"Acting Class" is a short play about a director, and an actor and an actress, rehearsing a play about Adam and Eve. This script can be put on nearly anywhere -- including a classroom -- as it calls for nearly nothing in the way of sets, costumes, props etc. This is a script that could be of interest to acting students, particularly students of classical acting, as playing the play does call for continuously moving in and out of two contrasting language registers: the heightenedly stylized vernacular speaking of the standard naturalism and the heightenedly stylized lyrical speaking of poetic theater -- and both have to sound completely, seamlessly natural. Indeed, the play's characters could well be acting students.

"X-1" is a long performance lyric for an actor. This script can be used across the spectrum of scripted, solo performance modes: reading to listeners, recital storytelling, empty stage monologue theater, and one man play supported by mummer-actors and sound- and video- commentary -- that the mummer-actors can "dance to", largely by mimicking/echoing the move-and-gesture of those who appear in the, possibly documentary, video companion-works. The plot -- such as it is -- of this performance piece is a man wakes up, gets up, and goes to work in the morning. He lives in an apartment with his wife and children in a large metropolitan area, and takes a subway train to work.

"Peleus" is a short, monologue poemplay that -- drawn from a passage in Ovid's "Metaphorphoses" -- re-imagines Peleus' side of his conversation with Zeus (his grandfather), as Zeus pressures Peleus get after Thetis and make her pregnant. Zeus had been intent on adding Thetis to his long list of consorts, willing and coerced (including Peleus' mother). But Thetis' father, Proteus, the ever-changing god of the sea, foretells that Thetis will have a son who will surpass his father in fame and deeds -- and this prophesy so spooks Zeus that he leans on his grandson, Peleus, to take his place in Thetis' arms. And Peleus is conflicted about what to do. "Peleus" was one of five short plays inspired by Ovid that ran from July 10 - 15, 2018 at London's Waterloo East Theatre (Brad Street SE1) in Off The Cliff Theatre's "Metamorphoses 2," directed by Kasia Rozycki.

"...and Another Frankenstein" is...yes, another!...representing of that great, Romantic era, Gothic melodrama that has held spellbound both playwrights and audiences since its earliest stage version five years after the publication of the novel's first edition. Indeed, there are over a dozen versions right here on NPX -- and you can be sure there'll be more. Why? What is it about this novel's four intertwined -- highly melodramatic -- stories that so popularly and persistently fascinates audiences? Well, from a theater-maker's point of view...it's the melodrama: of the Demon's desperate desire for love and his/her rage at its denial, of Victor's crippling remorse for having created such a solitarily monstrous creature, of Justine's calvary wrongly convicted of William's murder, and of (the frame story) Walton's ill-fated quest for fame as an explorer. In this re-enacting, these four plot streams concurrently play out, thanks to the devices of a play-within-the-play and that of making the Demon a scenographic effect and vocal presence rather than a personage enacted onstage the more usual way. In this play then, there is no pale green, most often male, and often cartoonly hideous, horror genre figure; even so, the character of the Demon -- his/her voice intact and beautiful -- is very present throughout the play, as his/her story is being enacted in the play-within-the-play. Also, this play represents this globally well-known story in a theater-poetry made of standard, global English -- to make for compelling, and popular, contemporary theater accessible to a wide range of today's daily users of today's global language.

"So Do We All (First Sequence)"...Fiordiligi, Dorabella, and Despina re-imagined for the pixelscreen performance space today... "So Do We All" a multi-episode, concatenation of scenelet sequences for the "zoom space." Each scenelet's running time should be about five minutes -- better, less than five minutes. This playwork, though similar to a stage play, is primarily intended for the digital performance space of our screen devices. It's apt for wide-rangingly devised setting, direction, casting, performance (and rehearsal and recording). A key goal is to put traditional stage-acting skills, most particularly verse-speaking skills, to use in a contemporary work adaptable to the "pixelspace" of our social media apps and conferencing/collaboration software.
We're all in the middle of an explosion of art-making with, and for, our phones; creative teams are encouraged -- using the dialogue to maintain continuity -- to set and "look" the different scenelets variously and inventively, while still pursuing, primarily through play-personage consistency, their particular interpretation of the play.