is stripped and found to be wearing a wire (hidden in a gift necklace given her by Akiko). The Chief gives her a choice: jail or exile to Saudi Arabia. Sam persuades her to go. The Chief assures her Da'ud has been released and is in Mecca, waiting for her.
Sam insists on driving her to Dulles airport. But a new video of Baladuri meeting Sam convinces the paranoid Chief that Sam is a traitor to a woman. The Chief dispatches forces to arrest them.
When Sam and Jen arrive they are surprised to find Baladuri already there, being deported for his suspicious activities. He shows Jen evidence that Da'ud was indeed released, but once in Saudi Arabia he was killed by jihadists when CIA told them Da’ud collaborated while in Guantanamo. Watching all this happen live in real time by CCTV, the Chief goes ballistic.
With Da'ud dead Jen has lost the one reason she had to leave the US. She doesn’t. She goes underground to fight the American Police State from within.

A few years before the First World War, artist Egon Schiele, the 20 year old enfant terrible of Vienna, Austria, paints urchins and models and mostly himself, using his art to explore sexuality and find the core of his being. Gustav Klimt insists he has "too much talent for his own good." 
But the beau monde of Vienna just at the twilight of La Belle Epoque, in 1910, has begun to take a firm hand in the battle against modernism, which drives Egon out of the city with his lover-model, Valerie "Wally" Neuzil. After a few weeks of bucolic life in a small Slovenian village, they are asked to leave, and Egon finds himself in yet another village, this time ruled by a troubled Magistrate, Oskar Stovel, with a dark past and vain reasons to support the reactionary pillars of the community, mostly in the form of the retired Commandant von Mossig. 
When von Mossig's defiant teenage daughter, Tatiana, takes refuge in Egon's cottage one rainy night, the pillars are shaken. Egon is summarily dragged out of bed and tossed into jail. Now in the clutches of Magistrate Stovel, Egon is first charged with abducting young Tatiana. And he is put on trial.
His influential patron from Vienna come to his aid, but the secretive, obsessive Stovel must tow the line to keep his job. Egon is easily acquitted of the charge, but Stovel is not satisfied and wants something more out of Egon, taking it upon himself to hold Egon on a charge of corrupting the youth of the village.  He launches an investigation, during which he pursues Egon's artistic soul. Meawhile, Egon decides - against the advice of his Vienna patron - to stop running from the conformists and confront the evil of artistic censorship head on. His lover uses her seductive gifts in an attempt to save Egon, but fails, setting the stage for a confrontation in which Egon's passionate defense of art and artists, results in the burning of his paintings and the discovery of a new depth of love for his lover-model. Stovel’s obsession portends trouble yet he finds himself so completely drawn to Egon's work, that Egon manages to bring about Stovel's final comeuppance.

The Alchemist’s Tragedy is a tale of Shakespeare’s self-discovery at perhaps the most psychologically troubled time of his life when he finds himself subject to the theological politics of England’s James I and the Church of the Bishop of London. It is the two-year period between the tragedies and the late romances, when William Shakespeare was exhausted, even repulsed, by the human corruption he has had to plumb in the creation of his most penetrating tragedies, a creative phase that ended with him leaving Timon of Athen (1609) unfinished. While his company tries to salvage something from Timon (as a knockabout farce). Will realizes:

“It is the words. It is the words that mold my world. These penetrating syllables that, giving utterance to action, chase a gossamer of truth found gasping in their breathy pulse. I need a dark, still den to parse it out, but hath no longer grit nor pluck enough to lock me in the dank, dark cell of my embittered soul.”

But then, in an attempt to keep his very private sonnets from being published, Shakespeare’s brother Edmund is killed, and Will finds himself incarcerated by the arbitrary assertions of church and state law. The charges are self-serving and contradictory: either his writing is a subversive act of treason, or he is a fraud, putting his name to seditious writings of better-educated courtiers. In any case, the capricious application of authority, particularly the laws governing theatrical presentations, supposedly for the good of the people, but actually to serve the greed of the Bishop and the self-asserted divinity of the King, lead Shakespeare to a cell in the Tower of London. There the King angry that his favorite poet might be proven a traitorous charlatan, sets aside the law and orders Will to write a new play to prove the King’s faith in the bard he praises to the crowns of Europe is well founded. The play’s subject is, of course, to be feature The King of England being confirmed in his divinity by God. Uninspired, Will manages to produce snatches of dialogue which, when a reading is demanded, he weaves into a chamber play performed by the drunken King and his courtiers. , during which Shakespeare expiates his personal demons, excoriating everyone including the King but turns his most venomous words upon himself, discovering…

I see how willfully for years I have escaped into illusion to refute, deny, avoid the crippling life prescribed me at my birth. So damned a-feared of the baseness I was born to, I chose to live in words and dreams, in all the magic horrors of history, its illusions, yea, of witchcraft and romantic cleverness. I read the library of my Lancashire Lord. I studied everyone I ever met - the peasants and their betters, rank by rank. I sought the sense of aristocracy, and learned nobility was better found in the heart of the wretched base-born, poor and... no, but, no... still hiding from the terror even now ... Hiding? Yea, between these very lines, blinded by the glare of brilliant quips in verbal cascades. Why? To run from the fear of death, alive. I’m dead, if not to life, then to the living of it. Why!?

