Michael, Dianne and Emily have been best friends since their freshman year at Applegate College. They lived together on Hallway B and became best friends. Senior year, they lived off campus in a house together. They called it Hallway House, to emphasize that they had not gotten past their freshman need to cohabitate. When their personal lives crash and burn, they take refuge in each other’s company, though Michael and Emily worry that their attachment to each other can endanger their relationships with other, "normal" people.

They are all now in a house owned by Dianne: the current iteration of Hallway House. Dianne is a shut-in, who spends time by herself on the top floor with her three cats. She makes good money writing steamy romance novels – and yet she has little interest in sex, or romantic relationships. She is from a family of ruthless wits who lived in Hollywood. They wrote for film and television. Her parents divorced, and went off and did drugs – and she was raised by aunts and uncles. But they wielded their tongues like Zorro wielded his sword. They’d cut her up into little pieces. Their repartee was sparkling, and it was exciting and fun, but she was not really accepted as one of them, and it took a toll on her self-esteem. It was like being raised by the Algonquin Round Table. Yet in some ways, she wants to re-create that kind of experience. She sees herself as Alexander Woollcott, in her group.

Emily has just left her husband Brett, who was cheating on her. She has only lived in Hallway House a week. She finds her old friend Michael stand-offish toward her; he has been there for two years and was hurt that she was no help when a long-term relationship ended for him. Michael has brought a younger guy named Connor back to the house. They are thinking of collaborating on a cabaret show for Connor. They might use the living room of Hallway House for rehearsals. Emily engages with Connor; she wants to know more about him. She talks about Dorothy Parker and the Algonquinites. Michael finds it upsetting when her questioning reveals that Connor has not heard of a lot of people their group admires.

After she leaves, Connor and Michael acknowledge a mutual attraction, but also face the fact that Michael is freaked out by the prospect of getting involved with a younger guy who does not get a lot of the references that Michael and his friends make. Connor is willing to learn new things, but resents Michael’s attitude and leaves. Dianne pops up – she’s been eavesdropping – and talks to Michael about his situation. She tells him to enjoy the role of older mentor: to see himself as George S. Kaufman and Connor as Moss Hart. But Michael loves the book Act One; he sees himself as Hart ... After Michael leaves, Dianne talks to Emily about a lousy college shrink they both saw briefly at Applegate. Emily had thought she was the only one to talk to this shrink. Dianne reveals a bit more of her personal history than ever before. And she tells Emily that drinking all that red wine and identifying with Dorothy Parker is bad for her liver.

Brett comes to see Emily. Dianne gives him a hard time, Emily tells him off, and she does not accept a non-apology/apology from him. Michael comes in and also expresses contempt for Brett. As Brett leaves, Connor comes back – he left his jacket when he visited the house earlier. Perhaps Michael, Emily and Dianne can change how welcome he feels in Hallway House. The play references screwball comedies by Kaufman and Hart, and perhaps it has a touch of the pace and feel of plays like You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came To Dinner.

Barbara Davenport has convinced her whole family to come together for Thanksgiving in 2018. Karen and Abigail, the grown daughters of Barbara and Karl, are both visiting their parents in the house where they grew up. The family have made it through the meal without conflict, and have headed into the living room. But the fact that Abigail unfriended her sister Karen and her father Karl on Facebook during and after the 2016 presidential election causes some strain. At first, Barbara tries to steer everyone clear of political topics. The atmosphere remains tense and toxic, so Barbara suggests they air their grievances. Abigail talks about why it is so problematic, for her, that her father voted for Donald Trump and her sister supported Bernie, then voted for Jill Stein. Barbara, as a loving mom, says that something as trivial and foolish as politics cannot break up a strong family like theirs, but that might not be the case. And Barbara does not seem to want to answer Abigail's questions about who Barbara voted for in 2016. Abigail may not be able to stay in the house, even to get through this one evening.

Full-length Play In Verse: This is a re-imagining of the Moliere play Tartuffe, set in a post-apocalyptic future America that has become a Christian Fundamentalist state. (The play was written several years before the 2016 election -- but it feels right for the current dystopian moment.) In the world of this play, the population of our country has been decimated by the super-strain of the Avian Flu – stolen from a lab, probably by Fundamentalists. We’re now ruled by Baptist Fundamentalists out of Selma, Alabama.

