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.

This is a play in conversation with The Merchant of Venice. Debbie is a middle-aged woman who teaches courses for English Department and the Jewish Studies Program at a small college. She’s teaching a Shakespeare course this term (the Spring of 2019), a Jewish Science Fiction course, and a Jewish Humor course. She talks about texts she teaches with Ray, a guy who has driven trucks and who drives vans for the college. She has recently asked him to move in with her. He’s in mid-life, like her, and his undiagnosed dysgraphia caused him not to do well in school. She finds it exotic that he’s a trucker, and he finds her Jewishness exotic.

They talk about The Merchant of Venice, and Shylock, and Shylock’s daughter Jessica who runs off with Lorenzo, and whether the Converso woman Amelia Bassano was the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. They talk about situations Debbie is handling in her Jewish Studies classes. Jewish Humor is particularly tricky to teach this term. A lot of Jewish comedians in the early 1900s wore blackface, and politicians are being exposed and disgraced with old blackface pictures in yearbooks. And Debbie teaches works by Woody Allen and spends time in the class on former Senator Al Franken, recommending his 1990s book Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot: And Other Observations as a term paper book. She suggests to her class that those two men, Allen and Franken, may not be sexual predators, and has sent the class links to bolster that assertion.

Debbie talks to some classes in the course of the play, parts of her lectures presented as monologues, and she meets with some students in conference. At the end of the term, she reads her student evaluations and finds that a smart female student in Jewish Humor who hated Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam and Allen's films has taken Debbie to task for defending and promoting predators, and assigning their work, and creating an uncomfortable classroom atmosphere for women who have been through traumatic sexual experiences. Debbie is called in for a meeting with the student and the dean. She sees some parallels to the trial at the end of The Merchant of Venice, involving Portia and Shylock, feels a bit like both of them, and feels badly for the student who found her class upsetting. The play’s title comes from The Merchant of Venice – Debbie uses it to comment on herself, the administration and academics who think too much as they shape policy: “O these deliberate fools! When they do choose, They have the wisdom by their wit to lose.”

A group of people gather for a songwriters' retreat in the Rocky Mountains in the mid-2000s. Their "mentor" is an abrasive, charismatic country singer/songwriter named Kyle Samperson. He humiliates some for their songwriting, personally offends some and clashes about politics with others. By the time Kyle turns up dead in Act Two, everyone has a motive for killing him. Snowed in, without internet or phone, the other characters size each other up and wonder whodunit.

This play takes place in the summer of 2001, just before 9/11. John is a downwardly mobile 20-something schoolteacher, trapped in Roommate Hell. He's attracted to Claire who is smart but a little prickly and shares his cramped apartment -- but what if John makes a pass and she doesn't reciprocate his interest? How horrible and awkward would that be? They both get bullied and baited by Ed, their defiantly working-class third roommate. Though Ed's girlfriend Annette is rich and has her own place, Ed and Annette spend all their time in this cramped apartment, all over each other, and speculate about John and Claire. John's old friends from Yale Lyle and Dianne come to visit him and are horrified by how he now lives. They all get trapped in the apartment with Sal, a pizza deliveryman who speaks little English, when the front door gets stuck. The heat has come on, in August, and in this dawn of cell phones, no one has a way to call for help. As tensions rise, John finally stands up to Lyle and to Ed -- and goes for broke with Claire.

Joan sits poolside (the edge of the stage) and Michael comes to find her. She says it was a mistake for her to have come to this Caribbean resort with him for his business conference. She's a quirky, moody artist, she wants to be home doing work, and she hates this place. She's rescuing semi-dead bugs from the water, as she did when she was a little nerd. Michael argues that they're different but their relationship can still work, and asks to be introduced to the bugs she has pulled out of the pool.

In a bleak dystopian future, a woman goes to the library to take out a young adult volume -- a life of a teen that she would like to live. A helpful librarian answers the woman's questions.

Rob and Nancy run into each other at their favorite bar at an odd hour. Since their breakup, it's been awkward for them and for friends when they are both there. They work out a "timeshare" arrangement so that they can go to the bar on alternate nights ... but as they talk, old feelings start to assert themselves.

Midge and Tina are two chronically wussy women who have signed up for an assertiveness training course. Their two instructors are Zora and Georgia who try to show them how to navigate situations with guys harassing them, and to stop apologizing when they're called on constantly apologizing for themselves. Zora and Georgia give Midge and Tina "tough love" -- goading them to the point where they stand up for themselves and each other.

Bobby tells Autumn how he can launch her music career. But he has strong ideas about how to re-make her image, and he seems to be hitting on her ... Bobby is offended when the tables seem to turn.

Two women on a soap have a cat-fight -- but when the cameras aren't rolling, the women playing them talk about writers, humor, and how the guy playing a character their characters crave has snaked another woman in the cast. This makes it hard to act opposite him, once cameras roll again and he enters the scene.

A girl disguised as a boy disguised as a girl and a girl disguised as a boy disguised as a girl disguised as a boy rehearse Olivia/Viola scenes from Twelfth Night at the Globe Theatre in Elizabethan England. Each is fighting and concealing an attraction to the other, about whose gender identity she is confused. Will Shakespeare wanders in and watches, thinks of the young man he has written sonnets to, and muses on how compelling androgynous young people can be.

Ten-Minue Play in Verse: A college student who focuses on literature is up late, studying for exams, telling himself that he's over his ex-girlfriend and ready to move on, when his Edgar Allan Poe poster starts talking to him. He's upset by how it keeps saying "nevermore" as he tries to think positive. He yells at it.

Margaret talks to teenager Meg about why she sent her to her room and the tension between them -- replacing years of closeness. They are very alike in some ways, but it develops that this is not the case of mother/child conflict it appears to be on the surface; it's a situation complicated by cloning.

An older woman, and a young woman who may be dropping out of college are unhappy with their lives, as they stay in a hotel near the highway. They find dealing with their families stressful, but a middle-aged woman they encounter in the hotel lobby is eerily detached from her emotions, and from everyone else.

Kiley and Erica go to the new art "installation" by Kiley's friend Hecuba Rosenblatt, a piece called Performance Art. As far as they can tell, a bunch of people have been paid to sit in rows and act like an audience at a play. They peer at them, and wonder what Hecuba means by this piece. Kiley thinks it's exciting, but Erica thinks it's pretentious -- and is Hecuba manipulating everybody? Maybe the people sitting in rows think they're really watching a play -- and Kiley and Erica are in it ...

Bi-Lingual Ten-Minute Play: Ariel has been called to the principal's office to interpret for Ivania, who has been in this country for a while but refuses to learn English. Ariel tries to tactfully translate back and forth between English and Spanish -- some dull and pompous things Mr. Miller says and some things Ivania says about how she dislikes English and the US. What Ariel and Mr. Miller don't understand is that Ivania is still mentally living in the world she has been forced to leave, and she does not want to give it up.

Andy and Marsha are trying to have a civil exchange, post-breakup. But there are underlying issues and goals for both of them, including cat custody issues -- and these come to the surface.