Lynn Aylward

Three Chords and the Truth is a full-length play about artistic destiny and how we (everyone, not just artists) interpret conflicting events in our lives as fallacy or paradox as we try to make sense of the world. It's also about “late style,” the idea that artists’ work in the later stages of their lives can exhibit more freedom, new inspiration ─or less benign influences of dwindling time. And, the play explores white straight male dominance in ostensibly freewheeling rock n’roll. The main characters are Vincent and Jade. Vincent is an indie-folk-rock musician who had a near-miss with stardom in his early twenties and has obsessively dedicated his life since then to making it. Jade is the keyboard player in Vincent’s latest band, the Blowholes. She is a classically-trained musician who walked away from a career as a concert pianist about the same time that Vincent had his devastating brush with fame. After years of struggle despite Vincent’s considerable talent, an opportunity to record for a major label falls in the Blowholes’ lap. Now, Vincent just has to finally make a hit album before the conflict between his artistic and human integrity and the multiple sclerosis he is secretly suffering from ruin his last chance. Riding shotgun in Vincent’s race against time is digital technology’s radical reshaping of the music industry. While the play is a wholly original story, its influences include the incendiary 90s rocker Stewart Lupton (who tragically committed suicide as I finished the first draft of the play) and other dark tales of pop music.

This play is an impressionistic work about James Albert Pike, who had a meteoric rise to become the most famous religious figure in mid-century America; an equally spectacular decline amidst the cultural turbulence of San Francisco in the 1960s; and who died lost and wandering in the desert in 1969 as the decade that he defined came to a close.

A Irish Catholic family in a small mill town outside Philadelphia personifies the struggle between preserving a family and its values and letting its individual members become who they want to be, in a period spanning World War I and the 1918 Flu epidemic through the Great Depression till the end of World War II. The play lets audiences re-evaluate the value of the family and family values from the timely current perspective of the Covid pandemic, the polarization of American society and the evolution of our perspective on individual rights and the common good.

A horror story that couldn't be more frighteningly timely as the world deals with climate change, the play brings us to a world where large chunks of land, once sacred indigenous burial grounds, as well as people from vulnerable populations are vanishing in Emeryville, CA, right across the Bay from San Francisco. Citizens take matters into their own hands to figure out why, as elected officials pursue their relationships with chemical companies.