J.Stephen Brantley

It’s a normal morning for Josh, Dinsmore, and Billy until the Ark Of The Covenant spontaneously materializes in their living room. What sort of message is God sending, and why would He choose a trio of trendy Brooklyn queers to spread the Word?

John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain were gold miners who arrived together from Boston in 1849 to stake a claim in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. They would remain there as a couple for more than fifty years. Together they braved nineteenth century San Francisco, saw the inside of prison brigs and dance halls, weathered floods and survived mine collapses, and befriended fellow argonauts from around the world during the single most culturally diverse event in all of history. After winning their very own mining camp in a card game, the pair held legendary Thanksgiving dinners there every year for decades, and eventually opened their home as a way station for travelers to Yosemite. Neither man ever married or expressed in letters any desire to do so. Their devotion to one another is thought to have inspired Bret Harte’s short story Tennessee’s Partner. This is their adventure.

While posthumous tributes stop short of naming their union anything but a ‘partnership’, there is ample evidence from correspondence and from the way station’s guest book that Chaffee and Chamberlain’s acquaintance was, in every way, a ‘bachelor marriage’. Such unions were not uncommon in the mining camps of the gold rush era, where women were scarce and men lived in close quarters. Few were as plain or as enduring as Chaffee and Chamberlain’s.

Inspired by their true story, The Wedded Bachelors of Second Garrote imagines John Chaffee and Jason Chamberlain’s private lives by drawing inspiration from their journals and guest books, Frederick Stocking’s reminiscences of the pair, and Bret Harte’s mining camp fiction.

Shruti Gupta is a DREAMer. A DACA recipient in her senior year of med school, she lives very efficiently in the apartment above her uncle’s jewelry store Jackson Heights, Queens, and leaves the drama to her brother Raj, the soon-to-be-married prince of the family. But when Irish actor Liam appears in Shruti’s patient communications simulation exam, a cross-cultural romance threatens to upend all her practical plans. Their unlikely romance blossoms just as the Supreme Court takes on the Trump Administration’s plan to end the legal protections that keep Shruti from being deported. She and Liam soon find themselves navigating cultural differences, ICE raids, newly unfettered racism, and what it means to be ‘American’.

April 2020. The left-leaning Wills family gathers virtually to remember their recently deceased right-wing patriarch. A dark comedy written for Zoom.

As the tiny African nation of Malawi erupts in riots around them, American aid workers Jack and Ericka take shelter in the storage room of a struggling NGO in downtown Lilongwe. At the same time, half a world away, Malawian student Gilbert and his gay co-worker Chad begin another day in the back room of a Manhattan florist. None of them can imagine how deeply their lives are interconnected.
While these two seemingly separate stories take place seven thousand miles apart, all four of the play’s actors share the same intimate physical space. Their dialogue is overlapping and interwoven, and at times incorporates Chichewa as well as English. The two couples pass within inches of one another, sharing the same set pieces and, eventually, a pivotal prop. It is only in the play's final moment that they each and all see one another.
In Chichewa, the play’s title, Pirira, means ‘endure’ or ‘persevere’. It is not only a theme for the play’s grieving characters, but also the name of the young Malawian girl, a victim of superstition and sexual violence, who connects them all to one another.
The play is inspired by actual political events that took place on July 20, 2011. It explores the ways in which our lives are inextricably linked across cultures, continents, language, and time.

Gay punks Tuffer and Roderick are turning forty. Neither wants to face it. While Tuffer continues to smoke, snort, and screw his way through Manhattan’s collegiate male population, Roderick’s gone straightedge, embracing activism and martial arts. With the arrival of Tuffer’s latest boy toy, Brandon, Roderick can take no more. After a disastrous quasi-intervention, Tuffer agrees to a sobering-up at Roderick’s mother’s house in rural New Mexico.

But when Roderick’s mother Abigail, a formerly successful folk singer, throws the guys a very organic birthday party, twenty years of tension comes to a head. They must confront one another, and themselves, in a kind of spiritual exile on the high desert. Each is on the verge of something new, almost somewhere, in the jamb.

The Jamb is a queer coming-of-middle-age story set in 2008. J.Stephen Brantley’s punk rock rom-com on crystal meth examines how addiction, politics and pop culture have impacted the lives of gay American men who grew up post-Stonewall, pre-Will And Grace. The award-winning 2016 production was directed by Obie-winner David Drake (The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me). Mature audiences only.

TUFFER is a very charming thirty-nine, but can pass for much younger in a bar at closing time. He’s a trust fund baby and ivy league flunker who continues to party like it’s nineteen ninety-nine.

RODERICK is Tuffer’s best friend. After years of reckless behavior, Roderick did a three-sixty in preparation for his fortieth. Now he’s taken up the challenge of reforming Tuffer too.

BRANDON is a twenty-year-old college student and part-time go-go boy. He may not be entirely innocent but he is certainly still green enough to be a romantic.

ABIGAIL is Roderick’s mother. Once a successful singer-songwriter, she has mostly retired to a hilltop in rural New Mexico.

In the summer of 1976, Billy Baal and his bandmates gathered to record the follow-up to their smash hit debut album BAAL. What emerged from those sessions was a Grammy-winning classic that would change the face of rock n roll, and a legend of sex, drugs, ego and hedonism to rival any the music industry has ever seen.

Within a year, Billy’s copious drug use, torrid affairs with both women and men, his tumultuous relationship with bandmate Sophie Barger, and rumours of his involvement in a tragic drowning had torn the group apart. Nearly four decades later, the mad genius frontman whose band bore his name is all but forgotten, but his impact on American pop culture lives on. This is his story.

