Brenda Kilianski

Battle of Anzio is a full-length drama that examines what can happen when people who gather to pay their respects to the deceased are still battling with the living. American and British expatriates, Italian natives, German tourists, and Albanian refugees all help fill the weekend commemoration with harmless flirtations, dysfunctional family reunions, suppressed war memories, and philosophical debates ranging from the ridiculous – “Does everybody really hate the French?” to the sublime – “When does one’s liberator suddenly become the oppressor?”

The Battle of Anzio, one of the bloodiest sieges fought during World War II, is solemnly remembered at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and Memorial where American service men and women have been buried in the cause of ensuring another nation’s freedom.

Central to the play is the turbulent relationship that exists between Gloria Daly, an actress coming to terms with impending retirement, and her daughter, Lavinia “Vinni” Velletri, an expatriate teaching English on the black market in Milan. Both have come to Anzio to find peace -- with each other and within themselves -- in a place noted only for war. Of the 7, 861 Americans buried at Anzio, one of those is the father and grandfather of these two women.

Rachel has just spent four days away at her sister's wedding and her roommates fear the monster who has been substituted in her place. How does Rachel reconcile 'the truth' to her evolving beliefs? How can Rachel articulate to her roommates that just believing in something doesn't make it necessarily true? And that she's the same person, just different?

Daniel Meir is a doctor without borders - or an unlimited future - at least from his charmed
perspective. As head of a medical clinic serving the refugee population in the Uptown
neighborhood of Chicago, Daniel has much to look forward to, including the impending
birth of his firstborn son, Seth, with his beautiful wife Ursula. But his world begins
collapsing once Yaasmiin, a Somali refugee, brings her five-year-old daughter bleeding at
the crotch. As Ursula balks at the bris planned for their unborn son, arguing that male
circumcision is no different than Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), that human rights
should trump religious ritual, Daniel's worldview begins to lose focus. Two sides to every
story only lead to double-vision for Daniel, where the clear-cut isn't so clear. While his
best friend and attorney, Eddie Fugate, is regrowing his foreskin and his loyal nurse, Carol
Alter, is reliving her own unspeakable childhood trauma, Daniel is looking for clarity,
balance, a restoration to normalcy which - he realizes perhaps too late - may have never
truly existed.

Sabrina and Edward reluctantly reunite at their mother's funeral, and while Eloise
insisted on wearing the family jewels on her trip to the afterlife, family secrets, rivalries
and resentments aren't so easily buried.

What happens when a child of the ’60s, now in her sixties – an ex-radical just released from a long-term prison stint – finds herself incarcerated once again, this time by the adult daughter of one of her victims? Lydia Carmichael is about to find this out when she’s held hostage by Nancy Ormsby, a woman whose mother was killed in a botched robbery involving the once-privileged Barnard co-ed thirty years earlier.

America: the land of opportunity...at least for some. What happens when those
opportunities, however scarce, become more bountiful for non-citizens at the expense of
her own people? Claudia Canard is about to discover the American Dream is more a reality
for strangers, a nightmare for herself and her co-workers, all who check the box "American"
regardless of how they hyphenate their identities.

Loos Ends or A History of Two Broads in Two Acts is the story of two remarkable American women, women whose struggles and achievements were representative of the struggles and achievements of so many American women during the first half of the 20th century, with the one exception being that these two women were quite exceptional in themselves. The play dramatizes the separate lives of and the shared friendship between novelist/screenwriter/raconteur Anita Loos and actress/philanthropist/muse Paulette Goddard. As both women attempted to succeed in a world dominated almost entirely by men, so it follows that all the remaining characters in the play are men as well. These powerful, creative, and often egotistical men who shared these women’s lives include D.W. Griffith, Florenz Ziegfeld, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, George Cukor, George Gershwin, David O. Selznick, and Erich Maria Remarque.

The play spans approximately seventy years in the lives of Anita Loos and Paulette Goddard, showing them first at the threshold of their careers, each attempting to balance relationships, both personal and professional, while simultaneously confronting misogyny, anti-Semitism, ageism, loneliness and death along the way. Their friendship is continually tested over several decades by personal tragedies, professional frustrations, and two extraordinarily willful personalities. That two women managed not only to hold their own against lecherous Broadway producers and overbearing Hollywood directors, but that they should achieve so much beyond their own earliest expectations is in itself a story that needs telling. Their lives unfold between Los Angeles and New York, from the days of silent pictures, vaudeville, and Prohibition to the Golden Age of Hollywood, through the bond selling tours of World War II up until the decline of the studio system in the 1950s, offering not only a very personal history of two women, who by their own admission were always feminine, not necessarily ladies, but forever broads, as well as a detailed retrospective of an era long since departed but always fondly remembered. A chance reunion at a Sotheby’s auction in the late 1970s sets the stage for an older Anita Loos and Paulette Goddard to reexamine their past, to renegotiate their present, and to reaffirm their love and friendship for what little time remains of their future -- together.

Ellen Clayton is still nursing the wounds of never being chosen for the cast of TV's iconic
children's show Zoom some thirty-odd years ago. As if that weren't enough of an emotional
burden for any one woman to handle, now she's contending with a B-movie actress
grandmother getting evicted from her nursing home, a father who's disappearing, a
Renaissance man looking for his wench, while her puppeteer step-mother is still pulling
all the strings. So what's a never has-been TV child star supposed to do?

Sarah is on the hunt for a mate, so naturally she uses a cat to catch her prey. But what happens when the hunter doesn't know she herself is being stalked? No cats were harmed in the making of this play...not so sure about the humans.