Kenneth N. Kurtz

Due to that famous key and the lightning strike, Ben Franklin time travels to a present day tavern on Philadelphia's Market Street

Chiaroscuro (A Study in Shadow, 79 pages.) is dark, raw in fact. It tells the story of Caravaggio and a young man hired off of the streets of Renaissance Rome to pose for a painting of The Flaying of Marsyas. The coercing of proper expression is extreme. Poetry, memory, torture and lust all come into play. There is full frontal nudity, as well as simulated sex (albeit sequestered behind an easel). The theme is imagination, and what might happen when a model has too little and an artist far too much.
Three scenes, 1:10. One set.
3 men. Renaissance period costumes

Lost Portraits (81 pages) is a trio of scenes about Elisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, the loveliest and perhaps most successful portrait painter of 18th Century France.

Portrait of a Patriot ( 27 pages.) Playwright Beaumarchais (40) and painter Elisabeth (21) have very different suggestions for newly arrived diplomat, Ben Franklin (72), on how to seduce France to meet a new America's needs.
Portrait of a Pronoun (17 pages.) The Chevalier D’ Eon (43), the century’s most famous sexual ambiguity, desires a portrait. Will Elisabeth (22) paint the Dame or the Dragoon?
Portrait of a Peasant (37 pages.) concerns a portrait commissioned by Marie Antoinette (28). She wishes to be shown as a shepherdess. Elisabeth (now also 28) will paint it, but only if the queen abandons her elegant theatre costume in favor of the genuine and repellent peasant rags that the artist provides, and thereby experiences some of the miseries of her lowest subjects.
Three scenes with one intermission, 1:45.
Bare stage with period furniture groupings around a three-fold changing screen.
4 men (or two men double cast), 2 women. Eighteenth century period costumes.

While Elizabeth Vigee leBrun paints her portrait, George Sand paints her life in words, rhymed couplets no less, all said while Chopin plays his piano scherzo in the next room.

Merde de Canard (107 pages) is a farce-comedy, based on the unflappable yet unpredictable logic of automatons. Its hero is a character from history, Jacques de Vaucanson, whose wondrous mechanical creations, especially the famous shitting duck, delighted Parisians of the mid-eighteenth century and also foreshadowed the workings of modern computers. As in all such comedies there are mistaken identities, lovelorn chases, sex desired but never quite delivered, and in this case, robots (one of them rather randy) running amuck. The play is subtitled: A Comedy of Seven Doors and Eight Automatons.
Two Acts, 1:45. One set. Period costumes, including panniers for the ladies.
4 men, 4 women, and 2 mime-puppeteers to perform the automatons.

Merde de Canard won the second place award in the 2006 Arkansas Rep. Kaufman and Hart New Comedy Competition. On August 15, 2016, the play received a reading at Gablestage, Coral Gables, Fl.

Panegyric (93 pages) is a romantic comedy. It is 1905 and three men who never really grew up find their shades delivered to the perfect purgatory. Oscar Wilde dallies quite innocently with a beautiful boy, Lewis Carroll flounders with a young and fetching mermaid, and Paul Gauguin chases after a nubile native princess. Of course they all learn to fear the ticking sound of the crocodile. You guessed it. Their souls have been delivered to the Neverland.
This is a sequel to Peter Pan, and we recently witnessed the centenary of that lovely classic, which two prequel novels by humorist Dave Barry and an estate commissioned sequel as well as a Johnny Depp biopic have helped to celebrate -- to say nothing of the 2003 film version of the original play, plus Peter And The Starcatcher and a musical version of Finding Neverland currently running on Broadway.
Peter Pan lives on and on...and on?

Tilting at Tilsit. (62 pages) A comedy of Seduction. Napoleon and Tsar Alexander meet to decide the future of Europe in an elegant tent erected on a raft moored in the middle of the River Niemen. Since it floats it also tilts whenever one of the emperors goes too far to either side. Though neither could admit it, they also go too far in the quest for control. In fact, Napoleon once wrote to Josephine saying that if Alexander had been a woman he would have seduced him.
Two scenes, 60 min. One set…that tilts.
Two actors (Napoleon-38, Alexander-30). Period military uniforms.

Versailles: a Masque of Baroque Perspective. (95 pages) In very free verse, Magic Realism meets the Seventeenth Century. Louis XIV spars with the three men who made his dreams come true: painter Charles Le Brun, garden designer Andre Le Notre, and military engineer Sebastien de Vauban, whose wondrous forts protected the frontiers of France. As well as the three women who delighted his private life: comely Louise de la Valliere, voluptuous Madame de Montespan, and puritanical Madame de Maintenon. All seven create a glorious edifice with dangerous cracks in its foundation.
Three scenes with one intermission, 1:35. One set with numerous pasteboard cut-outs and/or projections.
Three principal actors (2 men, 1 woman) and a chorus of 6 men and 3 women. Period costumes.

The Wine of Wrath (60 pages) is a free-verse adaptation of Euripides’s The Bacchae. It differs from the original Greek tragedy in that the chorus speeches have been rendered as lyrics for four increasingly impassioned ladies’ hymns to the god and one vicious men’s hunting song, and the original’s offstage scene wherein Dionysus transforms the young headstrong king into a female spy has also been imagined as an onstage cross-dressing premonition of the horror that is to come.
One hour, one set, period Greek costumes.
5 men plus 5 male chorus, 1 woman plus 7 female chorus.