Andy Boyd

Synopsis:
Three Scenes in the Life of a Trotskyist traces the forty-year story of Lev Trachtenberg from idealistic radical to hard-core conservative. We first meet Lev in 1939 as a leftist firebrand at City College. But after finding himself on the other side of the picket lines in the campus rebellions of the 1960s, he finds himself zealously embracing the Reagan Right. This horrifies his one-time comrades, who wonder: has Lev abandoned his old ideals, or held onto them too tightly as the world around him changed? Three Scenes is a play about politics, literature, and the corrosive power of success in America.

Available as a podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/three-scenes-in-the-life-of-a-tro…

This play begins in the fall of 2011, when a libertarian rancher, an anarchist punk, an aging hippie, a radical priest, and a single mother gather in Courthouse Square in Prescott, Arizona, determined to fix America. They all agree that the one percent is too powerful, and the rest of us are getting screwed. When they try to get more specific than that, though, they find themselves disagreeing about nearly everything. Some want to focus narrowly on economic inequality, while some want to reimagine the entire structure of society. Some see the government as a potential ally, while some see it as the main enemy. Over the course of the occupation, unlikely alliances form even as friendships crumble. People unused to articulating their worldview in public are forced to defend their most cherished beliefs. The personal and political merge and fuse, and abstract debates about political theory suddenly become intensely emotional. This is a play about the sometimes frustrating, always necessary work of trying to create a new world.

The play is prefaced with two quotations, “We need a better world right away, this week” by Wallace Shawn and “We need everybody and all that we are” by June Jordan. These two “we needs” are held in tension in this play, as they are in our political moment. We must move incredibly quickly to deal with the myriad problems in our society, but we must also make sure we don't leave anyone behind. How do we do both at once? I don’t have answers. But I do have a play.

A young experimental playwright named Andy Boyd pitches George Lucas his screenplay for a new Star Wars film. The concept: a prequel to the prequels that fleshes out the economic and social implications of the mysterious intergalactic organization known as The Trade Federation. Replacing the veiled references to colonialism in the original films, Andy’s script is a full-on allegory where The Trade Federation is The International Monetary Fund, the Gungans are the Zapatistas, and the Jedi are an international community reluctant to push for any real structural change – the UN, basically. Lucas thinks the movie sounds really boring and unceremoniously kicks Andy out of his office. Then things really get weird.

The Trade Federation is a play that uses the grand narratives of late capitalism against capitalism itself. It weaponizes one the most successful film franchises of all time against the dead-end ideology of “capitalist realism,” which insists that history is over and that there is “no alternative” to the unfettered rule of the market. No, this play argues, we can always fight back. Star Wars told us so.

The place: a Coney Island of the mind.
The time: old timey-times.
Coney Island Baby is a musical comedy in one act by Andy Boyd featuring a demented doctor with a brilliant plan to save the premie babies of Brooklyn, a back-stage sideshow "will they won't they" romance/friendship, a famous folksinger dying of a mysterious disease, and a plan to save Coney Island from gentrification (in the person of Fred Trump (boo hiss!)) that brings them all together! It's a weird, silly, earnest, ironic musical comedy written by a playwright who only knows like five chords. It's about community, friendship, and solidarity, and it's also about why Coney Island just might be the greatest place on earth.

The year is 1939. The place, Southeast Missouri. Three members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (Billie Barstow, Harry Leland, and his daughter Baby Blue) are sitting on the side of Highway 61, attempting to gain public sympathy in the wake of a wave of anti-Union evictions. They are also trying, fitfully, awkwardly, to trust one another.

This is a play about people who, forced against the wall and with nothing left to lose, fought back.

A weight loss competition in a small Midwestern town. A budding romance between two park rangers at the local bird sanctuary. A diner run by a mother/daughter duo whose relationship is showing serious strain. When these three collide, 15 year-old Jenny will learn valuable lessons about self-acceptance, care, and the perils of an all-lentil diet.

It is Right to Rebel! tells the story of Jiang Qing, who was Mao Zedong's wife for thirty-eight years. The play is framed around her 1980 trial for attempting to overthrow the Communist Party and make herself Chairman. Using this frame, we see Jiang Qing climb her way from homelessness and poverty to stardom on the Shanghai stage (in a celebrated production of A Doll's House). When the revolution comes, she retreats to Mao's mountain headquarters in Yanan and quickly strikes up a relationship with him. However, the rest of the Communist leadership is suspicious of her: is she just some bourgeois actress? Is she maybe a Kuomintang spy? They agree to let her marry Mao under one condition: she must never be involved in politics, only cultural policy.

After spending the fifties sidelined by Deng Xioaping and Liu Shaoqi (including long involuntary stays in a Moscow mental hospital) Jiang Qing figures out how to seize power: she will use her authority as an expert on theatre to wage a propaganda battle against Deng, Liu, and the rest of the "revisionists." This propaganda battle quickly becomes a literal civil war: The Cultural Revolution. However, when Mao dies without naming her his successor, she quickly falls from power and is put on trial.

This is a play about theatre as politics, politics as theatre, and revenge as revolution.

One was a communist. The other was a capitalist. One was an artist. The other, an engineer. And yet, for the year between the spring of 1932 and the spring of 1933, Diego Rivera and Henry Ford were friends. Rivera came to Detroit on a commission from Ford’s son Edsel to paint a mural on the theme of Detroit Industry. Rivera and his wife the painter Frida Kahlo arrived in a city on the brink of revolution or collapse: bank failures, violent labor clashes, rallies by Communists and Bible-quoting proto-fascists that drew audiences in the thousands. River Rouge tells the story of the year that followed in a dizzying collage-inspired style mixing vaudeville, docudrama, folk music, protest theatre, and magical realism. It asks a question as relevant today as it was in 1932: how can we use art to remake the world?

