Carol Wolf

A short play about a rising leader in a community of blind primitives who discovers that having more resources than others can be dangerous.

Chester, the stage manager, has hijacked an important, powerful feminist musical drama full of accusations, despair and remorse, and rewritten it as a romantic comedy. He has fired the orchestra and the chorus, skimped on the set, and used the money to hire starlet Candace Lord to play Amelia Fish. He has cast himself to play opposite, and written scenes so that he can make love to her on stage.

The Terrible Experiment of Jonathan Fish is set shortly after Darwin, in a mythical country called America. Jonathan Fish, betrayed by his wife who dies in childbirth, raises his daughter Amelia in isolation to believe that there are three sexes, men, women, and girls. Men and women are equals, and girls are an inferior kind of being whose purpose is to become a wife.

Fish is determined to become a famous botanist in the tradition of Charles Darwin, whose Complete Works are the only education he has allowed his daughter. When he is murdered by the avenging ghost of his wife, Amelia meets the outside world, and discovers that the world she was prepared for does not exist.

Having learned that her only recourse from the tyranny of a guardian is to find a husband, she embarks on the quest with determination, only to discover that that would make her a wife. She fights a duel against the man she has fallen in love with but cannot marry, and vows to run away and somehow make a life of her own.

And this is when the original feminist Author shows up, and tries to put everything right.

As the dead pile up in the play, they join the chorus of ghosts, and together with the Musician (and perhaps an ASM), provide the absurdist musical accompaniment.

In the winter of 1547, King Francis I of France is riding from castle to castle as though Death were after him, which it is, and France stands upon the cusp of a new regime.

Henri, Dauphin of France, has so angered his father, King Francis, that the King has ordered him confined to house arrest at Pierrefonds Castle. To share his misery, Henri has forbidden anyone else who arrives at the castle from leaving also. Lucio, a trapped courtier, starts a rumor that the King is planning to bar Henri from the succession. When Marguerite of France, Henri's sister arrives, and is also forbidden to depart, the plotting and intrigues turn deadly.

Fights, plots, love, duels, all based on a true story.

The Thousandth Night is a one-man show about an actor in Occupied France, who was arrested and has been put on a train for Buchenwald. The train is derailed by saboteurs, the prisoners are herded to the platform of a bombed-out train station. The play begins when the actor, Guy the Bonheur, steps through a door into the train station thinking he can just walk out the station and go home, and finds a roomful of gendarmes, (who guarded the prison trains). This is the audience. He tries to convince them not to put him back out on the freezing platform; not to load him on the new train. He tells us has never done anything subversive against the Germans, he and his company simply act little plays at the Cafe Shaherazad, and he begins performing the plays, playing all the parts himself, in an effort to connect with them, and to stay in the room.

The stories are all comedies from the Arabian Nights, and Guy plays not only all the characters, but his company members playing the characters. He plays 26 characters over the course of the play. We learn that two of them were Jewish, and were shipped off the Poland because Guy refused to lie and say they were not. We learn that two were in the Resistance, and Lisette, whom he adores, was arrested because Guy did not dare to help her.

All of the hard choices of living under an occupation are in the play, and still Guy continues to play for his life. At last Guy realizes, as Lisette told him, “If we submit to them out of fear, we are putting the chains on ourselves.” And Guy reclaims his art, and his soul, and performs the final story in a manner that is truly subversive.

As the train draws into the station behind him, Guy, with pride, agrees, “I am a danger to the Reich. So, this must be my train.” And he goes.

King Cymbeline's daughter Imogen has insolently married the man of her choice, against the wishes of her stepmother, Magunna. Rome is demanding tribute. Magunna has promised her son Cloten that Imogen will marry him, so that he will one day be king. Cymbeline is beset with problems that began with the betrayal of his best friend, Belarius, and the disappearance of his son. And amid all these tribulations, the servants and attendants of the great ones at court pursue their own small efforts to preserve their honor and integrity.

The Cymbeline in the First Folio is a turgid mess with howling errors in playwriting, like the antagonist coming out of nowhere, with no "motive or cue" half an hour into the play, and the deus ex machina happening in the wrong place. Cymbeline Simplified is a comedy that sets all these problems right!

Marli Johnston, in 1952 has come to the Place to throw her meds into the woods, and prove to herself and the world that she no longer suffers from childhood epilepsy. She is desperate to seize her chance at a normal life, and accept an offer of marriage, free from the anti-convulsive drugs that have kept her nearly comatose for most of her life. Anne Larson, on the verge of a breakdown, has come with Marli, sent by her family; Marli doesn't know that Anne is a doctor. Anne is trying to commune with her husband, a doctor serving in the Navy during the Korean war.

The Place is haunted by the ghost of Paul Gallagher, an actor who in 1922 is waiting for the big break that will revive his career on Broadway. He has been covering for his growing deafness by meticulous rehearsal, and he walks the three scenes of the play in which he enjoyed a spectacular out-of-town tryout, while he waits for the call to come back for rehearsals and the opening on Broadway.

In the 1990s, Emma has come to the Place with her brother Ben, because her dear friend Anne, now dead, once told her that this is where she learned everything she ever knew about courage. Emma, facing her own trial, tries to commune with her friend. On her first day, she and Ben find a corpse in the riverbed, that they soon learn committed suicide. Together with Tony, they work out the mystery of who it was.

Across time, these people all connect with one another, at The Place in the Woods.