Stephen Burleigh

Autumn, 1896 Bethany, Arkansas
The Southern Cross Saloon

Bethany is an historical drama set in the fictional town of Bethany, Arkansas in 1896. The story takes place on a stormy night in the Southern Cross saloon, a mash-up of wild west barroom and river front brothel, forty days after the lynching of young African American for raping the young mistress of the wealthy saloon owner. Renowned anti-lynch activist and journalist Ida B. Wells arrives from Chicago with her friend “Stagger” Lee Felton to investigate the lynching. The play merges the theatricality of old fashioned saloon melodrama with the heightened stakes of in-your-face-racism met head on by an immovable force for justice in the character of Ida B. Wells. Bethany is the first full length play featuring Ida B. Wells as the protagonist.

Autumn, 2001
Post 911 Attack
Time in stasis
Ground Zero

THE PILE takes place at Ground Zero, dead center of the apocalyptic pile of twisted steel and colossal chunks of concrete in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks and collapse of the towers. The action is both realistic and other worldly. It’s days and weeks after 9/11: it’s timeless. New York Fire Fighter Bull Sweeney digs in the rubble of the aftermath of the attacks, searching for the remains of his son, Kyle, also an NYFD firefighter who was lost in the collapse of World Trade Center Towers. Bull’s exhausted, utterly depleted physically and spiritually. He challenges God, or any supreme being that would unleash such horrendous evil in the world. As he digs he retrieves the remains and artifacts of other victims. In counterpoint to Bull’s dig, on a scaffolding representing one of the collapsed towers, Godfrey Malbone, the personification of evil (Satan?), holds Kyle hostage. We learn that Malbone is playing an existential game with Bull; he will hold Kyle from passing to the next world until Bull quits his dig, forsaking his search for his son, and abandons his faith. But Bull’s preternatural determination is visceral, and he refuses to quit despite pleas from his wife, Rose, his best friend and NYFD comrade Bernie who reports that in three days a full excavation of the site will commence destroying any chance of Bull’s ever finding Kyle. The news ignites Bull’s fury. He can’t believe they would bull doze the remains of heroes and loved ones – not his son. He vows to battle on, to dig until he finds Kyle or dies trying. He can’t hear the dialectical arguments between Kyle and Malbone, but they witness and comment on scenes between Bull and his visitors. Malbone is determined to win Bull’s soul.

Summer 2016
Night - 2:20 AM.
The 103rd floor exterior observation deck of the Empire State Building.

The deck is not open to the public, but celebrities and other VIP’s are frequently given access. It is one floor up from the official 'Top Floor' accessible to the public. The deck is about 1,100 feet above the street.

A despondent young woman, anguished after being dumped by her middle aged married lover, takes refuge at the Empire State Building’s highest observation deck with the intention of jumping to end her life and her woes. At the moment she pulls herself up to the top of the retaining wall, a black man about her age, summits from his climb scaring them both to a tumbling introduction. Turns out Phoebe works for her lover/boss at a diamond exchange on the 74th floor. Damien may be an enterprising jewel thief in addition to being a world class climber. Phoebe may have stolen hidden cash before ascending to the deck. A short time later her gigolo boss appears on the deck to take her back to their love nest but Damien defends her honor.

DARFUR was a semi-finalist at the 2015 O'Neill Playwrights Conference.

The year is 2013. The play takes place in the elegant living room of Khristo Volkov’s beachfront Mombasa villa. When the villa of international arms merchant Khristo Volkov and Darfurian companion Sumah Boru is set upon simultaneously by a South Sudanese rebel leader, and a former MSF physician and her adopted son, the psychological and emotional blow-back of the Darfur war ends in a life and death struggle for meaning and identity.

DARFUR deals with the impact political/military issues in a region of Africa have on the perpetrators and victims of the conflict. The play is neither didactic nor is it a polemic.

The year is 2007. MARTIN FOLEY is an executive consultant for a multinational corporation called Makepeace Risk Management Services that contracts security services for governments around the world. He specializes in third world countries involved in military conflict and has spent the past four years consulting in Iraq and the adjoining region. LIZ, his wife of 29 years, has stoically raised their two sons in their luxurious home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. On Liz’ fifty-fifth birthday she and Martin return home from her birthday dinner where he receives a call from his boss, the ceo of Makepeace, that their son, 22 year old LOGAN, has been kidnapped somewhere in Northern Iraq. Martin and Liz knew that Logan had ventured on a personal odyssey but didn’t know that he had traveled to the Mideast – or so Martin tells Liz upon receiving the call. The following day Makepeace security liaison, EVIE BOUDREAU, and her assistant TOM, set up a communications center in the Foley home to monitor communications with the kidnappers, a Kurdish rebel group who captured Logan and his girlfriend, SUSANNAH, while they were doing relief work at a clinic in Kirkuk. The next night the family, including oldest son, 27 year old MATT, assemble to watch the kidnappers broadcast their demands via closed circuit video to the communications center in the Foley home. A beaten and blind folded Logan is forced to read the statement. They accuse Martin Foley of orchestrating the bombing of refineries that resulted in the destruction of an orphan health center and that he did it as an agent for Makepeace. They demand that Martin exchange himself for his son and stand trial for this terrorist act. When the broadcast ends Liz demands to know if what the kidnappers allege is true. Martin admits that he and Logan had a confrontation over the bombing that resulted in Logan’s travel to the Mideast to do relief work. Liz tells Martin that he must trade his life for Logan’s. Martin’s dilemma is that Makepeace will never allow him to make the exchange – he can’t free Logan and he knows his own life is in danger. He conspires with Matt on a plan to liberate Logan.
The play shifts in time and location from the Foley music room to various stops on Logan’s Mideast road odyssey, including: his meeting Susannah in a UN relief camp, his capture, and brief imprisonment.