It’s another weekend chez Peter and Marcy Cunningham, art dealers extraordinaire, where moonlight, skinny dipping and roast beef are negotiating tactics. Peter is displaying a new masterpiece to his guests, painted by the mysterious artist, Skylark. Roger brought an attractive brunette Outsider Art expert, Tracey, both to authenticate the picture and to warm his ego and bed. Tracey, curating an exciting new collection, wants arm candy when she meets with lecherous male collectors in Switzerland. Peter wants Tracey’s authentication because he really, really needs the money from selling the picture to cover debts (and the picture may be fake). Marcy wants . . . Marcy wants her marriage and her role as Peter’s charming business partner to survive Tracey. Lilibeth’s unexpected arrival – the curator who got Tracey her job and is, by-the-way, Roger’s wife – upends the careful calculus of desire, betrayal and art world shenanigans.

Tensions erupt as Hamlet’s Father’s Ghost, Banquo’s Ghost and Cleopatra await Paris, Romeo and Juliet’s arrival at the League for Dead Shakespearean Characters, an afterlife community for dead (poisoned, stabbed, self-inflicted death, etc.) and otherwise ghostly characters.

ChiChi is a down-on-her-luck gourmand panhandling breakfast on a subway platform. Her wild food obsessions are interrupted by a newly employed pal from the homeless shelter, contacting Jade Blue’s overnight radio call-in show, meeting a pregnant woman who desperately needs a job, and being lured into employment by Jade Blue’s promise of FREE COFFEE AND DONUTS.
Along the way, a lucky sweater (see my play A PILE OF SWEATERS for background) gets passed around, Jade Blue cheers her loyal listeners on to success and through FREE COFFEE AND DONUTS, ChiChi may find her way back into society.

Kathryn, a Pulitzer-prize winning, COVID-panicked journalist, shares her panic with us – how she obsessively checks and double-checks her apartment, her backpack, her carry-on for her tampons, her chargers, her documents, and reminds herself – and us – that this is her first pandemic.

An idea pitched during a pre-Passover 2024 Israeli cooking show, featuring a chocolate cake, turns into an audacious push-back against despair

At the intersection of privacy and technology, where does greed reside? And are the dynamics different when women, college friends working together, are involved?

Jordan and Kelly have been developing their new product - bio-feedback enabled leggings - since college. The fit is perfect, the fabric is fabulous and the technology - the tech has been fought over, with a careful eye towards maintaining users' privacy. Post-successful launch, post-appearance on The View, complications arise when a selling platform has a simple request: add location data to the health and wellness data points already collected, to help Alzheimer's families track loved ones. And maybe . . . just maybe, add additional health and wellness data points. Lola's dangling of success and wealth further fuels long-festering stresses between Jordan and Kelly, with Jordan seduced by Lola's promises. Kelly resists, interpreting the location data as both surveillance and capitulation: if they provide location data, it will be harder to refuse further tinkering with the source code.

THE BUY BUTTON looks at tech's imperative to succeed at any price magnified and manipulated by learned gender roles. Jordan doesn't just want to succeed - she wants to succeed as easily and cheaply as possible, leaning heavily on expendable boyfriends and Kelly's free labor; success will be worth the price. Kelly takes a measured stance in favor of privacy safeguards, in favor of supplying smaller sales outlets, in following their original vision. This conflict - long simmering but fueled by Lola's business proposal - bursts into view, revealing Kelly to have had a plan - and the backbone to make it happen - all along.

Don't judge Kelly and Jordan too harshly - the road towards success in the age of the internet is paved with bickering, manipulation and betrayal and maybe they're just better at it than we are.

Kathryn, a Pulitzer-prize winning, COVID-panicked journalist, shares her panic with us – how she obsessively checks and double-checks her apartment, her backpack, her carry-on for her tampons, her chargers, her documents, and reminds herself – and us – that this is her first pandemic. She returns to her hometown to report on COVID – the zoom classes, the shuttering of downtown, the prom-in-a-parking-lot – and finds herself caught between loyalty to the truth – the union colluded in closing the town’s largest employer, an industrial plant – and loyalty to her union family and the community. The closer she gets to the truth – and every conversation leads back to the union – the more the community splinters and the more estranged she becomes from her family. What she thinks she knows about her mother’s life – what has shaped Kathryn’s ambition – is based on what the teen-aged Kathryn could see and process and she learns is only partly true. Ultimately, she wrestles with multiple complicated truths, and how to best honor and serve the prove-able truth, her family’s truths and this community. Small town life is revealed in all its complexity as a lot of ice cream is eaten.

