Wim Coleman

Justine is the nanny for a wealthy family in Switzerland. One night she is awakened to find that a mysterious Demon has strangled William, the little boy in her care. The Demon carries her to a glacier, where she tries to kill herself by leaping into a crevasse. The Demon saves her, and they soon become lovers. The next morning in her bedroom, she and the Demon say their final farewells.
This action is intercut with more recent events. Watched over by a Nun, Justine is in a jail cell awaiting hanging for William’s murder. Justine is visited by Victor, William’s older brother, and Elizabeth, Victor’s cousin and fiancée; Victor is also the Demon’s creator. In the end, Justine is eager and ready for hanging. She tells the Nun that she is pregnant with the Demon’s child, whom she hopes will free the damned from Hell and be a scourge to the living.

NOTE:
Four of the characters in The Harrowing are drawn from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. The Demon is the creation of Victor Frankenstein; Elizabeth is Victor’s cousin and fiancée; Justine Moritz is the nanny for the Frankenstein family; in the novel, she is found guilty and hanged for murdering the child in her care—a murder the Demon actually committed. The Nun is not based on any character in the novel. Although The Harrowing is freely inspired by Chapters 7 and 8 of the 1831 version of Frankenstein (Chapters 6 and 7, Volume 1, of the 1818 version), it relates a very different series of events.

On a night in 1793, Marie Grosholtz (the future Madame Tussaud) searches a Paris cemetery for the freshly guillotined head of Queen Marie Antoinette. While the young sculptress makes a plaster cast of the face, she engages with a conversation with the decapitated queen. Back in her workshop, she adds Marie Antoinette to a wax exhibit that already includes the firebrand journalist Jean-Paul Marat and his assassin, Charlotte Corday; they will soon be joined by the revolutionary zealot Maximilien Robespierre. As the Reign of Terror rages around them, the wax figures come to life and argue among themselves and with their creator about revolution, freedom, tyranny, power, history, personhood, and other themes as vital today as they were in Revolutionary Paris. By the end of the play, Napoleon rules France, and Marie Grosholtz has moved her exhibit to London and transformed herself into Madame Tussaud. While Tussaud dances with a mute wax figure of Napoleon, the other figures become something more than mere hallucinations in the mind of their creator.

Paris, 1789. The French Revolution has begun. On his last day in Paris as America’s Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson helps Patriots of the National Assembly to write the Declaration of the Rights of Man. But he is bedeviled by personal dilemmas. Maria Cosway, his Italian-English lover, dreams of sharing Napoleonic power with him as the revolution unfolds. His oldest daughter, Patsy, wants to become a Catholic nun. His mixed-race servant Sally Hemings insists upon staying in Paris — and she is pregnant with his child. During the play’s powerful final moments, Thomas and Sally bargain over the terms of her return.

Berlin, December 1944. As the Western Allies liberate France and the Soviet Army closes in from the east, a delusional Adolf Hitler dismisses as lies any news hinting at the Reich’s impending defeat. Instead, he summons his chief rocket scientist Wernher von Braun to plan a project that he hopes will “make the planet great again”—a military invasion of the planet Mars.

In a Midwestern city, a married architect dies suddenly of a heart attack—in the public company of his mistress, Trudy. Trudy’s long-absent musician husband, Ted, arrives, surprised to find Trudy still living in the home the dead architect built for her—and also having struck up a puzzling friendship with the architect’s widow, Geneva. Ted embarks on an affair with Geneva, and the play descends into tragic darkness as Geneva ruthlessly uses both Ted and Trudy to resolve her grief for a husband she never really knew.

On Holy Monday in Jerusalem, Jesus has just driven the money-changers from the Temple. One of his followers, Judah Ben-Hur, takes this as a signal to begin a Jewish uprising against Roman rule. What happens when Judah tries to recruit Jesus to lead thousands of armed men into battle? “The Cleansing” is inspired by a little-known plot thread in Lew Wallace’s novel Ben-Hur.

One fall night, Professor Elaine Simmons is visited at home by Sydney, one of her favorite students. It seems that Sydney bit Prof. Simmons the night before—in the form of a wolf. But contrary to traditional lore, not everybody who gets bitten by a werewolf turns into one. What will be Prof. Simmons’s fate? The moon is rising, and she’ll find out all too soon.

Produced for NC 10by10 New Play Festival, Carrboro and Cary, NC; July 19 - 22 and July 26 - 28, 2018.

Awarded Third Prize in the 2016 Winston-Salem Writers 10-Minute Play Contest; presented as a staged reading at Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts in Salem on April 1, 2016

A patient asks a physician to amputate her hand. The hand isn’t really hers, she tells the doctor. Naturally, the doctor wants to hear what the hand has to say about all this. But when the hand speaks from the depths of a hypnotic trance, the doctor’s own world undergoes a disturbing transformation.

The date is February 1601; the scene is London. Is William Shakespeare guilty of treason against the throne? Queen Elizabeth seems to think so, and she summons him to her privy chamber to explain himself. As Shakespeare pleads for his life, he and the Queen engage in a sharp debate about freedom of expression, the divine right of monarchs, and the looming specter of democracy.

Prince Segismundo has lived all his life in a wretched prison cell. What is he to think when he awakens one day to find himself the ruler of all Poland, only to awaken the next day in his cell again? Which is the dream -- his miserable existence in prison or his palace life of power and glory? While wrestling with questions of dream and waking, illusion and reality, Segismundo must learn to tame his own savagery and prove himself worthy to be Poland’s king. This new translation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s classic Spanish play is faithful to the original text, fluently readable, and eminently actable.

When a ballet lift goes wrong, who is at fault — the lifter or the liftee? Because it matters a lot!