Oral, a prosperous businessman, opens his home to a former megachurch pastor who has been disgraced in sex scandals: the Reverend Chadwick Pusser. Oral’s son Daniel cannot feel free with Tyler, the guy he loves, with Pusser around, probably planting hidden cameras around the house. Daniel reads SF and alternate histories and suspects that his world is an aberration – a false history. He asks a website called oracle.net for the lost original draft of Moliere’s play Tartuffe – the one that was banned, before Moliere watered the play down. Daniel thinks if he can get a pdf of the original, the universe will shift back to what it should be.

Tyler’s older brother Vaughn is engaged to Daniel’s younger sister Mary-Anne – but Oral decides to force Mary-Anne to marry Reverend Pusser, which horrifies the teenaged girl. Pusser advises Oral about how to control women in his family; he cites Lot – who threw his daughters outside to be gang-raped, whose wife was turned into a pillar of salt for caring about her city, and who had sex with his daughters and fathered their children – as an example of the kind of upright man the Lord smiles on. Doreen, the outspoken housekeeper, and Oral’s second wife, Alma, express themselves very differently, but both of them try to help Mary-Anne avoid the horrendous impending marriage.

Oral won’t listen to Daniel when he speaks up after Reverend Pusser makes a pass at Alma, or to Doreen, who denounces Pusser and tries to get Mary-Anne to stand up for herself. Mary-Anne surreptitiously listens to old rock music from our era, but she is timid – not the rock rebel she wants to be. Alma indulges in old Rodgers and Hammerstein movie musicals, and Doreen is partial to old sitcoms; they use these ancient, forbidden texts to help them interpret their world, as Daniel uses the things he reads on-line.

Daniel himself rejects a pass from Pusser, and tells Oral about it. Pusser claims to have taped footage of Daniel and Tyler having sex, but says he erased it – too painful for Oral to watch. Daniel says Pusser is lying, but comes out to his father, and Oral throws him out of the house. Alma convinces Oral to hide under a table and listen as she pretends to be interested in Pusser. Soon, Pusser’s all over her. Oral confronts him at last. Pusser tells Oral the house is Pusser’s now; Oral has given the preacher Oral’s on-line banking password, and Pusser has dirt on the family. Things don’t go quite as Daniel hopes, in terms of the Oracle, and thwarting Pusser in the way that Moliere’s Tartuffe is thwarted ... Yet ultimately, Daniel is not without hope or a sense of purpose, and in some ways the whole family may be better off.

Since the play is set among a racist white upper-class, I think of the characters as white. But when it was produced in the Fresh Fruit Festival in NYC, people in the cast were from all different backgrounds, and it worked fine.

Viridian and Teal are therapists in a future society in which almost all people are non-binary: no longer exclusively male or female. Fetuses are treated in utero with genes from hermaphroditic fish, and now children grow up without a fixed gender. In adolescence, they explore their ability to express in different ways along a gender spectrum, or to be asexual. Viridian and Teal must evaluate a couple that wants the fish genes removed; one feels completely feminine, the other completely masculine, they have lived in male and female roles for years, and wish to be “frozen” in those roles. Viridian and Teal must determine, for the state, if the couple is sane and should be allowed to proceed. The couple have the names Amaranth and Cerulean, but prefer to be called Saffron and Topaz and by the pronouns "she" and "he." They seem freakish in their society. They have been together seven years. They do not feel the therapists or the government have a right to judge them or their relationship, but cooperate with the therapy to win civil rights for other binary couples.

Viridian cannot understand why anyone would want to go back to the Dark Ages before gender fluidity, when there was so much more crime, messed-up relationships, mental illness, addiction ... And what if this couple is sanctioned by the state, and chooses to have children, and denies them the fish gene therapy? Viridian loves Umber, who urges Viridian to be less judgmental; this peculiar couple makes people ask questions, Umber says, and that can’t be bad. Umber has stress at work, also, directing a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on the main stage of a big theater, but Hibiscus, who gave Umber that job, wants to impose certain interpretations on the production. To keep Hibiscus busy (at least in part) Umber writes a play for the theater to present in its black box: a play in which Elizabethan actors playing Viola and Olivia are really girls disguised as boys (or, in the case of Viola, a girl playing a boy playing a girl playing a boy) and fall in love with each other. Umber writes in a role for Hibiscus as Shakespeare, watching them rehearse, moved by their androgyny as Shakespeare was moved by the young man in the sonnets. Umber wants the Viola and Olivia characters to escape the binary universe, but thinks Shakespeare may be too old to go with them ... Viridian teases Umber about Umber's fixation on "fluidity virgins," discovering it for the first time. Teal loves Fennel, who thinks the binary couple is kinky – pornographic, almost. Teal is bemused by Fennel’s reaction, but later worries that their relationship is too frivolous. By the end of the play, Viridian and Teal do make a judgement about the binary couple they have been talking to.