Grandma is supposed to move into assisted living and she is not happy – she’d much rather go to Mumbai. Daughter Lily just wants to keep Grandma safe, but her idea of safe is Grandma’s idea of death. Grand-daughter Julie, packing Grandma’s bags with summer clothes, is suspicious but also intrigued that Grandpa Lou – beloved but long dead – still gives Grandma advice. If no-one’s happy if mama’s not happy is true, which mama – Grandma or Lily – should be happy? Grandma’s long-time friend and foil Ruth helps tip the balance in favor of Grandma’s happiness.

The keys Charlotte finds on her late husband’s key chain lead her to discover his secret, other life. Kind, upstanding, good citizen Paul had another apartment, an unfinished novel, a passion for gardening and a lover he met on Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons. Charlotte is devastated. In this meditation on love and betrayal, what does it mean that Paul and Suzanne had been lovers and parted before Charlotte and Paul met, only to passionately reconnect years later? The calculus of betrayal is further complicated when Charlotte learns what Paul surmised when he met Suzanne’s daughter: she is his child, born after that fateful summer. As Paul would never leave Charlotte and their children and grandchildren, he would never leave Suzanne and the daughter and grandchildren they have together.
TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS asks if this complicated history mitigates the lovers’ expected guilt and also whether a man can honestly, passionately love two different women at the same time. Charlotte must ultimately find a way to navigate her feelings of pain and betrayal while deciding whether and how to honor the emotional commitments the husband she adored made to his other family. TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS tests the boundaries of love in all its complexities.

Several friends in an assisted living facility gather to celebrate their recently deceased friend, Julie, and to send her clothing to a woman's shelter. While organizing her clothing, they find a worn pair of child sized wooden shoes, stashes of money and, amongst Julie's many sweaters, an old US Army sweater. When Julie's granddaughter arrives, they find two matching fabric bags, made from a dress depicted in a war-time photo, and within the larger bag, photos and paperwork which offer clues to Julie's war-time childhood. One photo points towards an unexpected friendship with a US Army sergeant. Poignantly, unknowingly, this sergeant's widow is one of the women who befriended Julie in assisted living.

JENNIE AND THE JUDITHS, a girl-group on the brink of musical celebrity, find their futures undermined by Jennie's post-performance drunken encounter with the leader of a conservative political group. Their agent mistakenly books JENNIE AND THE JUDITHS into performing for this group, thinking he is booking them to perform for a similarly named environmental group.

A young woman volunteers at a soup kitchen to meet a cute guy to be her plus-one for a wedding where she is a bridesmaid. She also needs a fresh idea for the bachelorette party – they’ve already done tiki bars, the Russian baths, yoga and sex toy parties – and it needs to be on the cheap, since the last blow-out party blew-out the budget. In between checking out the male volunteers and buttering bread, she meets a working mom who regularly brings her children to the soup kitchen – they think it’s a restaurant – and finds her world-view upended. On that day, in those circumstances, she is pushed to reconsider what a bachelorette party could be: an opportunity to volunteer at the soup kitchen. Will the promise of great social media coverage – trending hash-tag-soup-kitchen-bachelorette-party, the cute volunteers and celebrity types who volunteer the early shift – and the cheapness of the event – convince her?

Val says she wants to get married, she's fully dressed in her wedding finery but . . . but she's in the subway when she should be in a bougie stretch limo or at least an uber, rushing to the minister and her groom. Instead, she and Alice are deconstructing her former boyfriends, her mother, her father's divorces, ugly bridesmaids' dresses, her surprise pregnancy. And her groom, who wants to be a father, but who is abstaining from sex with her until their wedding night. Who will father her baby and does it have to be the biological father? Lots of choices - which will Val choose?