Michael David

Broke and broken down, famed poet Edna St. Vincent Millay struggles to fulfill a paid commission she desperately needs.  At the summit of her powers, “Vincent” received the first Pulitzer Prize ever awarded to a female poet.  Now, on the last night of her life, she is torn between the twin distractions of drugs and booze, the comic hectoring of her personal journal come to life, the colorful past conjured by her overactive imagination, and that “one damn thing” ... writing a Thanksgiving Day poem for The Saturday Evening Post.

In a story told by two actors portraying 15 characters, we discover the early years and education of Ted Kaczynski, the "Unabomber."  A certified genius, Ted enters Harvard as a 16-year-old socially awkward freshman.  But it's his participation in a three-year "experiment" conducted by the Harvard psychology department that reveals Ted's concerns about an ever-evolving technological future, and his distrust and growing anger toward science and education.  Kaczynski leaves Harvard with a conviction that man's dependence on technology must be stopped ... and a plan for how to do it.

It's a dark and stormy night outside room #7 of The Blue Moon Motel.  The unusual play "Blue Moon" is a mysterious thriller-comedy about abduction, familial betrayal and impossible choices, combined with tales of earwax-eating cats and dangerous pilgrimages through lightening storms to locate Original Recipe chicken.  But now, what secrets do the Russian captors hold that may impact the events of the evening? And what (or who) are we waiting for?

It's 1979 in Act I and a career-waning Tennessee Williams is visited in his Key West bungalow by longtime contemporaries Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.  Both visitors arrive, one unexpected, to cheer Tenn after having suffered a month of burglaries, a gay bashing and the murder of his gardener.  But neither Gore nor Tru – adversaries in a bitter 30-year feud – expect to see the other. Rivalries, recriminations, and revelations are fueled by memories and liquor as the three titans of literature battle for supremacy.  In Act II it's 1949, thirty years earlier, and we see how it all began.

When Germany invades Poland and bomb the Warsaw Zoo in 1939, killing and releasing hundreds of animals, caretakers Jan and Antonina Zabinski find that their home on the zoo grounds – as well as many of the now abandoned animal cages – prove to be effective hiding places for their Jewish friends and neighbors ... until the Nazi SS decides to take up residence.  This is a play about the all-too-brief childhood of one little boy, strange alliances and unforgivable betrayals, and a dead zebra in the living room.

To honor the dying wish of the family matriarch, a widow, his two grown children, a granddaughter and "significant others" trek twelve grueling miles to return to the family's camping spot of nearly three decades earlier.  But much has changed, including a now polluted and dying stream (their only source of water), record-breaking temperatures and an adult child no longer willing to tolerate a father's abuse. The woods holds its own surprises as well, including poisonous snakes, a ravenous bear and spirits, both intoxicating and incorporeal.

It’s four o’clock on a February morning in the small attic bedroom of an old Missouri Ozarks farmhouse.  Fifty-year-old Amelia desires nothing more than to sleep just a few more hours but her elderly mother, Ethel, comes knocking on the bedroom door.  What’s so important it has to be talked about tonight?  Does it involve Ethel’s plans to sell the farm?  Or does it concern Amelia’s brother, Gideon, and the night he “up and left us” 20 years ago?  Or might it have to do with the mysterious grey bird that appears at the kitchen window, hours before a death in the family?

This is the story of four people and what happens when they face several life-altering decisions in the span of just 24 hours; one of them doesn’t make it out alive, and no one makes it through completely intact. "Fontanelle" challenges traditional theatrical literary forms and experiments with new ways of communication.  This, in a play that explores our own growing inability to communicate, the elusiveness of human connection, the interconnectedness of seemingly random events and the fragility of life in the face of devastating circumstances.

When young Kate Smolensky arrives for an all-important job interview, she is not prepared for Mr. Mooshegian, an officious yet impersonal middle-management "company man" who seems better prepared to conduct an interrogation than an interview.  In a battle of wits and wills, Kate appears to be impressing Mooshegian until the arrival of the mysterious "Supervisor," a woman who plans to test Kate's qualifications through increasingly bizarre and frightening methods.  This is not a play for the squeamish.

In the unsettling "Claims," audiences are led down a twisted path by Lou, a divorced father who believes his teenage son is being sexually abused by the man who has recently entered his ex-wife’s life ... and Lou's old home.  And bedroom.  Our suspicions and misgivings grow along with the Lou’s until the final, shocking conclusion when we are forced to re-evaluate everything we have believed, and our own complicity in the catastrophic outcome.

With justice at stake, when does the need to lie outweigh the demands of truth?  For Brent (an aviation mechanic and “regular guy”), rescuing Conrad – the longtime friend of live-in girlfriend Alex – from a vicious gay bashing is instinctive heroism. But Conrad’s determined pursuit of justice at all costs, Alex’s troubled past and Brent’s impulsive physicality puts all three on a path where scruples surrender to misrepresentation and mistakes ... degree by bitter degree.