Eric Fritzius

A dramatization of tragic incident, of questionable historical accuracy, which has greatly affected multiple generations of the family of playwright Eric Fritzius, not to mention his whole frickin' life.

In March of 2020, my father was in his third week of in-patient physical therapy following spinal surgery, and I had come down from my home in West Virginia to help for what I thought would be a few weeks at most. When COVID-19 hit, that all changed. The virus had already ravaged nursing facilities in multiple states and my Dad's facility took it very seriously and visitation to his nursing home was restricted to window visits only.

These became daily reality for nursing homes worldwide in 2020.

While this monologue depiction of one half of such a window visit telephone conversation is fiction, it is directly inspired by conversations I had with my father in the early days of the pandemic, when having only 17 total cases in the state seemed like a lot.

This monologue was first published in the COVID-19 anthology In the Midst, by Inspiration for Writers, edited by Sandy Tritt.

The decision to settle down can be a tough for some, but especially for a hardened Pirate Cap'n, who must choose between a rich, ya-harr-filled life of high-seas adventure and the destiny-altering effects of one magical moonlit walk on a beach with the girl he once lost. Wells Fargo executives and Johnny Depp, beware! A 10 minute sea-faring romantic comedy.

Every parent knows the mind of a child is a dangerous place full of unanswerable questions that can spring out at any moment. For a father who’s actually afraid his young son will try to fly off a roof, Superman-style, though, those questions (and answers) are going to tend toward the creative. (Includes role for a boy aged 6-10)

Set in fictional Eldridge, West Virginia, a town so poor it uses a defunct savings & loan building as its sheriff's department, and where public defender is a part time job. Newcomer Howard Rainey has been serving in that capacity, on retainer from his 8-month-old law practice. When Rainey is called upon to defend Eldridge's most legendary moonshiner, he finds the old man has a couple of unlikely allies: the town's doctor, as well as the very sheriff who made the arrest. And if they're serious about one thing, it's that Old Man Hartsook must be set free.

A 10 minute political horror comedy. Security is at an all time high in all walks of life, including at the movie theater, where sneaking in food to avoid inflated snack bar prices is a serious business requiring serious counter-measures. Enter Agent DeGrunte of the Movie Theatre Security Administration (MTSA), who will use up to and including a body cavity search to insure no one sneaks snacks to a showing of FARGO 3D.

Jack Vale is dead. What awaits him beyond is not at all what he expected. He's not even sure if he's upstairs or downstairs, if you catch the meaning. But he's allowed to ask questions about the secrets and conspiracies of the world he always wanted to know but could never learn the answers to in life. He'd better make them good, though, because he only has twenty of them. (An Ellipses Cycle play.)

Bureaucracy almost never starts from a place of evil. Often it grows from a seed of safety, flowering with regulations designed to protect, but with little regard to whether the regulatory blooms are necessary or even make sense.

Oh, forget all the the flowery metaphors.

Set in a blood plasma donation clinic, we see one man's attempt to throw himself against the walls of regulatory illogic, armed only with a digital recorder.

The little perks in life can make the daily hassles and chores we must face worth it. Hank and Angie have an oral disagreement when it comes to the household “job” jar. Can they head off disaster or will the winds blow cold?

An adult play for all audiences.

(An Ellipses Cycle play) We have it pretty good, here in the good old U.S. of A. Besides peanut allergies, we don’t have to worry about much when it comes to our daily lives. Unless, of course, you happen to live in one of the West Virginia counties that experienced confirmed sightings of an African lion. That might slow you down on the way to work, especially when one is camped out on your front porch. In this play, the Ross family learns just what African lions are and are not capable of.

(An Ellipses Cycle play) Virgil Hawks has a problem: he shot and killed West Virginia’s legendary Mothman. Now he has to figure out what to do with the body before the Men In Black catch wind of it. His solution: take it to his buddy Jeff’s house. Based on the author’s short story of the same title found in A Consternation of Monsters.