David Crespy

Chrome deals with the poisoning of Hudson County, New Jersey with the residue of chromium, a chemical used in the process of producing shiny elements in cars, refrigerators, and other products of the 1950s. The play was developed originally at the Waterfront Ensemble Theatre of Hoboken, NJ, when I was its artistic director and a resident playwright.
The play is among several I have written about the realities of air, water, and land pollution in New Jersey. I grew up in Freehold, where my father was superintendant of schools.

Doudoun Toledano is a girl of 15 in Salonica (Thessaloniki, Greece) circa 1897 and desperately wants to go to Paris to study at the the Alliance Israelite Universelle. Because of this, she is driving her parents crazy. She is headstrong, bold, and wants to go to school because if it is good enough for boys it is good enough for her. But her father, Isaac Toledano forbids it as she is expected to marry her fiancé Saul Vitale, though her mother, Esther, encourages her ambition, and her brother Chaim thinks she is crazy, because wishes he did not have to go to Talmud Torah. In the end, Doudoun must make her case with Rabbi Covo, the Grand Rabbi of Salonica – and the entire story is narrated by a fool – Joha, the most foolish wise man or the most wise foolish man of middle-eastern culture.
The play explores Jewish Salonica of the late 19th century, with its first electric lights, a railroad, and early automobiles in competition with donkey-drawn carts and horse-drawn trolleys, barefoot Jewish porters with their Ottoman Fezzes, and Jewish lemonade sellers, wealthy Pashas in military uniform, Greek and Bulgarian farmers and fishermen, and working Jewish girls who fold tobacco in factories. The play is the beginning of my Madre de Israel Cycle of plays, that detail the story of this haunted Jewish community from 1897-1957.

Mirou of Kalamaria is the second in a three play cycle of plays, Madre de Israel, that I have written about the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki, Greece of which I am a descendant. The play explores the relationship between Mirou Vitale a 17-year-old, the oldest daughter of a family of Italian Sephardic Jews and Issac Krespin, an 18-year-old prisoner in Yedi Kule, the old Turkish prison there, who is young, poor, and a hot-head from nearby Veria, Greece. The events occur on the cusp of the opening of the Macedonian Front in World War I, and lead to Mirou and Isaac’s escape to immigrate to America.

It is 1957, and Allegra Parente (nee Vitale) has been living in Thessaloniki, Greece for over ten years since surviving the war, barely in contact with her sisters. She survived Auschwitz, just barely, leaving her two-year-old daughter, Bolisa, to live with childless Christian Orthodox friends in 1944. With her husband (also a survivor) Joseph suddenly dead from a heart attack, and her business failing, Allegra is despondent, and her daughter Bolisa believes, suicidal. The solution - Bolisa writes to Allegra's sisters, Mirou who lives in America, and Daisy, who lives in Israel, to come back to Salonica - and heal.

The play dramatizes the experience of Bolisa Parente, a Sephardic Jewish girl living in Thessaloniki, who is whisked away from her mother Allegra’s apartment by her dead grandmother DOUDOUN, who had been murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust along with much of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki. Along with her mother, Allegra and her Greek boyfriend, Panagiotis, BOLISA and her family travels first to Sarajevo, where BOLISA becomes a younger version of her grandmother DOUDOUN, collecting stories of Old Spain from Sephardic families as she teaches French for the Alliance Israelite Universelle. One of the women interviewed is Laura (Luna) Papo Bohoreta, a Sephardic Jewish feminist and author, who provides her family’s Spanish history to BOLISA (as a younger DOUDOUN), focusing on the story of Hasdai Ibn Shaprut in the court of Abd al-Rahman III at the Palace City, Madinat al-Zahra, of the Caliphate of Cordoba. During the course of the play, we follow Hasdai’s rise from court physician and inventor of a medicine, theriaca, rescued from Roman and Greek History because of Hasdai’s ability to translate a Latin medical text to Arabic, and his remarkable negotiations with Christian kings, including Queen Toda of Pamplona and her fat grandson Sancho, to his amazing exchange of letters with Joseph, the King of the Khazarites, a Turkic tribe which converted entirely to Judaism. The letter that Hasdai receives from a Khazarite Jew in Constantinople is at the heart of this play, and provides Hasdai with the hope and dream of the coming of the Messiah and the Messianic age. At the end of the play Bolisa returns to Sarajevo, finalizing her journey to collect the Spanish stories of the Sephardim, and to preserve her own family’s history.

