Anne Welsbacher

In a 1904 leper colony on an island off the Massachusetts coast, the understaffed hospital priest, Father Jameson, serves as both spiritual advisor and amateur physician while fending off the tactics of nearby village community leader Elizabeth to close down the colony. Bitter newcomer Kath meets other residents whose only commonalities are their disease and their shunned status in society. Hattie and Eugene, who moved north during the Great Migration, now must live in separate cabins and weigh having a child doomed to be taken from them. Maude, an immigrant from Ireland and skilled midwife, and Domingo, a Portugese immigrant who delivers goods to the colony and is thus doubly shunned by fellow villagers, fall in love. The hospital’s medical director, the town mayor, and the mayor’s mistress battle personal, professional, and ethical dilemmas.

“What fresh hell is this?” On the day of her death, Dorothy Parker faces a frightening choice: She can remain in a strange room with an unknown guide from the netherword, far from all her old friends—even Robert Benchley. Or she can discover and admit her own truth. As she appraises—through her poems, reviews, stories, and scripts—the highlights of her past, she discovers that her own harshest critic was always herself. Pardon My Dust takes place at various places and times between 1893 and 1967, as portrayed on a single set consisting of a couch or chaise, a desk, chairs, and assorted trunks, bags, and boxes. Its characters are Dorothy Parker, female, any age, but capable of depicting 30s-60s, and Janus, male or female, any age but capable of depicting same range.

Last Chance Liquor is a small, failing liquor store in a small, failing Kansas town. Its owner, Ray Stauffer, 60s, is a recovering alcoholic whose daughter, Rayette Boulanger, cut off ties after a messy divorce decades ago. Now Rayette, a modestly successful actor in her 40s, has returned to bring her mother, Lily Boulanger, 50s or 60s, back to Los Angeles for cancer treatment. But Lily has no intention of leaving.

Among those Rayette left behind was her high school sweetheart, Steve Shepherd, 40s, now a councilman, arts entrepreneur, and closeted bisexual. Seeing Steve again throws Rayette into uncertainty about her life’s purpose. She came home with a scripted plan, but nothing is following the plot she had envisioned. The harder she presses her mother to leave Kansas, the harder Lily pushes back. The more she tries to snub her estranged father, the more the small town thrusts him back into her life. Further infuriating her is the discovery that Alice Leaf, 60s or 70s, her father’s “other woman” from the past, and beginning to show signs of dementia, is moving in—with her mother.

But when Eddie Dallinger, 17, shows up claiming to be the son that Rayette had as a teenager and gave up for adoption at birth—a son her family and Steve didn’t even know existed—Rayette’s world turns upside down. Will she return to Los Angeles, where the break of her career beckons? Will she remain in Kansas to embrace the remnants of her small family?

Two Bites, a new adaptation of The Diaries of Adam and Eve, features the journal entries by Earth’s first human couple as they explore their relationships with each other and with their brand new planet. In an hour of storytelling, Adam and Eve age, outgrow the garden, and raise two sons under the curious eye of their literary creator Mark Twain, now dead 100 years and pining for his own beloved Eve—the wife who preceded him in death.

In the tempestuous period following World War I, Ohio housewife Eva Dearbourne struggles against a resistant medical establishment to keep her husband, George, from being institutionalized for symptoms of what today are known as bipolar syndrome and PTSD. Her sister, Letha Weaver, entrenched in the suffrage movement as the passage of the 19th Amendment nears, also presses Eva to lock up her husband, and George himself refuses to seek the help he needs.

As George’s post-war nightmare spirals deeper, Eva’s best hope lies with Dr. Gerhardt Sheffler, who opposes institutionalizing patients. But the German-American physician refuses to treat any veterans of the war, a stand that mystifies but does not deter Eva.

Further blocking Eva is Vernelle McDaniel, Sheffler’s intelligent, ambitious nurse, who refuses to take seriously any information that Eva has painstakingly researched about possible treatments. Sheffler’s bitterness from a troubled past has closed him off personally and professionally. To save her husband, Eva must break through that wall of broken trust—a breakthrough that could save not only her beloved George, but also the doctor himself.