Callie Kimball

Perseverance Turner, A Black schoolteacher, writer, and suffragist, is determined to elevate her students above the circumstances in which they were born. One hundred years later, in the same small town of Hillcroft, Maine, Dawn Davis, a white schoolteacher, is running for office on a platform of education reform in between Zoom classes. As the two women's stories intertwine, and ownership of history takes center stage.

ALLIGATOR ROAD is set in central Florida’s oldest hardware store where Kathy, a recent widow, has yarn-bombed all the hammers, saws, and paint cans. It's a gesture of whimsy before she hands the store over to Lavinia as an act of reparations. But her daughter Candace will do anything to stop Kathy from throwing away the family store. ALLIGATOR ROAD is a sly comedy that unravels ideas about entitlement and the price of freedom.

Broadway World Critic's Choice: Best of Maine 2015

"Alligator Road addresses big issues – white privilege and guilt, racism of the past and the present, the problematic concept of reparations – in an interestingly oblique, non-didactic way. Kimball’s punchy, irreverent script delivers turns that feel at once surprising and inevitable, her dialogue is refreshingly free of Big Issue exposition...What’s perhaps most interesting about Kimball’s script is its ambiguousness; the script asks questions rather than answers them." Megan Grumbling, The Portland Phoenix

"An incisive and insightful drama about family relationships, race, and the meaning of personal freedom...Kimball, whose other works include Jenny1538 and Rush, has written a taut, tension filled script and scathing, acerbic, often mordantly funny dialogue for four wonderfully flawed and human characters, with whom the audience easily empathizes...Kimball vividly paints her characters in colorful strokes and emotionally laden confrontations; she knows how to build tension to a white-hot temperature and diffuse it in a brief moment of sharp humor...Hers is a play that deserves a wider audience, and one can only hope that Alligator Road will find many more venues and audiences with which to share its message." Carla Maria Verdino-Sullwold, Broadway World

Setting
Labor Day 2014. A hardware store in central Florida.

Characters
KATHY. White. 45. Sweet, coarse, and slightly hot.
CANDACE. White. 21. She is a dagger. It costs her nothing to say anything.
LAVINIA. Black. 20s. A peacemaker with starch.
SCOTT. White. 30s. Not as much of a dick as he could be. If the women are having multiple conversations at once, knitting the words of the play, Scott is a pair of scissors.

After studying with Michelangelo, 27-year-old Sofonisba Anguissola boards a ship from Italy to Spain to paint for King Philip II. Her 20 years at the Royal Court are one long chess game, since Sofonisba must play to and against the expectations of the king, the bishop, the fool, a lovelorn knight, and a 14-year-old queen. What negotiations and sacrifices did she make in the service of her art, and how did she navigate the tricky waters of court politics as an unmarried woman? A play about the hunger for creation--of birth and of art--and what it costs.

The play can be done with three actors or as many as seven, if the male roles are split. Unproduced.

SETTING
The Spanish Court of King Philip II, 1560-1571. And two ships, 20 years apart.

CHARACTERS
SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA. Italian. 27 when the play starts. 47 when it ends. Court painter to King Philip II of Spain.
QUEEN ISABEL. French. 14 when the play starts. Queen of Spain, Philip’s second wife.
BISHOP ESPINOZA. Spanish. Late 50s. His paternalism is benign and suits the time.
KING PHILIP. Spanish. 32 at the start of the play. A good husband, but still a king.
DON FRANCISCO FABRIZIO DE MONCADA PIGNATELLI DEL PATERNO. Sicilian. Around 40. He is the son of a prince. Tragically earnest.
THE FOOL. Scottish and ageless.
ORAZIO LOMELLINO. Italian. 30s. Handsome and strong.

Tetherly, a dentist specializing in existential terror, and Nina, an opera singer who just might be the worst babysitter ever, square off in a strange ballet of truth or dare. But is this a game anyone can even win? "Thelma and Louise" meets "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" On steroids.

CHARACTERS
TETHERLY, 40s but looks younger. Pretty. White. Benign. Dentist and PhD candidate.
If she were a real estate agent, no one would feel comfortable going into an empty house with her, but they might not be able to say why.

NINA, 24 going on 24. Latinx. Former paralegal. Aspiring opera singer. When she talks
it’s arrows.

SETTING
The present. An American suburb. A living room. At once the most secret and public
room in the house.

It’s 1899. Frank and Belinda stand at the threshold of a new life in the Yukon Gold Rush. But are they really brother and sister? And what horror did they leave behind? Even if the law catches up with them, will it matter in this wild frontier? Told in a dark, poetic, and fractured way, RUSH asks whether escaping your past only makes it haunt you all the more.