In the end, he comes to understand:

If I’m to know the infinity of my imagination, I must pay homage to my nature’s limitations… I’m neither free to have faith in god, nor to deny him… The tragedy for me is not being able to believe. In anything. I alchemize my words into people and I’m then duty-bound to live with their beliefs, but only as I create them. Faith is the luxury of those who will not question – everything. What I know of the world I live in’s only this. It is cheerless, dark, and deadly. But only when we fail to exercise out Will, and Will it otherwise.

In the year 30,107 BCE, Adam - an ordinary hominid - becomes extraordinary. He finds himself in a garden (he chooses to calls it Eden) in a glade inhabited by a Gardener with the power of technological magic and the snappy patter of a vaudeville straight-man (or maybe she's JoAnne Worley). The Gardener is trying hard to get Adam to deal with his evolution into a whizzbang of sensitive self-awareness (imagine Jon Stewart channeling Robin Williams) when a woman wanders in - she’s called her Eve (Samantha Bee mind-bending Kristen Schaal). She's looking for the quickest way back to the ibex on her Cro-Magnon’s village spit!. But a snaky hunk called The Reaper slinks into the flowery glade. giving Adam and Eve a choice: come to terms with the exploding nebulae of their own evolving brain power (and love?) or leave. As "ordinary folk" they find their relationship troubled - but they're locked into a binary relationship tighter than a proton and a electron. So they stay.

Accepting their newly evolved selves, they set about terraforming the glade for comfort, foiling the Reaper's intent and fouling Eden. The Gardener complains, and evicts them. They won't budge. Eve's pregnant, and Adam is building a cottage - trampling trees, inventing windows and conceiving a device he calls a rocking chair to ease Eve's pregnancy. At odds with their reactionary social workers, evolution has thrust Adam and Eve into a world where they are stiunned by how much more perceive than they can possibly understand.

Under the Gardener's watchful eye and the Reaper's sly influence, time passes and the first two kids - Cain and Abel - are quickly spoiled by the good life of Eden. Cain plows acreage into sustenance, Abel turns sheep into shirts and skirts, and tasty lamb chops, till one day Abel's wooly whites scamp through Cain's rutabaga, ruining the crop and crapping on the bliss of Eden. Suddenly, the boys have evolved into something strange - enemies. Cain's dark side slays Abel and thereafter the glade is haunted by bad memories and the foreboding of excess.
Cain runs off, so Adam and Eve exile themselves back into the world only to find it now a desert - totally unevolved. They must live on the barren sands of time, with only each other until they have more childrem who have children who have children. None is quite like the passionately missed Abel until Seth who rekindles their bliss. Then one evening Cain drops by for dinner. Having enslaved the Gardener and impoverished the Reaper, he manages to seduce Seth into following him to the fleshpot city of Ur which evolved from the darker side of the intellectual prowess Abel inherited in Eden. Once again Adam and Eve watch their favorites evolve beyond their liking leaving them to ponder the astrophysical emotions of the stars.

Liliana, a stage actor of a certain age, misleads Spenser, a film actors of a certain age, into joining her for an afternoon in the theater. Her reason is she trusts him - to help her select a season of classic plays for her to schedule for her new theater. He is enticed by the idea of living through scenes from a handful of the great plays throughout the ages. And yet he has another agenda – as does she – not the least of which is tearing out each other's heart. Each farce provides a peek into the raucous, sometimes hysterical life they led through two marriages, two divorces and three much loved children, he’s kept from her.

The bloody encounters of the great tragedies bring out the knives, and Liliana's calculated willingness to play any scene – use, bend or mangle any great line – inhabit any role. Ultimately, it is all to the purpose of winning back Spenser’s love and, not incidentally, to add his stardom to her theatrical hopes and the box office.

While she's running circles around his career and fortunes, Spenser is racing through the labyrinth of their lives to find out what the hell she's done with all his money, and how. When he turns the tables in a scene of Shakespearean venom and she finds herself on the ropes, she pulls out all the stops and plays the death card, killing off their oldest son. With that, they've hit a new bottom even for Liliana, leaving Spenser to play one final classic moment that will wipe away all their ferocious illusions. Somehow Spenser finds the will and the way to stop the bloodletting, heal the wounds, and patch together a new future for the both of them, together, and deeply in love. At least for a season or two.