In 1867, several thousand "refugees" from the former Confederacy landed the SS South America at the Brazilian town of Santa Barbara, soon thereafter renamed Americana. Here, in the western hemisphere's last slave society, they tried to recreate the world they had lost. Os Confederados begins with the story of these first pioneers. As they arrive in Brazil, they begin to realize that they have different ideas of what it means to rebuild Dixie in the Brazilian jungle. For some, a New South means a world free of Yankee control where rugged individualism could finally flourish. For others, it means a reimposition of rigid hierarchies of race and gender.

From that opening, the play jumps one hundred and fifty years to 2017. Descendants of the original Confederados are holding their annual Festa, a celebration of...something. As the Confederados struggle to reconcile their Confederado identity with their Brazilian values, the same contradictions evident in the founding generation reassert themselves. What, after all, does it mean to celebrate your past as you move into the future? What does it mean to celebrate a past you don't remember?

Os Confederados is a play about family, about history, and about memory. It's about race and gender and Brasilidade. It's about why we hold on and how we let go.

Seven Minutes In Eternity is an exploded biography of William Dudley Pelley, America's favorite fascist mystic. It follows Pelley from humble beginnings in small-town Massachusetts to revolutionary Russian, Jazz-Age Hollywood, and Heaven. Twice. In the second act, we enter the world as Pelley sees it, uncovering an international conspiracy that only Pelley, with the help of his allies Hitler and Mussolini, can stop.

Sinclair Lewis never actually said "When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross," but if he had he would have been talking about William Dudley Pelley. This plays shows that fascism is as American as small-town values, religious revivals, Superman, and the Ku Klux Klan.

Eric and Ace are a pretty normal couple. Except Ace is transgender, and they’re Eric’s human puppy, and Eric’s Catholic family doesn’t know about any of this. But Eric’s little sister isn’t doing well, so they go home to help take care of her—and maybe say goodbye. Pup Play is a play about figuring things out: what we owe each other, who counts as family, and how to be honest about who and what we love.

When 17 year old Nick transfers to a new school, he finds himself drawn into the orbit of the mysterious, fabulously wealthy Jay. Jay throws extravagant parties at the local Yacht Club with the goal of attracting the attention of Nick's cousin Daisy. Only one problem: Daisy has a boyfriend, football star Tom. As Jay launches a campaign to be elected Homecoming King and win Daisy's heart, Nick finds himself more and more fascinated by Jay's ability to invent his own reality, and by his paradoxical desire to make everyone a star. This play, adapted from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, asks audiences to choose: do we want equality, or do we want to be the best?

Nora's mother Cassandra is fading fast. She has late-stage Alzheimer's and needs constant attention, attention Nora can't give. Nora hires Juanita, a live-in nurse, to take care of Cassandra. As Juanita and Cassandra bond, though, Juanita begins to provide more than physical care. As a way to help Cassandra emotionally cope with her impending death, Juanita indoctrinates her into fundamentalist Christianity. This play asks the question, what is a "good death"? Is it a death without fear, safe in the arms of Christ? Or is it a death without illusions, surrounded by loved ones? This question implies a broader one: what gives life meaning? People? Or God?

In this play, two women in Puritan Massachusetts navigate friendship, love, sin, and death in a struggle to live Godly lives. Mercy Pritchett is a young woman recently widowed who must carve out a space for herself in a society that praises women only as wives, mothers, and daughters. Sarah Gooden is a recent arrival to Massachusetts, a refugee of the tumultuous civil war that led to the widespread discrediting of the Puritan movement. Their unlikely friendship takes us into the founding moment of American exceptionalism even as it reveals the darkness at the heart of our national soul.

After 17 year old Kim's mother dies under mysterious circumstances, Kim must decide whether to stay in her hometown of Prescott, Arizona or leave with her 23 year old boyfriend Scott. Meanwhile, her friends from high school are dealing with much more pedestrian concerns. It is, after all, the weekend of winter formal. Affordable Rates and Color TV is a mashup of Sam Shepard and John Hughes, a coming of age dark comedy set in the Arizona high desert.

A military official answers allegations of war crimes.

Two people, Shotwell and Firegood, are serving a 90 day stint in a protected nuclear bunker far beneath the earth's surface. They are each equipped with keys: in the event of nuclear war, they are to turn their keys at the same time, releasing "the bird" at the enemy. The play begins on day 90, when their replacements are supposed to arrive.

Nobody arrives.

This is a play about isolation, paranoia, jealousy, and jacks.

An adaptation of the story by Donald Barthelme.

An audio recording of the play can be found at: https://soundcloud.com/user-498240986/game-by-andy-boyd-from-the-story-…

A tale told from far-off times that's also somehow a powerpoint presentation.

When my mother was a kid she had a recurring nightmare that Angela Davis would kidnap her in the middle of the night. I wrote a play about that.

A letter from the only person who will only ever truly love you, but who lives in New Jersey so isn't really on your radar dating-wise.

When the family car breaks down at a rest stop on Christmas Eve, a family is forced to reflect on how they got there, in both the literal and the cosmic sense of that question.

A man has an unusual method for shielding himself from the emotional shock of a breakup.