Lynn Wells Nelson

The year is 2010. Your neighbors try to put one over on you. After that, are they really your friends? A guy claiming to be from Poland shows up on your doorstep and says he's a relative of your husband. What does he want? Is he really family? You find out you're related to an iconic actress. Will she give you the time of day? Your son is a stranger. If you try to love him after all these years, will he love you back?
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She lived to be 122 years old and still holds the record as the world’s oldest documented living person. She conducted a clever real estate transaction and outlived her buyer.
The irony of a “long-life well-lived” is that one often ends it alone. For old women there are few exceptions. THE OLD BIRD immortalizes one.
The play was inspired by the life of Jeanne Calment, documented by Guinness World Records to be the world’s oldest living person. She was born in Arles, France in 1875 and died in 1997 at 122 years of age. As did the real woman, the Jeanne of THE OLD BIRD claimed to have met Van Gogh, among others. She sold her apartment in a “reverse mortgage” but managed to outlive the “deal.” Iconoclast that she was, she refused to sit back in a nursing home rocker to live out her life. Instead she smoked, biked, swam and ate her daily sweets. In this play, Jeanne savors the fictional friendships of those she meets along the way—a fictional niece, realtor, and not so fictional “acheteur d’appartment,” the man who bought her apartment and in another great irony had to pay her a monthly stipend for her life. In a larger sense Jeanne challenges us all to value a full and adventuresome life. To paraphrase the living woman, “You can have sadness and troubles at any age; so for now just smile.”

The Swan’s Song Theatre is about to close its doors if it can’t produce a successful play. Each of the Artistic Co-Directors has independently hired a separate Director to direct HEDDA GABLER. The newly hired directors have conflicting styles, one is a classicist the other a revisionist; and each of these two women have issues of their own. Most of the pre-cast actors for the show have fled to other productions except for the two female leads. Casting, rehearsing, and performing the play will decide the fate of the Swan’s Song.

Alan is a conniver, always looking for the big break, the lucky investment, and the easy way out. When he knocks on his family’s door with his hand out, he comes up against the closed door of “do not disturb.” Alan’s sister Marnie works hard, cares for their ailing mother and can’t forgive him for the deaths and deceptions of the past and contrivances of the present. When Mom’s caretaker Zandra loses her lottery ticket, Alan is the prime suspect. This is a play about family, forgiveness and reconciliation

Dr. Duane Knight has developed his hypothesis into a theory of “molecular displacement,” and he needs funding for further study. But is it a “real” theory? Jeremy Burns is a venture capitalist who might have spread his investments too thinly and needs one big “hit.” When the two meet all sorts of coincidences surface that give rise to questions: what is a fact and what is fiction? Are the two men really cousins? Did both have sons who died?
Wives of the two men play an intrinsic part in what motivates each man, since both wives want money for different reasons. Jeremy’s wife Deena loves playing the society role, and Duane’s wife Louise is tired of being the poor professor’s wife. All four have secrets they keep hidden.
The assistants to both Jeremy and Duane work throughout the play to keep the principals and principles in check, and then they discover each other.
At play’s end, the Burns and Knights dine together to unravel many truths and fictions. As Duane says, “You have to find out what’s real or not,” and then goes on to quote Physicist Richard Feynman in saying, “In physics the truth is rarely clear.”

In that old fashioned campy style, CATALINA The Musical, tells the story of love at any age and of saving the island from developers. Set against the history of the island itself, it is the story of any town at any time.

When Diane sells her dead mother’s home “lock, stock, and barrel” she wants only to walk away from years of junk. But the buyer, a young man with Asperger’s disease comes with baggage of his own and pulls Diane back into a world of ghosts and memories. Billy grew up in Chicago with high functioning autism and a penchant for ghost towns and stories, but he followed his best friend Frankie to Phoenix. Sight unseen, Billy’s mother in Chicago buys Diane’s trailer for him and he moves in amid all the dishes, linens, cans of food, pictures, and years of Helen’s hobbies.

Billy enjoys his new status as homeowner and is hardly surprised when Helen’s ghost begins speaking to him. He comes across Helen’s diary and begins to read of her youthful romances and mistakes. Diane later finds the diary and discovers Helen’s long held secret of Diane’s father’s disappearance.