Jeanne Drennan

Jeanne Drennan

Jeanne Drennan is a playwright, librettist, and lyricist whose works have brought her seven fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A number of her full-length plays—Asparagus, Limoges, Medea at Athens, Wrong Side Out, 12 Dogs, Waxworks, Atlas of Longing—have been produced or developed at theatres small and large across the country, from tiny places in New York (Medea at Athens, 12 Dogs) to much...
Jeanne Drennan is a playwright, librettist, and lyricist whose works have brought her seven fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. A number of her full-length plays—Asparagus, Limoges, Medea at Athens, Wrong Side Out, 12 Dogs, Waxworks, Atlas of Longing—have been produced or developed at theatres small and large across the country, from tiny places in New York (Medea at Athens, 12 Dogs) to much larger programs like the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Asparagus) and the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (Atlas of Longing).
Her new play Get Out of Dodge had its premiere production at the Venice Theater (Venice, FL) in 2016 after being named a winner of the AACT New Play Fest, and has since been published by Dramatic Publishing. 12 Dogs was recently part of Barter Theatre’s 2017 Festival of Appalachian Plays and Playwrights. Previously, 12 Dogs received development at the InterAct Theatre (Phila.), North Shore Repertory Theatre (San Diego), and Open Stage Theatre (Pittsburgh). It was a finalist for the NNPN’s Smith Prize and for Bloomington Playwrights Project’s new play contest, and won Boston TheaterWork’s new play contest, BTW Unbound.
With composer David Berlin she has written book and lyrics for the musical Dear Boy, which has had workshops with the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre and Musical Theatre Artists of Pittsburgh. Other works in progress include the play Whiteface and the comic musical Juiced!, for which she's writing book, music and lyrics. Jeanne is currently the Managing Director of MTAP—Musical Theatre Artists of Pittsburgh, a group that has emerged as an incubator where new works of musical theatre come into being and are nurtured. She’s a member of the Dramatists’ Guild and has worked with City Theatre’s Young Playwrights since the program began in 1999.

