Jason Patrick Rothery

Winner of the 2014 Jessie Richardson Award for Outstanding Original Script.

A once-brilliant scientist makes a startling discovery: a bio-engineered form of rice that could save an overpopulated world on the brink of catastrophic famine. But what are the costs, to himself and to those for whom he is responsible?

Inside the Seed re-imagines the Greek morality tale Oedipus Rex as a darkly comic political thriller. Mirroring real-life scientific and corporate controversies, Seed examines how good, smart, well-intentioned individuals are drawn into, and corrupted by, complex institutional systems, be they corporate, military, or governmental.

One day, former star of stage and screen Groucho Marx receives a letter from a fan requesting a photograph. The fan turns out to be T.S. Eliot, then widely considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century. Groucho, having always craved acceptance from the literati, sends Eliot a debonair head shot. Eliot writes back, thanking Groucho for the portrait, but asking if it might be possible to have a second photo with Groucho sporting his trademark greasepaint mustache? The two aging icons become pen pals, and eventually arrange a dinner at Eliot’s Kensington flat. The dinner itself remains something of a mystery. The only extant account of their encounter — the last time, as it turned out, that their lives would intersect (the always ailing Eliot died seven months later) — is in a letter written by Groucho to his brother Gummo. The elder Marx brother describes a quasi-awkward and playfully combative evening with each storied artist variously attempting to impress the other.
After Groucho failed “to bowl over the poet” with recitations from King Lear, Eliot started quoting quips from Duck Soup. “Now it was my turn to smile politely,” a frustrated Groucho wrote. “I was not going to let anyone—not even the British poet from St. Louis—spoil my Literary Evening.”
Cat vs. Duck (Or: A Literary Evening) imagines the evening shared by Eliot and Groucho, and their spouses Victoria and Eden, in a magic realism meets vaudeville style that spirals off into fanciful tangents that gradually begin to blur and entangle. The play is at once celebratory and iconoclastic, probing each artists’ checkered past, and the toll that their capricious temperaments, and the tumult of their lives, exacted on the people closest to them.

For as long as anyone can remember, the grade sixes of Anderson Elementary have been at war with the grade sevens of Jacobs Junior High. At the behest of their charismatic leader, Calvin, and drawing inspiration from the mythical Wedgie - the only Six to battle and defeat a Seven single-handed - the Sixes are launching a final all-out last-ditch assault in the vain hope of conquering their foes once and for all. A strange and surprising confluence of phenomena, however, augurs the fulfilling of an age-old prophecy, a prophecy that heralds the arrival of The One - a The One who really doesn't want to be a The One, or understand the necessity for The Ones, at all.

In the spring of 1665, the small village of Eyam (Derbyshire, England) suffers an epidemic of bubonic plague by way of fleas festering in a box of cloth (or so the legend goes). The newly appointed rector – William Mompesson – makes a passionate plea that the residents impose a quarantine and pledge an oath to stay, lest they spread the plague to the surrounding villages. His parish persuaded, they mark off a circle of stones outside the village limits - the purported inspiration for the nursery rhyme "Ring-a-ring of rosies, pocketful of posies," though this is hotly disputed.

This same historical event inspired the okay play The Roses of Eyam, and the remarkable novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks.

For as long as she can remember, Ruby has felt like the world's number one pushover. But now Ruby's finally ready to start fresh and seize the day. All she needs to do before embarking upon her new life is tie up a few loose ends in her old one: Help break her convict father out of prison by hiring the two novice hit-people - Sam and Bridget - to put him in the infirmary, break up for good with her unhinged therapist Kathi, and get back together with her pyramid-scheme pushing ex-boyfriend Emmerson. Seize the Fish is a really goofy comedy about relatively incompetent but well-intentioned people doing whatever it takes to *carp diem*.

Set in the early aughts, and in the wake of a shattering terrorist attack, two brothers return home to hold their father's funeral. (Yes, it's one of *those* plays.) Carter is an idealist and agitator whose blistering book about the corporate corruption of the American government is going to be pulped before it ever hits the shelves. Dylan is a pitchman specializing in "tweens." As Carter struggles to wrap his head around penning a biopic about a young Jeff Buckley-esque musician who perished before his time, the brothers' conflicting world views gradually come to a head.

This devised piece, inspired by the spaghetti Western's of Sergio Leone - particularly Once Upon a Time in the West - is an evocative and lyrical take on a beloved genre. Like Leone's cherished films, the story is pretty straightforward: A sinister henchman mercilessly secures land for a shadowy money-grubbing baron, a woman confronts the hazards of the lawless frontier, and a mysterious gun-toting figure lurks on the periphery.