This is the full-length version Las Semillias de la Expulsión, which will be part of my six play cycle, Mi Corazón Español Vive Ahora En Grecia: Six Plays of Sephardic Spain & Greece, and takes place in Thessaloniki with Sephardic Jews Allegra Parente (a Holocaust Survivor) and her daughter, Bolisa, contemplating their future. In the process, Bolisa asks about her grandmother, her Nona, Doudoun Toledano (who died at Auschwitz). Doudoun, as a young woman, gathered stories of Old Spain from Sephardim around the Mediterranean as she taught French for the Alliance Israelite Universelle, during the time of the Ottoman, Empire. Doudoun herself appears mystically at this moment, and offers to share these stories with Bolisa, and the play ends with Bolisa stepping into the past with her Nona (and off of her mother Allegra’s balcony!) – which starts the cycle of stories about the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain. It is “seasoned” with a bit of Ladino songs – which would not have to sung – just spoken. The play explores the trials of Abraham Senyor, Crown Rabbi of Castile, and Isaac Abarbenal – the great father of the Sephardic Exile as they wrestle with the reality of the 1492 Alhambra Decree which gave Jews and Muslims three choices with regard to their continued presence in Spain – Convert, Leave, or Die!

This play dramatizes the relatively unknown story of Spanish Diplomat Sebastián de Romero Radigales who saved the last 500 Spanish Jews of Thessaloniki. He and his diplomat colleagues in Greece, facing the tensions of the Spanish Franco regime, frantically attempted to work around Franco’s own collaborationist policies with the Axis Powers, while at the same time, trying to find ways to signal non-belligerence to the Allied Powers. Radigales ignored all of this, and simply tried to save Jewish lives anyway he could, based upon his deeply-felt Catholicism and Christianity.

La Sinagoga de San Pablo conflates two unique moments in time – a moment of peace and reflection in the missionary pilgrimages of St. Paul, and the moment when the Jews of Veria were herded like animals in their own synagogue and sent to their deaths via cattle cars to Auschwitz. The play is a dialogue between good and evil, between the message of faith, hope, and love, and the horrors of hatred and genocide. In the end, the forces of evil win the bodies of the Jews, but their spirits and memory reside in the message of Paul, and in their ongoing resurrection through the sacrifice of all their lives.

This play conflates the Yeni Camii, the New Mosque of the Dönmeh of Thessaloniki past with that of its haunted present – An artist and his friends are preparing the former Mosque for an exhibition featuring paintings of the Sephirot, which as they haphazardly practice a Kabbalistic ritual, open a whirlwind of past, present, and future, from which they cannot escape and are forced to experience. They find themselves at crucial moments in the life of Sabbatai Sevi and the history of the Donmeh, the moments of his initiation into his messianic career—touching briefly upon the more recent events of the rise of the Turkish State, with a guest appearance by Attaturk.

Men Dancing is a mystery tale about AARON NAVARRO, a young artist who struggles against his family's wishes to make sense of his dying father LEONARD's shrouded past. As he discovers the truth about the secret erotic drawings his father drew while a spy in Berlin, AARON's own life begins to unravel, becoming a maze of dreams, passion, and lies. In the midst of Leonard's devastating illness, a cryptic language emerges between Aaron and his father, a magic poetry built on the desperate need between two men to reach a common ground. Men Dancing explores the nature of love, family, and the powerful and mysterious bonds between a father and his son—and the consequences of searching for truth.

In this madcap interactive children’s musical comedy, Hank & Cici Hunter are two kids sucked into the mysterious land beyond the TV screen: Zenith! Unless they save their Mom from the evil game show host, Neato Keen and his henchmen, the Couch Potatoes, they’ll be turned into couch potatoes themselves!

Kosher love is hard to find! Beshert follows the adventures of Nadya Finkelstein, a single mom and eccentric professor at the University of Northern Southeast Missouri, as she struggles through the strange looking-glass world of dating over the age of 35. In a world turned topsy-turvy with talking furniture, crazy suitors, flamboyant and cinematic guilt-trips, and vaguely-threatening vegetarians, Nadya discovers the meaning of true love as she stalks that elusive prey—the nice Jewish guy!

The Sudden Glide explores the life of a sixty-something, fictional Mississippi-born actress,
YVONNE ALLAWAY as she faces the toughest hurdle of her life—a fifth Academy Award
nomination as Best Actress in a Leading Role competing against Meryl Streep. A recovering
alcoholic and drug addict, YVONNE prepares to go to the Academy Award ceremony, and
struggles with her adult children, RAUL and CAMILLE, as well as her British ne'er-do-well
husband, GIL MARSDEN, who is about to leave her for a twenty-something sculptress. On
the way to the ceremony, driven by her son RAUL’s crazy Bronx-born lover, FRANK, she’s
given just enough coke and booze to throw her off her game—but to make things very
interesting.