Plays

  • WHITEFACE
    (Play in development)
    Claire and John are in their 60s, a happy interracial couple for the past 15 years. They’re partners, but now reality has gone tilt. One moment they’re singing an old Irving Berlin song together, and the next Claire is teaching a class where nothing goes right. Her slideshow of iconic civil rights pictures includes an image of three girls dressed up for Halloween, two of them in...
    (Play in development)
    Claire and John are in their 60s, a happy interracial couple for the past 15 years. They’re partners, but now reality has gone tilt. One moment they’re singing an old Irving Berlin song together, and the next Claire is teaching a class where nothing goes right. Her slideshow of iconic civil rights pictures includes an image of three girls dressed up for Halloween, two of them in blackface. Claire recognizes her smiling teenaged self as the third girl, a white hobo with a cigar. Next stop, a Dark Wood like Dante’s. Her guide Eleanor, a black teenager from 1962, comes through the wood looking for her dog but also bringing Claire’s high school uniform and a desire to talk about old times.
    Eleanor doesn’t judge, but everyone else Claire meets in the Dark Wood finds fault with her. And they adopt strange disguises, like her daughter and son-in-law who masquerade as those two friends from the photo and continue to blame Claire for opting out of blackface when she had, after all, promised. John’s granddaughter Shanna badgers her to sign a mysterious petition and blames Claire for inaction. John himself is heading the school’s inquiry into the botched slideshow; Claire fears losing not just her job, but John, who’s lost all recollection of their shared life.
    The final reckoning comes with the appearance of the souls of the damned—or one of them. Claire takes the only step open to her if she is to emerge whole. And, in a very wobbly way, it works. Eleanor finds her dog and John and Claire reunite to sing Irving Berlin. But they don’t get far before the Dark Wood springs its last surprise, the reason Claire’s world went tilt in the first place. Her return to reality is rocky, but with clear signs of hope.
  • GET OUT OF DODGE
    Apart from a mother-in-law who drinks, Molly Hamilton has an enviable east-coast liberal's life, with a great job, an equally great husband, talented kids. Then one hot July day, her long-missing father Schuyler knocks on the door. His plan? Molly should join him on a road trip back to Idaho, the place where he left her at seventeen to mop up way too much blood, some of it oozing from a wounded U.S....
    Apart from a mother-in-law who drinks, Molly Hamilton has an enviable east-coast liberal's life, with a great job, an equally great husband, talented kids. Then one hot July day, her long-missing father Schuyler knocks on the door. His plan? Molly should join him on a road trip back to Idaho, the place where he left her at seventeen to mop up way too much blood, some of it oozing from a wounded U.S. marshal.
    Family alliances shift as sixteen-year-old Phoebe embraces Schuyler’s world while Molly fights her husband over how to handle the fugitive under their roof. Worse, Schuyler’s story keeps changing, and yes, that is a thirty-eight in his bag. It takes a DUI, an ill-timed communal prayer, a food fight, and three lawyers named Henry to reveal Molly’s path. There are all kinds of second chances. When it comes to family, grab one.
  • 12 DOGS
    12 Dogs is a play about what it takes to plan for the future when it’s not clear that there will be a future at all, especially not for you. Luisa is a young widow teaching in 12 Dogs, a small town in the Outlyers of a post-cataclysmic North America. Her attempts to win opportunities for a brilliant student attract outsiders to the place, and they come with their own plans for the boy. Gradually, the place that...
    12 Dogs is a play about what it takes to plan for the future when it’s not clear that there will be a future at all, especially not for you. Luisa is a young widow teaching in 12 Dogs, a small town in the Outlyers of a post-cataclysmic North America. Her attempts to win opportunities for a brilliant student attract outsiders to the place, and they come with their own plans for the boy. Gradually, the place that had seemed a refuge from a disintegrating society in the Homelands begins to slip away. Luisa’s choices shrink as her one-room schoolhouse is closed and her teaching licence is revoked. She had earlier lost her husband Anton to the civil insurrections plaguing the Homelands and is now exposed to the draft herself. What seems worse, her beloved dog has disappeared and her student is trying out risky behavior that’s apt to shut down his opportunities. Then Jack, her unshakeable rock and unquestioned support, seems to kick away her foundation of belief in Anton, just as she discovers that the student has set an entirely different course of his own. Luisa can’t go back and can’t see a way of moving ahead until she’s able to reconnect both with basic values that were slipping from her mind and heart, and with Anton’s living memory. Salvation, as it turns out, resides in the unexpected.
    12 Dogs is a politically aware excursion into a world where the hunger for honest words and imaginative expression seems almost unquenchable. In this world, Luisa’s dog talks; poetry, comic books, and particle physics have a power to transport and elevate characters who seemingly have few choices and sometimes grim futures; and a young couple, about to be parted for all time, holds off despair by looking with wonder at a blank piece of paper and the beautiful trail of handwriting beginning to fill it.
  • WAXWORKS
    The Story: With his seventh novel, Izzie Parschak has become a celebrity, with his figure about to go into Poets’ Corner at the Waxworks. But even in the flush of success, he finds that suddenly nothing is what it seems. Is he being interviewed by a talk-show host or the secret police? Has he been put in a green room or a holding cell? Why are his apparently powerful friends unconcerned when a youth...
    The Story: With his seventh novel, Izzie Parschak has become a celebrity, with his figure about to go into Poets’ Corner at the Waxworks. But even in the flush of success, he finds that suddenly nothing is what it seems. Is he being interviewed by a talk-show host or the secret police? Has he been put in a green room or a holding cell? Why are his apparently powerful friends unconcerned when a youth organization called the Patriots demands his prosecution under the Decency Statutes? How to understand this new and dangerous logic? But in that green room Izzie falls in with Roger, an idealistic young editor who has developed a system, an elaborate dance, for taking a few knocks and negotiating the chaos while publishing the truth.

    When Izzie is finally put through a charade of a trial, he finds himself capitulating to the system, playing his role by confessing to anything for a lighter sentence. But when he sees that Roger has cracked under new pressures and threats, he summons up the courage to take Roger’s place, to find his own voice, to be that one person shouting from the trenches. The dance, it turns out, is not the one Roger described, but a wholly new one that is not without its beauty.

