Kenley Smith

Jozef, a 10-year-old boy in Gdansk, Poland, has an odd souvenir -- a woman’s shoe. It comes from a hill called Biskupia Gorka, where he has witnessed something on a warm July day that he’ll never forget.

In the spring of 1946, five SS Aufseherinnen (female guards) from the Stutthof concentration camp are sentenced to death by a Soviet/Polish tribunal. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann, infamous for her cruelty and known as the “Beautiful Spectre” by the camp inmates, shares a cell block with 22-year-old Elisabeth Becker; together, they wait out the five weeks until they are scheduled to hang. Elisabeth maintains her innocence and enlists the help of Lech, a Polish guard, to begin crafting a letter-writing campaign to the President of Poland. Jenny, who knows Lech from his previous job, uses that information as leverage to begin a project of her own.

When Victoria sets out to learn more of her family’s history, she opens a portal to a past full of loss, pain and indomitable perseverance. Her mother reluctantly joins her, and the two women uncover old wounds — a scandalous affair in segregated Virginia, a stolen child, a lost parent, a horrific accident — that linger unhealed in the present. The play is based on actual events. Original research by Yalewa Sparrowhawk.

One shotgun blast. Two young women. Two brothers. Four lives fatally intertwined. "Devil Sedan" unfolds as a tale of defied expectation, a journey into the deepest mysteries of faith and duty.

In 1956, an enormous monster destroys Tokyo. A broadcasting crew, a famous Japanese author and an American Air Force general face the initial attack. Many years later, the event still sends ripples through the psyches of two nations that must cope with legacies of loss, fear and hatred.

Locked in a transparent cell with a seemingly delusional young soldier, a military chaplain attempts to learn the truth about a violent, shocking crime. But as the session unfolds, punctuated by threats and even torture, the chaplain's sense of reality begins to shift. Are the prisoner's conversations with God the ravings of a disturbed soul, or the revelations of an enlightened one?

West Virginia always gets the short end of the stick, Big E says. He’s not feeling so great himself — his neighbor’s a jerk, his son gets into fights, his daughter dates a black guy, and those disability checks aren't such a sure thing these days. And as the cops show up, Big E starts to realize that in the gunfight of life, he’s holding a goddamn pocket knife. With ol’ John Henry himself — hammer and all — rising from the staircase, West Virginia becomes an altered state in which folklore and a turbulent past collide with a desperate, screwed-up present.

THE SHADE OF THE TREES follows a family's oral history, generation through generation, over almost 150 years. In the present day, a storyteller recalls childhood stories told by a grandfather in Virginia. That grandfather becomes a boy, circa 1930, who listens to his grandmother's first-person tales of the Civil War. As her stories come to life, we see a 12-year-old girl who aids a young runaway slave and discovers that she must choose between loyalty to her new friend and her perceived duty to her society.

Two college students take shelter as a gunman stalks their classroom building. The play was written on 4/16/2007, hours after the Virginia Tech shootings.