Parabolis explores the death of a teenager, JAY, in a terrible skateboard accident, and the attempt of his divorced parents, EVAN KLEIN and KENDRA PITNEY, to come to terms with their son’s death. At first EVAN tries to take KENDRA to court, but the judge finds that there has been no parental negligence and forces the couple into mediation with an eccentric mediator, KAKIE VIEW. During the course of the mediation, both EVAN and KENDRA deal with the terrible rift between them, even as their surviving son, GIL, struggles with his brother’s death, and EVAN’s pregnant second wife, RACHEL, tries to deal with EVAN’s rage. Over the course of the play, JAY appears in a series of skater monologues—and it’s clear he’s caught in a kind of limbo. He then appears as an apparition only to EVAN, but neither KENDRA or KAKIE or his wife, RACHEL, believe him. Eventually, it dawns on EVAN that Jay is appearing so that EVAN will reconcile with KENDRA and be a better father to GIL, who has Asperger’s syndrome, and the new baby on the way. The play ends with KENDRA and EVAN struggling to play heart and soul together, along with GIL and JAY’s girlfriend, JORDAN.

Karen Sebbens, a young middle-school biology teacher, in love with science, has invoked the spirits to help her solve her questions regarding evolution. She struggles to make sense of her fundamentalist Baptist faith in light of the teachings of evolution—which she intellectually understands, but cannot accept, as it is heresy. She has refused to teach evolution in her classes and has taught creationism and intelligent design instead. Using her Ouija board, she brings the spirits of Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin to find a way to integrate her faith and evolution—but instead she is to be tried in the INFERNAL COURT OF EVOLUTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN – with Wallace as her advocate, Darwin as the prosecutor, a jury of extinct animals, and Lucy, the Australopithecus, as her judge. Karen argues her case before some of Evolution’s greatest scientists and Creationism’s strongest advocates. Her life hangs in the balance.

Based upon a true story taking place in Keytesville, MO, Stars in the Sky dramatizes the trials of William Hill, the founder of the Bank of Keytesville, who took his wife, Bettie Redding Hill and small son, Willie to Griggsville, Missouri shortly after the murder of Bettie’s father, William Redding by a Union Militia, and the confiscation of the Hill-Redding Homestead by a Union Caption, Hale T. Chellis. Hill returned to Keytesville and seek the reinstatement of his claim on his property and his business at the close of the war—even though the war in Missouri was far from over. Hill wrote many letters to his wife, and she in return, which deal with the brutal day-to-day grind of life during the Civil War in Missouri, including the violence of Confederate bushwhackers, the trials of freed slaves, and the cruel reality of the relentless skirmishes and mutual distrust between neighbors and families. These real-life letters form the basis of the musical’s story of survival, triumph of the spirit, and acknowledgement of the past.

ADDISON QUINN is an owner of a hippy bookshop that specializes in Celtic literature in the small town of Wretched Grace, Missouri. She is afflicted by dreams in which she has the sense that she is murdering people. Working with a local police detective, SYL NOVUS, she is realizing that she may be channeling the next victims of a serial killer, nicknamed Mike the Mortician, because he buries his victims with full funerals, homemade caskets, and grave sites. She is approached by a young woman in the town, JUANITA GILLIS, that her boyfriend, COOPER KHORASSAN, is missing, and she is worried about him. JUANITA also checks in with friends who work at a local convenience store, DON IBEN, who is the nerdy manager, and Willis Macklin, who is his assistant – they have connections to COOPER, who once worked there. As ADDISON and SYL dig into the past, they are assisted by MAXINE WRIGHT, an eccentric woman, who owns an antique store next to ADDISON’s bookshop. In the midst of this, it is clear that DON, who is a game-master specializing in Celtic games, and ADDISON have a much deeper connection – a connection that will lead them to the killer, and a truth about themselves that is far more ancient than either can imagine.

Wilde supervises the nocturnal adventures of a somewhat murderous couple; as
observed by a flying plesiosaur.

Tess, Ira, and Hoochie Stone are the adult orphans, living in the magical world of Queens, NY, of Sol and Irma Stone, whose souls have been inadvertently caught in an AI program on their son Ira's laptop. All three are caught in the midst of rather exciting, life-altering personal crises that may or may not cause the end of their worlds as they know it.

