It’s 1974 in a small Mississippi town not far from where R&B got its start. It’s a town with a history of plantations and  segregation. It’s where the Devil bought souls and where Biblical scripture is part of everyday speech. But when the lights fade up on the 24 hours in which this story takes place, the war in Vietnam has been declared over, the country’s president has resigned, and most of the blues clubs around town and the railroads leading to them have been closed for several years. The town might not be aware, but it’s caught between a history rich with identity and a transformation into something vague and undefined. Like adolescence, this town should be something to get past and get through, but only a few people have that chance, and if the lights were to fade up on the next 24 hours, those left would be part of just another story.  

         As for this one — it’s about a young white woman who is inheriting a large sum of money, a few corrupt politicians, an unprincipled journalist, and a guitar player on his way to California, and each are to blame for a black man arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. This isn’t a play about race as much as it is about culture and time and being connected to a way of life that we are born into and that is part of who we are.

Full Length. Everything at work in the play is intended to illuminate -- woman. (This is not to say that there aren't other means also at work). The story is intended to weave into one fabric the actions and specific objectives of five female characters such that in the final measure of the play, each make choices that re-define who they are and allow each to begin anew in the world.

The setting is a fading beach house on a Caribbean island at a time caught between the present and past. There are cell phones, but the adapters to charge them don’t work, and what appears to be true gives way to its opposite: For example -- The doctor is really an artist. The innocent children are savage. A person’s soul is in his feet. Even photosynthesis is a ruse that tricks us into believing the sun is necessary for life when in fact it is a carcinogen.

The plot centers on the disappearance of a famous archaeologist who has sent a valuable and legendary artifact to his wife, Sophie Borderaux. While she is unaware of the artifact that is hidden somewhere in her house, others are not - including a mysterious man who shows up to rent a room, and her husband's brother and sister who left their more "civilized" lives in the US to become a part of the "barbaric" island which has come under the influence of the Dragon Fire Night Club down the beach.

"A Gentlemen’s Pact" is available as a 30-minute one act and a 90 minute intermission-less full length. The play takes a modern look at marriage, family, gender and friendship when two university professors, Bill (a young African-American English professor) and Arthur (an older white professor in the Political Science department) wrestle with how to resolve the upheaval caused by Bill's startling announcement that he wants to marry Arthur's wife, Evelyn. The two men battle wits, barter property, and eventually engage in fist-a-cuff combat until the object of their competition enters the scene and turns the tables. Evelyn, a stay-at-home soccer mom who put her PhD in Art History on hold, makes it clear that she is not something to be negotiated. She’s unhappy in her marriage with Arthur, but doesn’t agree with Bill’s assumption that they are having an affair.

As the evening progresses, a visit from Arthur’s career-focused ex-wife, and then from their teenage daughter, who yearns for connection to a tribe (literally), complicates the already stressful triumvirate. The stage is set for four of the five characters to struggle with finding agency in a world where each are marginalized and defined within the hegemony of the white male perspective. With continually shifting power structures, the characters re-constitute who is on whose side until all are reduced (and elevated) to a place of survival. By the play’s end, the family dinner is first burnt, then thrown out the living room window, and lastly devoured by a pack of small neighborhood dogs. Ultimately, it becomes clear that there is room for only one victor in what turns into the ultimate and long-awaited battle of the sexes

There's an actual reason why things go missing then suddenly appear in the very place we looked a hundred times. Some people have a gift for finding missing things even when what's missing is a mystery.

An American musical about the first wave of the women's rights movement and the personal lives and sacrifices made by the few women who had a vision to make a difference. Conflict arises over the abolitionist movement and the men and women who wove their way into and out of the 80 years that past between the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls and the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote. The play is witty and contemporary. Music composed by Elliot Sokolov.

A film noir re-enactment of the song Love Potion Number Nine, covered by the Searchers in 1963.

A front page news story can happen anywhere -- except when it’s unexpected. A small town journalist with big plans settles for a human interest piece on Salsa dancing in the heartland. Resolved with the notion that nothing ever happens in small towns, the journalist is oblivious to a political scandal that turns into a murder just 50 yards away.

Why do people kill those they love? This is a ten minute dark tragedy on how three siblings, desperate to stay alive in the slums of a broken city, kill for love.

An absurdist play in verse that tells the odd story of a young girl who believes water should be conserved so that the human race and herself might continue to survive, not realizing that the extinction of the human race might be the point.

A community theater production of Mary Zimmerman's "Metamorphosis" runs into challenges when the town levies fines for literary content about climate change that has the potential to trigger stress and fear in the audience.

A woman learns something of herself and the kind of love she thought she would never have, while searching for parts of a seaplane in the cold waters of the Saanich Inlet. (Published in Smith and Kraus Best Ten Minute Plays, 2018)