    The Show: Izzie’s struggle is to act inde-pen-dently in a society that thwarts and ultimately punishes indepen-dence in thought and action, and his story, Waxworks, explores the role of the artist in a politically confusing and troubling world. My aim is to tell a story grounded in persecution, mad violence, art in service of political oppression, and the insidious attractions of dictatorship, while at the same time telling the consummately human story of a man trying to make sense of chaos and finding a way to navigate it.

    The play requires six actors—three men and three women playing eleven roles. (The doubling scheme is included in the list of characters.) The various settings should be simply suggested to keep the action fluid. Projections and sound which help to define place and/or state of mind are included in the stage directions.
  • ATLAS OF LONGING
    Right now, more than anything else in the world, Nathalie wants the Islamist terrorists who kidnapped her friend and colleague Michael over his political journalism to let him go. She’s a food writer in Brussels, a would-be cooking show host, and Michael’s plight is not her only worry. At home her son David’s skateboarding is driving the neighborhood mosque crazy, especially when he does tricks on their...
    Right now, more than anything else in the world, Nathalie wants the Islamist terrorists who kidnapped her friend and colleague Michael over his political journalism to let him go. She’s a food writer in Brussels, a would-be cooking show host, and Michael’s plight is not her only worry. At home her son David’s skateboarding is driving the neighborhood mosque crazy, especially when he does tricks on their disability ramp. Perhaps just as bad, the forward, disarming Dominika shows up at her door, a penniless immigrant from Poland who trades on her family’s role in saving Nathalie’s mother from the Nazis. Managing the unexpected, sexy young guest, along with David's dangerous standoff with the mosque, becomes even harder when Michael’s kidnappers release a video of his brutal execution. The crime sparks a shocking response from David and a loud rebuke from the neighborhood, all of which threatens to overwhelm Nathalie's longing to be accepting and tolerant, the earth mother who feeds the nations. The little family lurches further into a volatile situation that brings it to the edge of catastrophe, where Nathalie discovers that confusion, mess, and disorientation sometimes produce a glimmer of hope.
    Atlas of Longing is a darkly comic play that stirs together good intentions from two sides of a cultural chasm and meets head-on Europe’s lurking fear that it may be turning into Eurabia.
  • WRONG SIDE OUT
    Wrong Side Out is a two-act play with music about Julia, a graduate student who falls in love with the godlike but married professor she assists in a freshman course called “Shakespeare.” The old love triangle becomes a bizarre pentangle as the play mines the Elizabethan/Jacobean theatrical vocabulary—music, dance, interlude, swordplay, and fluid sweep—to tell an urgently paced story of love betrayed,...
    Wrong Side Out is a two-act play with music about Julia, a graduate student who falls in love with the godlike but married professor she assists in a freshman course called “Shakespeare.” The old love triangle becomes a bizarre pentangle as the play mines the Elizabethan/Jacobean theatrical vocabulary—music, dance, interlude, swordplay, and fluid sweep—to tell an urgently paced story of love betrayed, unrequited, requited, and then betrayed again, all under the lyrical spell of William Shakespeare.
  • Asparagus
    Asparagus is set in the flush 90s, at a point where Emily suddenly gets a break in her desire to create work of lasting value. Through Barb, an old friend and now a story editor, she’s sold her first screenplay to a small production company based in New York. But at the last minute she’s ordered to make huge changes to the work. To complicate matters, her daughter Molly is having a few adjustment problems, and...
    Asparagus is set in the flush 90s, at a point where Emily suddenly gets a break in her desire to create work of lasting value. Through Barb, an old friend and now a story editor, she’s sold her first screenplay to a small production company based in New York. But at the last minute she’s ordered to make huge changes to the work. To complicate matters, her daughter Molly is having a few adjustment problems, and her husband Joe is about to leave town on a teaching assignment just when he’s scored a major museum sale: paintings of Emily that capture her grief after his infidelity a few years earlier. But luckily for Molly’s screenplay, a working class man named Art suddenly enters her life with a strange request. Will she write a TV movie about his daughter Lisa? Lisa’s murder the previous year is still unsolved, and Art thinks a TV movie could give the case new exposure, maybe even lead to an arrest. Emily resists, but is drawn into his story and finally yields, agreeing that she’ll at least talk to Art about Lisa’s life, about her hopes and dreams. Maybe there’s a story in it all.
    Emily needs incident, complex characters, reversals; now all she has to do is listen and find exactly the right combination of details from Art and the lives of everyone around her to make the screenplay work. And it does. The screenplay thrives on this rich diet, and the company is so happy with the product that Emily even gets to meet the young star who will play the lead. But the same night Barb fires her. Emily is clearly exhausted and another writer will do a final polish of the script. Angry at what she sees as a betrayal, Emily pushes Barb too far and finds Barb has caught on to what she’s been doing. Only then does Emily see that the drive to create art of lasting value exacts a pretty high price. At close, all she can do is be honest with the people whose lives she’s ransacked, and then live with the consequences.
  • LEFT LUGGAGE
    Béla Zsolt survives the Nazis pursued by nine suitcases he no longer possesses. Packed by his wife Ági, they carry spectres of the war and the deportation of Hungary’s Jews. But Ági will do almost anything to save her husband, and Béla suddenly feels in league with the murderers stuffing the cattle wagons. Who will stay, and who will go? And what kind of life will be possible, once the decisions are made?...
    Béla Zsolt survives the Nazis pursued by nine suitcases he no longer possesses. Packed by his wife Ági, they carry spectres of the war and the deportation of Hungary’s Jews. But Ági will do almost anything to save her husband, and Béla suddenly feels in league with the murderers stuffing the cattle wagons. Who will stay, and who will go? And what kind of life will be possible, once the decisions are made?