Tekiah! is a dark comedy about the clash of culture between the nearly hermetic world of clannish Sephardim and the brash multicultural forces of New York City. It contrasts the glaring legalities of right-to-die issues against the metaphysics of a Kabbalistic raising of the dead. In Tekiah!, Liana Sultan, the last in a generation of proud, close-knit Greek Jews, battles with the fierce Wiccan magic of her southern-born, WASP sister-in-law, MaryNell, who is desperately trying to cope with the loss of Ibram and with the job of raising his two small sons. Into this mix are brought Liana’s dead brother, Ibram—a dead poet of no discernible talent; Liana’s lover Quadif, an ex-Muslim professional dancer and eccentric philosopher of mixed African-Spanish descent; and Wendy Chin, MaryNell’s friend, a caustic Asian-American medical editor who is an incurable romantic in spite of her carefully-manicured Manhattanite cynicism.

Houseblend explores the comic dynamics of the ultimate “blended family”—human and alien! Narrated by the family bassador, Lucy, Houseblend takes us on a strange journey to the curious planet of Tsimmis, the US Postal Services Division of Extraordinary Packaging, the world of female pugilists, the Great Plodz, and the real life tensions of what happens when two families collide.

Welcome to the strange world of young actors struggling to make it in the big city, after graduating from their small college, University of Northern Southwest Eastern Missouri at Wretched Grace. By day, they pose as working actors struggling in New York City, and wrestle with the darkness that is the theatrical profession.
By night, however, Majors are a secret elite team of superheroes, trained by their former theatre professor, Dr. Nadya Finklestein, at a secret training center located at USEM, to fight an assortment of evil, supernatural villains in New York City (including the undead, vampires, werewolves, zombies, aliens, etc.). In addition to their nightly battles with villains, they live in Queens together in a sleazy apartment share, struggling to find work as actors in New York, and have their own theatre company in the basement of a Queens bar, the Low Brow Sci Fi Theatre (LBSFT) where they regularly perform an ongoing serial theatre comedy, Theatre Majors in Outer Space which is also recorded as a web series.
The play comes to a crescendo as they fight against the force of darkness, actually just another professor, Phillip Hensfield, in the Department of Anarchic Metaphysical Nonsensical Enactment Devising – and the Gods must intervene – actually the Greek Gods including Dionysus, Apollo, and Aphrodite – who decide to start their own rock band to save the world.
So join the Incredible Theatre Majors of Wretched Grace – Orchid, Shakes, Tink, Blade, and Atom, as they take on the evil henchman and their master with the help of Olympus!

Three siblings find themselves in an enormous hotel kitchen after a plane crash.

Gaston and Frazier, two mad poets touched with HIV, duel on Valentine's Day with words of love.

Bedtime in a boys’ bedroom; Stefany and Ira tell a story to us about two little boys caught in the world of divorce.

La Susona is a horror play based upon the legend of Susan ben Susón, Jewish Converso in 15th century Seville, Spain in the Jewish Quarter (Judería) in known as of an uncanny beauty who, while trying to protect her Christian noble lover, betrayed her father, Diego Susón, and thereby sealed her horrific fate. The setting is Calle de la Muerte, Barrio de Santa Cruz (La Judería), Sevilla, España, 1480.

The Missouri Horror deals with the lynching of James T. Scott in Columbia, Missouri in 1923 as a Lovecraftian moment of horror.

When Michelle Benmayor approaches her Nona (grandmother) about her anger issues, her Nona shares the story of her Nono in old Salonika, as she is wafted into the past to the melody of La Bella en Misa, a Sephardic folk song.

IRA, a plus-sized guy and his guilt-giving mother, Estelle, have it out at the Psychotherapist’s office. Violets and synchronized swimming are involved.

Every seven years, we all have one - Today, Rosalind and Kelly fess up to theirs!

Gun violence affects everyone, anywhere, anytime in America - no one is safe. On a bus to NYC, out of the blue, Toby shares what happened to her parents to her friend, Daniel. There is no reason, there is no rhyme.

A proposal scene, but reality has flipped and to their horror the characters realize they’re in a flashback and things have gone south. Way south.

On a visit to the famous Altneuschul of Prague, Ben Feldman, a young, right-wing, American Jewish college student is confronted by a shadow figure in twilight, Ya`qub Ibn Ibrahim, who seems to know all there is about him…including Ben’s feet of clay.