SINNERS & DEMONS

A Play in Two Parts

Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God
&
Demons At The Beck of A Ruthless God

In the minds and hearts of the survivors of America’s Civil War, it is the troubled memories of the notorious19th Century rebel, William Clarke Quantrill, that bring to life this charismatic guerilla leader, seeking a reasonable, and often emotional re-evaluation of his widely condemned deeds and misrepresented infamy. As he says at the opening to the audience:

QUANTRILL
(off-handedly almost surprised to be here, in a lazy drawl of self-discovery)
I am a dead man – my presence here, a construct of the vague fears and nagging terrors in the heart – of half a nation in denial, half in despair… Pictured as a fiend brandishing hellfire, they say I fed on brutal hate. That’s what ‘they’ say. (repeating a much mulled over question) Why am I here? I want... the why! – Not why the ill-repute. The greater why: why did I drive myself to do what I did, how could I have reveled in the lies writ large about my life and give them no denial. And why would you care now? After all, I am a dead man, a dim and wearied ghost, for mine is a posthumous existence.

His willful mother, Caroline Cornelia Quantrill, has refused to believe the lurid tales told by the victors, sure in her heart that the military reports and penny-dreadfuls wrote of a different man. Spurred into action by the delivery of an ominous black flag by Kate Clarke, a woman claiming to be the Quantrill’s common-law’s wife, Caroline wrenches her youngest surviving son, Franklin, from the uneasy peace of their home and business, to act as her protector in a quest to find her first born, dead or alive, innocent or guilty.

From Quantrill’s birthplace in Dayton, OH, to his purported gravesite in Louisville, KY, and on through Western Missouri and Kansas – where the Civil War raged long before the shelling of Fort Sumter brought the rest of America to arms – mother and brother, in the company of the disapproved wife and a guilt-ridden Kansas Senator, Preston Plumb, trace the exploits of the notorious guerilla warrior from the Confederate capital of Richmond, VA, to the slaughter of Lawrence, Kansas.

Along the way they confront the warriors Quantrill lead into battle, the writers who preserved his memory – fairly or not – and the soldiers and civilians, lawmen and outlaws who loved him, hated him, supported him, or died by his hand. It is both a memory seeking redemption and a mother’s search for some facts-be-damned truth she can live with. What she finds brings Caroline to a greater understanding of the nobility of the human soul. It’s something she never allowed herself to find in the family Bible she keeps firmly clasped to her breast and locked in her hard and wary heart.

SINNERS & DEMONS

A Play in Two Parts

Sinners In The Hands of An Angry God
&
Demons At The Beck of A Ruthless God

In the minds and hearts of the survivors of America’s Civil War, it is the troubled memories of the notorious19th Century rebel, William Clarke Quantrill, that bring to life this charismatic guerilla leader, seeking a reasonable, and often emotional re-evaluation of his widely condemned deeds and misrepresented infamy. As he says at the opening to the audience:

QUANTRILL
(off-handedly almost surprised to be here, in a lazy drawl of self-discovery)
I am a dead man – my presence here, a construct of the vague fears and nagging terrors in the heart – of half a nation in denial, half in despair… Pictured as a fiend brandishing hellfire, they say I fed on brutal hate. That’s what ‘they’ say. (repeating a much mulled over question) Why am I here? I want... the why! – Not why the ill-repute. The greater why: why did I drive myself to do what I did, how could I have reveled in the lies writ large about my life and give them no denial. And why would you care now? After all, I am a dead man, a dim and wearied ghost, for mine is a posthumous existence.

His willful mother, Caroline Cornelia Quantrill, has refused to believe the lurid tales told by the victors, sure in her heart that the military reports and penny-dreadfuls wrote of a different man. Spurred into action by the delivery of an ominous black flag by Kate Clarke, a woman claiming to be the Quantrill’s common-law’s wife, Caroline wrenches her youngest surviving son, Franklin, from the uneasy peace of their home and business, to act as her protector in a quest to find her first born, dead or alive, innocent or guilty.

From Quantrill’s birthplace in Dayton, OH, to his purported gravesite in Louisville, KY, and on through Western Missouri and Kansas – where the Civil War raged long before the shelling of Fort Sumter brought the rest of America to arms – mother and brother, in the company of the disapproved wife and a guilt-ridden Kansas Senator, Preston Plumb, trace the exploits of the notorious guerilla warrior from the Confederate capital of Richmond, VA, to the slaughter of Lawrence, Kansas.

Along the way they confront the warriors Quantrill lead into battle, the writers who preserved his memory – fairly or not – and the soldiers and civilians, lawmen and outlaws who loved him, hated him, supported him, or died by his hand. It is both a memory seeking redemption and a mother’s search for some facts-be-damned truth she can live with. What she finds brings Caroline to a greater understanding of the nobility of the human soul. It’s something she never allowed herself to find in the family Bible she keeps firmly clasped to her breast and locked in her hard and wary heart.