Pat Montley

A lawyer returns to her college to investigate the alleged seduction of a student by her dance teacher. The student’s accusation is vehement; the teacher refuses to defend herself. Prompted by the lawyer’s questions, the pair re enact, through flashbacks, the stages of their playful, passionate relationship, reporting different versions of the culminating episode. In uncovering the truth about them, the lawyer is challenged to come to terms with her own experience in the face of what seem to her disarming ideas of education and intimacy. The script calls for six modern dance sequences, four of them choreographed to Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise.” All three performers must be dancers as well as actors. Running time: 85 minutes

Based on the life of Hrotsvita of Gandersheim, the 10th century nun who was the first woman playwright on record, ROSVITHA'S REVIEW is both a playwriting lesson provided by Rosvitha and a farcical, tongue in cheek speculation on how she came to write her plays, specifically one about the conversion of a prostitute.
When the nuns’ enactment of a bawdy Terence comedy provokes Bishop Diehard’s censure, Rosvitha determines to write her own play. With the help of Sophia (an uppity princess consigned to the convent by her Emperor-father), Rosvitha does “research” at a nearby tavern/brothel. Their plan backfires when the proprietor, ex-Empress Theophano, Sophia’s long-runaway grandmother, sees through their ploy and sets them up for a rendezvous with a “customer”—her own paramour—the bishop, disguised on weekends as a blacksmith. The mutually terrified trio manage to escape one another’s clutches, but not before the girls get the goods on the bishop.
Back at the monastery, grandmother and granddaughter are happily reunited. When the nuns present Rosvitha’s new play, the bishop, recognizing the plot and even a few of his own lines, is both outraged and compromised, and thus blackmailed into giving his blessing to Rosvitha’s playwriting career.

Urged by apparitions of her namesakes Saint Joan and the apocryphal 9th-century Pope Joan I, and armed with an infusion of the Life Force, Sister Joan—faster than a speeding angel, more powerful than a prayer, able to leap clerical hierarchies in a single bound—blackmails her way to becoming pope, so she can fight the never ending battle for truth, justice, gender equality, and the American way by transforming the Catholic Church into a liberal democracy and saving the world from overpopulating.

Jonah has just been released from juvenile commitment into the foster care of Jacqueline Dawson, whose estranged son he helped to murder. She witnessed the crime and testified against the other two perpetrators, which resulted in their imprisonment. Now the gang leader who organized that crime wants to teach a lesson about what happens to “snitches.” He orders Jonah to torture and kill Dawson—or be killed himself. The instructions come through Jonah’s girlfriend LaBelle, whose investment in the outcome is intensified by her pregnancy. Jonah and LaBelle plot the murder, even as his relationship with the strict but caring Dawson develops and his imagined visits with her dead son jar his conscience. When he has a change of heart, it is too late, and Dawson urges him to go through with the murder. He resists, believing that help is on the way.

At a future crossroads, Zero, a shabby Shaman/Salvation Army Santa, pesters financier Ray for half his assets. When Ray bets nobody behaves that generously, Zero finds Viola, a bewildered senior who trusts Ray with her finances and is attracted to her assisted-living robot. Viola opens her heart and home to the vagrant shaman and a teen-age, Latinx, pregnant-virgin, social worker who, at their Winter Solstice ritual, births “el sol,” a source of magical, greed-healing powers. Viola offers to finance Zero’s ritual business, but discovers that the unscrupulous Ray has depleted all her assets. Facing homelessness, distraught by Ray’s betrayal of trust, and in mourning at the discovery of Robbie’s true mechanical nature, Viola entreats the shaman to escort her soul on its final journey. After helping her prepare her heart with forgiveness, Zero agrees. But the journey is interrupted when Ray returns, apologetic and ready to submit to the greed-healing powers of el sol…whose “magic” includes providing a salvific monetary windfall from an unsuspected source (deus ex porcus!).

What is history and who gets to tell it? What is biography? hagiography? How does folklore intersect with fact? with faith? with politics? What is sanctity? How did the goddess religion intersect with Christianity? Why did Ireland accept with relatively little resistance a new religion so at odds with its culture? How was the status of women affected by this transition? This play—inspired by the mythology and folklore of Brigid, once the Celtic Goddess of Fire and Fertility, co-opted by the Christian church and reduced to saint—is her unauthorized biography…or the possibly true, though not historical story of why a young druid abandons her heartfelt faith and reluctantly accepts Christianity.

When a music teacher is found at the church organ with her throat slit, her lesbian lover, the pastor, and his young daughter confront one another with their grief and anger. The investigating detective interrogates each of them as a suspect. The terrifying Indian Goddess Kali, challenges them all to come to terms with her. Although at its most superficial level, the play is a detective story, at its heart it is a mystery play—exploring the intersection of Hindu and Christian beliefs regarding death.

It’s 1955 and Christina Gallagher isn’t ready for puberty. Her parochial-school education, stern confessor, pious grandmother and run-away adulterous mother have made her distrust her body and pursue spiritual perfection. But her understanding of morality is challenged when her best friend gets pregnant and when she realizes the next door neighbors—her adored music teacher and her trusted family doctor—are lesbians. Meanwhile, the couple battle their own demons at the close of the McCarthy era, struggling to accept their feelings for each other in the face of fear and guilt and an unscrupulous priest.

Set suggestion: The fluidity of scenes is best accommodated if the set is not naturalistic. Some scenes require only a bare area of stage. Other locales can be suggested by one or two props (e.g., a table and two chairs for a restaurant, a step unit for a front stoop). A unit set with several acting areas might best serve the script.

A Pothead tries to do business with a Girl Scout. (a 10-minute play)

African-American journalist and activist Ida B. Wells challenges Suffragist Alice Paul on her plans for the Women’s March of 1913. (a 10-minute play)