SILENT DANCER is a play/dance/romance – where the characters express themselves in
dialogue and also in dance/movement.
It is set in New York City in 1921, and tells the story of an 18-year old maid named Rosie Quinn,naïve, ambitious, determined to live her dreams. She and her brother Michael danced on street corners when they were children. Now they are hoping to have a dancing career in the city’s burgeoning silent movie business. Michael is a veteran of WWI, and a closeted gay man, who will be made to suffer when he dares to express who he really is. Rosie breaks the rules when she has a passionate relationship with a talented African-American piano player/composer named Perry, who knows too well that their romance is dangerous. The racism of the era both adds to their fascination with each other and breaks them apart.Rosie works as a maid for a famous New York couple, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. She and Zelda develop an off-balance sisterhood of shared secrets and Zelda, for her part, starts to feel a sense of envy for what she sees as Rosie’s greater emotional and sexual freedom. What happens to these characters, icons of their era, is the story of SILENT DANCER, as it moves in and out of time. They tell us what is going to happen to them in the future: Scott Fitzgerald,
for example, in the midst of his triumphant fame and fortune, knows that he will die of
alcoholism at the age of 44. Perry will tell us that after he left Rosie and New York City for Chicago, he met up with and toured with Louis Armstrong --and that he never knew about the daughter he had with Rosie. And Rosie herself shows us how she began her career as a dancer in the silent movies – never famous, but always present. “You can still see me,” she tells us, “on Youtube.”
SILENT DANCER expresses the reality and the dream, the desires, errors and facts of the eternal present, and the revelations of the arc of time, in the life of characters in this very American story.