Phoebe Eaton

An activist-attorney tangoes with a client about filing a sensational lawsuit. The case’s Muslim paralegal tries to navigate a path through the fog of relative morality as her boss’s lonely suicidal daughter quietly forces a forbidden connection.

Upcoming excerpts in THE BEST WOMEN'S STAGE MONOLOGUES 2021 (Smith & Kraus) and SHE RESISTED: MONOLOGUES BY WOMEN 2021 (Applause Books)

Goodman Theatre literary manager Jonathan L. Green: “A sharp analysis of contemporary society. Dialogue is snappy and distinctive.”

Yale Repertory Theatre: “Witty [and] fast-paced…characters spar with one another with agility and deftness.”

2019 O’Neill Conference: “Your voice, and your ideas, have made a significant impact on our office.”

2019 Papatango New Writing Prize committee (Second Round): “You write some really cracking dialogue. Nicely structured, and there is real skill on display throughout.”

Back in London as her marriage to faithless fellow poet Ted Hughes is imploding, Sylvia Plath, now 30, debates whether to set her divorce in motion. As her mental state worsens, she starts unpacking her woes to Professor Trevor Thomas, her closeted art-historian neighbor (and a wannabe painter) in the flat below, the pair of them ultimately discovering shocking common ground and a kind of friendship and mutual compassion.

As seen in BEST WOMEN'S STAGE MONOLOGUES of 2019 (SMITH & KRAUS): “Suicide as Art”
Three upcoming excerpts in SHE RESISTED: MONOLOGUES BY WOMEN 2020 (Applause Books)

Plath is as sensitive about being called crazy as the professor is about his homosexuality, then a jailable offense in the UK, where it is classified as mental illness, and he remains deep in the closet. These are two people living in exile and not coping well as the play toggles back and forth between their mirror-image sitting rooms all the way to the finish line of this poetic whydunnit. Indeed they loathe each other until they discover devastating common ground. A new full-length work in a Surrealist, free-verse style charting Plath's path to self-destruction and an unlikely final friendship.

Author's Note: Professor Thomas is a gay man in Britain in an era when same-sex relations are illegal. Arrested for a bathroom liaison as a young man, he saw a promising museum career destroyed. Attempting to "cure" himself, he married, had children. His wife left him, and he decamped to the States for a spell. Even after England/Wales decriminalized homosexual acts "in private" (1967), and homosexuality was eventually declassified as mental illness, he remained primarily closeted the rest of his life. (Long after the law changed, gay men remained a target of police entrapment, beatings, and blackmail.) In January, 2017, the "Alan Turing law" posthumously pardoned thousands of men convicted on these grounds and related "gross indecency" offenses.

2017-18 Woodward/Newman Drama Awards: "From hundreds of plays, yours was selected by our committee as being among the best of the best. That's no small feat."

Playwrights Horizons literary director Sarah Lunnie: "A yearning and melancholic drama, rendered in lovely precise language."

Clubbed Thumb: ”Theatrically inventive.”

2017 Papatango New Writing Prize committee: "An effective and insightful depiction of a notorious and profoundly sad episode. The script's ambition to collide poetic voices with theatricality is apparent and laudable."

A writer-roué presents the promise of a more exciting, fulfilling life as he pursues best friends whose dreams have dead-ended. (And his dream has dead-ended, too.) Pan incarnate, his boozy pranks and twisty horndog sexuality will alter the characters' lives forever in this modern-day satyr play. There’s a fair amount of phallic imagery whistling around the stage, between the bottles of booze and dick talk. But go deeper, and Pan is also about the value people assign themselves and others. How brute competition still drives mating, and how the rules of attraction remain engraved in DNA, untouched by feminism. Pan might be the bastard daughter of God of Carnage and Carnal Knowledge.

Playwrights Horizons lit director Sarah Lunnie: “A linguistically rich and endlessly clever comedy of manners.”

Clubbed Thumb associate artistic director Michael Bulger: “Park Avenue under the microscope of comedy is refreshing."

Jerilynn Fike is being hazed by prima donna NYC acting coach Diana De Cordova, who warns if she's not careful, the only work she'll get is "the girl face-down in a pool of blood." At her waitress day job, after a bit of casual racism in the workplace aimed at co-worker Lamonica Gates, the pair exact revenge and Jerilynn finds herself out of a job. A black comedy about ambition/fluidity of identity, drawing on interviews with sex- and fetish-workers in addition to actors. Cast is all-female and an hommage to the work of Maria Irene Fornés and Rainier Werner Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant) -- with a Tabasco shot of Robert O'Hara and Jean Genet.

New Georges new-play advocate Sonya Sobieski: “Great fun.”

The Blaneys get some household help. With unintended consequences. An experiment with time and sound inspired by the Salem Witch trials--and rebuttal to Miller's The Crucible.

JFK and Castro throw it down, yo
A little après-death afterlife taekwondo

Castro awaits his motorcade in Havana, only to realize he's now, in fact, dead when his chariot to the afterlife finally pulls up: a '62 Bonneville convertible with Shakespeare at the wheel--arch-nemesis Jack Kennedy riding shotgun. A heated discussion ensues: here in the Hereafter, Shakespeare continues to write the tragedies of heads of state. Next on his plate: JFK-- only this being present day, Shakespeare's writing JFK's biopic, for which he means to interview Castro on controversial points of history.

The trio is soon in the thick of battle, throwing it down over scandalous doings then and U.S. foreign policy now: Castro, still terminally paranoid. JFK, still wrestling down his thick Boston accent. Shakespeare, ever the commercially minded sellout, swinging like a pendulum between the two, from iambic pentameter to rap -- Bard of the Schoolyard.

A sameness of issues today reveals itself. When is involvement interference? What to do about nations making far-ranging decisions whose own citizens only ever have a keyhole view of the big picture? Or their picture simply doesn't mesh with our picture? The play comments on the ostrich-y 'Don't-ask-what-your-country-does-for-you' attitude we 've generally adopted here in the States. And has a relevancy now that president Trump has scrapped the Iran nuclear deal and has hinted at using nuclear weapons on ISIS. Russia has also asked Trump to pressure NATO to withdraw troops from Europe's Russian border, a response to its sudden escalated presence there and disclosure of its largest ever nuclear missile, Satan 2 -- capable of obliterating an area the size of France.