This is a play that is in conversation with Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, to some extent, and it is also an adaptation of that play, set on a modern US college campus. Bea and Ben are smart, quirky juniors who bait and diss each other with such ferocity, their friends suspect a mutual attraction. The friends stage conversations for them to overhear, and fool them both into acknowledging how they feel. Meanwhile, a much nastier "practical joke" targets Bea's shy freshman cousin Hiroko. (Bea is Japanese-American; Hiroko spent much of her childhood in Japan.) A coked-out creep semi-stalks Hiroko, and has a science nerd morph another kid's sex tape so that Hiroko appears to be the girl in the tape. The creep shows the tape to Hiroko's boyfriend, who publicly rejects her, and bits of the tape wind up online. Heartbroken and humiliated, Hiroko will not leave her room and is ready to drop out. Bea demands that Ben prove his love by helping to fight back.

In the Spring Term of 2019, Debbie Baskin is teaching Jewish Humor and Jewish SF for Jewish Studies and a Shakespeare course for the English Department of a small college. Things are trickier in Jewish Humor with Senator Al Franken having been pressured to resign, and renewed charges against Woody Allen. Debbie faces flak from administrators and a student for including those men in her course and saying they may not be predators. She's also launched a new romantic relationship, and she sounds off about Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, and about the Dark Lady in the sonnets. This play started out with a large cast -- but it may work better in this version as a monologue play, with a strong woman playing Debbie.

Bernie comes to London with a chip on his shoulder because of American-bashing he encountered years earlier as a Rhodes Scholar. His wife Lori tries to soothe him. Bernie's small indie film company is interested in producing Fiona's period piece screenplay about John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. Fiona hates US cultural imperialism, and the need to get Yank funding for her film. Her husband Nick tries to soothe her. When the couples meet, some cultural stereotypes are confirmed and there are many awkward moments. Fiona is appalled by how Bernie wants to re-write the script. Later, their drunken arguing one on one leads to almost absurdist bashing of each other's countries -- and then to a pass. Act Two takes place in NYC, as Bernie and Fiona's affair continues. Nick and Lori are thrown together as they try to deal with it -- and they find more strength and good humor between them than they might have thought possible.

Alan flies from NYC to Florida to talk his father Murray out of surgery ... and learns surgery was not really imminent, but as long as you're here, why not stay for the Passover seder? He resents his family manipulating him and trying to set him up with his sister's au pair girl -- though he learns something about Lisa, the au pair girl, the rest of the family does not know. This a gentle family comedy in which people make points, argue and make peace through humor -- often long, odd and shaggy Jewish jokes.

This play follows a Senate race in a southern state, between Carl Sharp, a hard-working, brilliant, self-made African-American Democrat in Congress whose family were poor share-croppers – and Bradley LeBland III, from an old New England family gone southern, who has dabbled in business but mostly trades on his family name.

Carl’s adviser is Deborah Kaufman, a transplanted New Yorker, and Brad’s adviser is Haley Vincent Gaines, whose father advised Brad’s father. Haley is attracted to Debbie; she is wary of him. Haley must attempt to cover for Brad’s inarticulateness and ignorance – while Debbie tries to cover for Carl’s tendency to wind up in personal scandals. Though married, he at times appears to flirt with her. And just before he debates Brad on state television, he tells Debbie about a short-lived fling involving himself and the rich, vapid, now Born Again Brad, when they were young men at Princeton – which gives the subsequent debate a strange feel.

After the debate, Haley, on a quasi-date, lets Debbie know that a Democratic campaign staffer has come over to the other side with a tidbit of information: Carl may soon be at the center of a sex scandal involving a young male campaign staffer. Debbie threatens Haley with the information Carl gave her about him and Brad at college. Haley confronts his candidate about his hypocrisy, and she confronts hers about his need to live dangerously, in ways that baffle her. The rumor-spreading mechanism is taking on a life of its own; there may be no way to avert the looming Mutually Assured Destruction scenario.