"Kimball exercises a poet’s finely-honed restraint, shifting and slowly stripping the talisman-like lines...Kimball’s grace with lyric and leaps is often arresting. At its best, I love how vertiginously Kimball’s script leaps and leaves us in the air: the end of a scene cuts off someone’s second thought at “Ma’am – ”; the internal memory phrases are increasingly sloughed of context. Most harrowingly, the story’s resolution is achieved with disarming simplicity, striking in its swiftness and restraint. And the show’s final memory words, stripped to verbal bone – not to mention its final gasp – caught my own breath." Megan Grumbling, Dig Portland.

Setting
Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and the Yukon Territory. 1899-1900.

Characters
BELINDA, any race, early 20s. Odd. Careful. Knows too much and too little about the wrong things.
FRANK, same race as Belinda, mid- to late 20s. Quick to anger. Wasn’t always like this.
ROSIE, Tlingit, early 20s. Practical and suspicious for every good reason. Mostly honest.
ALICE, white, mid- to late 20s. Savvy entrepreneur with a secret or three. From Ohio.
JEB, any age, any race, preferably black. Rough but harmless and well-meaning prospector.
GARRISON, man, white, any age. The implacable face of the law.
DOCTOR, woman, Scottish, any age. Has seen too much.
NEIGHBOR, woman, any race, any age. Has not seen nearly enough.

The play can be done with six actors by doubling Doctor/Rosie (or Alice) and Neighbor/Alice (or Rosie), or seven actors if the Doctor and Neighbor are doubled.

Bug's just your average 13-year-old girl whose family is hiding out in a storage facility. So naturally, she's transformed herself into a high priestess who's trying to raise the dead. On this particular summer day, her incantations seem to work, setting off an acceleration of events ending in a rough Armageddon that launches her into the world.

Nominee, The Kilroys' List, 2014 and 2015
Lark Playwrights' Week, 2013
Rita and Burton Goldberg Playwriting Award, 2012
Finalist, Clubbed Thumb Biennial Commission, 2011 (under the title "Grendel")

Setting
August 2011. A makeshift living area in a storage facility near Biddeford, Maine.

Characters
BUG, WHITE, 13 GOING ON 8. Isolated. Obedient, eager, and straightforward. A little slow.
KITTY, WHITE, 45-50-ISH, STORAGE FACILITY MANAGER. Never smiles. The drug addiction of her youth has been replaced by a ferocious devotion to Jehovah. Looks like she eats cigarettes.
GLORIA, BLACK, 30S-40S, YOUNGER, PRETTIER, AND KINDER THAN KITTY. Though she is Kitty's first and most faithful convert, she has outgrown the friendship. Often tries to protect Bug. Often fails.
BOBBY, WHITE, 30. Prison was probably the best thing that ever happened to Bobby. Seems hapless and free of subtext, but this is simply a persona he's cultivated to survive his home life and prison life. The reality is much darker.
TRUCK, NOT WHITE, LATE 20s-30s or 40s-50s. ENTREPRENEUR AND BOBBY'S FRIEND. Handsome in a way. Smooth. Nothing but subtext. Has either avoided or been to prison but is now sober and into health food. Takes great pride in his accomplishments. Understands first-hand that doing the right thing often comes at a cost.

A voyeuristic peek at dating 1,000 years from now. Louisa's your average, brainy, slightly mousy single gal in the city. Sure, she's got twelve clones and a decent job at the Center for Proteonomics, but she's also got a genetic trait of not feeling pain that makes her, well...different. Louisa's predictable world is turned upside down when she meets romantic renegade Sam online at the Ninja Diner. Sam offers Louisa everything she wants, and a few things she hadn't bargained for. (Male and female couple, or two women.)

"Dating in general often ends up to be a maze of social and personal issues all with the goal of hopefully finding someone you can spend your life with. With this play we see that nothing has changed 1000 years from now – society has it’s rules, and we still have our issues. This is science fiction done right – using the genre to explore ourselves and the world around us. What obstacles do we put in our own way? What are put in our way by society? This story explores that in a very thoughtful way." Erik Engman, certified reviewer for Hollywood Fringe.

SETTING
May 39, 3006. A bedroom.

CHARACTERS
Louisa, female.
Sam, male or female.

Nine-year-old Jenny1538 is a perfectionist. She’s going for her sixth attempt to earn her Discovery badge. It’s the only badge she doesn’t have, and her presentation is a sure-fire win—she’s found 11 lost days from the 18th century. A play about identity, loss, and what it means when your outsides don’t match your insides.

"Kimball’s script is often deliciously disarming, filled with veers and leaps, and as in her other work, she has a particular skill with fragmented, lyrical riffs into the absurd, as when Dominic rattles off a weird litany of “because” (including, memorably, “Because Gwyneth Paltrow cries baby organic tiger tears”)." Megan Grumbling, The Portland Phoenix

Characters
JENNY. 9. Played by a grown man. Wears a Brownie uniform. Classic overachieving perfectionist.

DOMINIC FRANCONIA. 40s. Sweatpants, tee shirt, sneakers—it’s the best he’s got. He does not have reliable shelter.

Setting
Here and now. Since Jenny is giving a presentation to her scout troop, the space could be a church hall, a community center, a basement, or…a theater.