Recovering addict and aspiring pop star Avery comes home to his sister Emily’s bedside following her horrific attempt at suicide. Over the course of a night he’ll fight to solve the puzzle of who his brilliant and wild-hearted sister really is – or was – and how she ended up confined to a hospital bed, connected to a ventilator. The Emilies is a story about addiction, and about recovery. Each comes with its own set of consequences. For Avery and Emily, there may be healing but there is also, inevitably, irreparable harm.

EMILY (f, 27) is a whip-smart, wild-hearted, alcoholic manager of a record shop who by all accounts should have been so much more. She is in the hospital following a suicide attempt.

AVERY (m, 30) is Emily's brother. He is a recovering heroin addict and proudly-out aspiring pop star who’s done everything he can to escape the suburbs that so crushingly shaped him.

THERESA (f, 45) is a cheerfully capable nurse in a sprawling suburban hospital who manages her patients’ pain - and her own - with snickerdoodle cookies and the power of positive thinking.

It’s New Year’s Eve 1983 and Martin’s plan for a quiet night in his parents’ basement is thrown into chaos when his old friend Dina and her hooligan roommates arrive with a gun and a bag of stolen books. Having teamed with Tony, a sociopath who sees himself as a craftsman, and Stuart, a bisexual English hedonist, Dina’s life is well out of control. On the run from a Manhattan thug, the reeling trio incurs upon bird-watching Martin’s quiet suburban nest and turns it quite upside down.

Regine the Thirteenth governs her nation as a shining example of despotic panache. But when one of her subjects selflessly offers to take the place of a death-row criminal, Regine is forced to reconsider both her law and her lifestyle. Furbelow is a fable about fame, friendship, and really nice fabrics.

fur·be·low [fur-buh-loh] –noun 1. a ruffle or flounce, as on a woman's skirt or petticoat. 2. any bit of showy trimming or finery. –verb (used with object) 3. to ornament with or as if with furbelows.

REGINE the Thirteenth (female) is the much revered leader of her land. Iron fist,
velvet glove, designer shoes.

JASPER the Vinedresser (male) once a farmer, is now in charge of the Federal vineyards.

TAMID the Lace Maker (male) is Jasper’s best friend and a craftsperson in the Capitol.

BOX (male or female) is a member of Regine’s elite guard.

TENCH (male or female) is also one of Regine’s henchmen.

COURTIER ONE (male or female) plays PRISONER ONE, a soldier, and
COUNTESS LORETTA LaROCOCO, a socialite.

COURTIER TWO (male or female) plays PRISONER TWO, a bricklayer, and SISTER
LUDMILLA DELFINA JUAREZ, a nun.

COURTIER THREE (male or female) plays MACKINTOSH, Regine’s decorator and
confidante, and a PRIEST.

COURTIER FOUR (male) plays Jasper’s husband CHISULO, a farmer, and the
EXECUTIONER.

COURTIER FIVE (female) plays Tamid’s wife KU, an apothecary, and a REPORTER.

NOTE: While these roles have been written to be played by just ten actors, a cast of fifteen, twenty or more may be used in production.

A booze-fueled brojob becomes more than fellatio between friends when Fish and Lambert, coworkers attending a sports marketing convention, wake up the morning after to discover at least one of them is feeling more than hungover.

In the year 2023, a young Latina professional returns to her childhood home on the U.S.-Mexico border where her ailing mother lives in the shadow of a sixteen-foot wall. Could it be the wall itself that is making her sick?

Kevin’s wedding is days away and his Dad needs a decent tuxedo. But before making their final purchase at an upscale men’s store, the two have a few things to get straight. So to speak.
KEVIN KEMP is a thirtysomething television director just days away from marrying a really great guy. Despite his tremendous success, Kevin remains very insecure.
TOM KEMP is Kevin’s father. Eternally Midwestern, but doing his level best to embrace his son’s big city lifestyle.
2010. Just outside the changing room at a high-priced menswear shop.

When a strange young man with a knife in his gut appears in Mary’s garden on a
cool autumn night, she is forced to confront her past and admit her part in a
terrible calamity she’d thought long buried. Sex, murder, the turning of soil.
MARY is noticeably older than Guy.
GUY is noticeably younger than Mary.
Mary’s garden, after midnight, in mid-October. A storm is coming.

During the late hours of a summer night on the coast of Eastern Long Island, a displaced Englishman and the drug addict who breaks into his home confront their differences and, more importantly, discover their secret similarities.

NIGEL is an Englishman in his forties. He’s escaped to the States in an effort to shed his working-class background, and has done quite well. Ensconced in his country home, a restored sea captain’s house, and surrounded by expensive antiques, Nigel is unquestionably successful. He’s also very lonely, too ordered, and surely sexually repressed. In moments of stress, when anyone else would be feeling a flood of emotion, the soft-spoken Nigel shuts down. Secretly, however, he craves drama, and is thrilled by Scott’s sudden appearance.

SCOTT is a homeless heroin addict who’s found respite in a seaside home while its owner is away. For all the difficulty of a life on the streets, Scott seems to have embraced the chaos. So far he’s been comfortably playing society’s victim, and seems to feel entitled to living off others in whatever way he can. Now, nearing thirty, Scott can’t quite acknowledge his need for a more ordered life and his desire for a measure of the comfort he enjoyed as a child. In the throes of withdrawal, Scott returns to his secret get-away without realizing its rightful owner has returned.

Break takes place in a seaside house on the East End of Long Island, New York, during the summer of 2007.

After nearly stabbing her husband at the breakfast table, Iris walked out of her Park Avenue apartment bound for Nashville, Tennessee. Returning to the dingy barroom where she misspent her twenties, she hopes to recapture some of the excitement of a bygone era. What Iris finds is Trevor, a washed-up-before-he-started country crooner, the hard truth, and a new start.