    By turns comic, bizarre, romantic, and tragic, the play moves back and forth in time to present a story that breaks free from its own era. This extraordinary journalist, novelist, and playwright finally arrives at an understanding of his persistent feeling of being trapped in the role of accomplice to villains. Reluctantly, then delicately, he constructs with Ági a picture, both beautiful and commonplace, of what should have been. Who would not like to have the same opportunity?
  • MEDEA AT ATHENS
    Aegeus, king of Athens, is in crisis. He mistakenly believes that his beloved son Theseus has been killed on a mission to slay the Minotaur of Crete, a death he believes was predicted by the oracle at Delphi. He’s up high on the Acropolis and he’s ready to step over the edge and end his misery, even though his death is likely to throw Athens into political turmoil. The only one trying to stop him is Chorus, a...
    Aegeus, king of Athens, is in crisis. He mistakenly believes that his beloved son Theseus has been killed on a mission to slay the Minotaur of Crete, a death he believes was predicted by the oracle at Delphi. He’s up high on the Acropolis and he’s ready to step over the edge and end his misery, even though his death is likely to throw Athens into political turmoil. The only one trying to stop him is Chorus, a cynical unpublished poet.
    But wait. Who’s that stepping out of a chariot drawn by dragons, the same dragons she used to make her splashy exit from Corinth after all those murders? Right, it’s Medea, his third wife, the same one he exiled several years ago after her attempt to poison Theseus. She’s back and she’s brought their spoiled and dissolute son Toby with her.
    But why should Medea want to keep this ex-husband alive? With Theseus dead and Aegeus a suicide, she and Toby could run Athens themselves. Could it be that eternal life, mysteriously bestowed on her by the inscrutable Olympians, isn’t looking so great without Aegeus? Could it be that she really loves him, and that the feeling is mutual? She tries to argue, reason, and seduce Aegeus into compliance. He counters her at every trick and evasion, every sophistry. So why does he not jump?
    The oracle may be oblique but never wrong. It is Toby, the spoiled, posturing son of these two willful royals, who forces Aegeus’s hand, just as it looks as if Medea will get her reconciliation. And, in dying, Aegeus understands both what it has cost him to have these two troublesome sons and why the price was worth it.

    A long one-act, 70-75 minutes.