Other characters include a wily old retiring right-wing senator, keen on helping Brad by destroying his Democrat opponent, and two media talking heads on state television, one male and one female, who take us through several spin cycles of the campaign.

Full-length Play: This play was produced once, just before the 2004 election, in a festival of plays about politics. The Carl Sharp character at that time was white, though still a self-made man from a family of sharecroppers. I now have a version of the play in which that character is black; I think either version can work well. This character owes more to Bill Clinton than to Barack Obama, but the play is not about any one politician on either side; it’s about patterns in our national politics and media.

Haley is in shock -- as her relationship has just ended. She has turned up at the home of Jessica, an old friend she has not seen in a long time. She says she's come untethered: funny in the head. Jessica talks about a relationship she, herself, found it almost impossible to get over, but gently suggests Haley may get past the place where it hurts so much she can barely breathe -- and Haley may re-discover a bunch of things she's lost, including old friends her boyfriend disapproved of.

Dierdre has arranged to confront Kristine, the young woman her husband Douglas has been sleeping with. In a restaurant, as a dour, nosy waiter wanders in and out, Dierdre gets ready to tear Kristine apart, and is startled to find Kristine is genuinely upset to learn Douglas is married and wants to know more about Dierdre's situation. It's been a long time since Dierdre has had a good talk with anyone, and the two women do have some things in common ...

In a bleak cyberpunk future, rich young Brandon Prince is angry at Lottie, the poor girl he's grown up with, who serves as his "comforter." He says she's so warm and kind to him it has made him weak, and that's why he let his uncle humiliate him at a family company board meeting. Brandon goads Lottie to say what she really thinks of him, menacing her with talk of dark things happening to her family outside the protective bubble of good living. But when he pushes too far, he gets more than he bargained for.

A Trumpian parable: the Emperor gives an interview to Emperor TV, bragging about his new clothes -- as he sits there in underpants. A reporter pretends to see the clothes, a surrogate for the Emperor scolds the reporter, and a reporter leaving the station talks about how the Emperor has no clothes.

Steve comes back to visit the office where he used to work, hoping to pick up some work on the side. Only Mark is there -- warmly welcoming him back and asking for advice on how to hit on the woman who replaced Steve. Mark is not bi-curious, but he's aware, on some level, of Steve's crush, and enjoys power and attention. One reason Steve left the office was to get away from Mark's mind games -- and this "reunion" leads to a confrontation.

Trent decides to introduce the two women he's been sleeping with to each other. It unnerves him to find that Lisa and Danielle don't fight over him -- instead, they turn out to be old friends from college, more interested in catching up with each other than in dealing with Trent.

Three GenX women show up at their 30th high school reunion, feeling very differently about it. Joan has been in rock bands and is seen as a cool, minor celebrity, but she was teased in high school and is puzzled by the friendliness the other two now show her; she's only here to try to raise money for a film she wants to make. She's indifferent to Sandra's efforts to apologize for past cruelty ... and Debbie gets more of a sense of why her old friend Sandra has dropped out of touch.

In a future in which almost everyone is gender fluid, a couple announce that one of them wants to be male and the other wants to be female -- permanently. Several therapists talk to the couple, to gauge their state of mind, and to determine, officially, if they are sane.

John and Sally, a married couple, bicker, while Rose, John's undead zombie wife, serves food. Rose grows quite hostile, and Sally is upset that John does not have a gun on hand to shoot Rose in the head, if necessary, as he promised -- and also by how many of their neighbors seem to have turned into flesh-eating zombies ...

Two little boys are playing, and the girl who lives next door to one is interested in what they are doing. When the kids discover a gun in a parent's dresser drawer, things get scary.

Trevor tries to get Maggie to talk to him the morning after a fight. He is charming, funny, conciliatory, poignant and irritated, by turns, at her for giving him the silent treatment. But as he goes on talking about what happened, we learn that Maggie may have a number of reasons for pulling into herself ... and may have a big choice she has to make about this marriage.

Cory and Janice sit in the park ... and Janice has an uneasy feeling that they are being watched. Perhaps she senses the audience watching them? Cory tries to be patient, but he finds many things about her behavior objectionable -- and this leads to a discussion of what has gone wrong during their engagement.

Silly things happen on a new Star Trek show that mixes up qualities and characters seen on Star Trek shows in the past.