READINGS HISTORY

LIGHTNING

Dollarhide Star, a worn out salesman, climbs to the top of a blue mountain to sell a lightning rod to a young, lone woman, Net March. Each holds a host of secrets that unbutton, unravel, and reveal dark truths. Both are murderers and both are victims. Delusion and lies lead to seduction, violence, and a broken forgiveness. A surreal romance. A Blue Ridge Fantasia.

MIDWEST PORN

Students at St. Mary’s Elementary School are preparing for Confirmation, but fourth grader Beatrice and her coterie threaten to boycott the ceremony due to their doctrinal differences with Catholic orthodoxy. At the same time, low enrollment figures and a strange influx of turtles threaten the very survival of the school. The situation worsens when Mikey, Beatrice’s classmate, shoots one of the turtles in the girls bathroom. And then his father Richie, bent on reviving the city’s economy by creating a pornographic video industry in an abandoned factory, gets involved. Porn, parents, children and turtles come together in an astonishing revelation that somehow manages to save Confirmation and St. Mary’s. Amen.

INSURRECTION

A memory play that takes place in the present, whatever the present is in the aleatory presence of memory. It is the story of love between a daughter and her elderly father who is tormented by memories of his blacklisting during the McCarthy era; a daughter who laments the recurrence of America's betrayal of her father and of all its citizens throughout history, while being forced to confront betrayals of her own.

A RANDOM ACT

This was an exploration of a work-in-process with supportive colleagues.

WORSHIP

Worship explores the relationship between teachers and the students who idolize them. Estelle, a legendary writing teacher, is known for her signature style—a mystical approach combined with a brutal honesty and a willingness to do anything in the name of art. Some vilify her, others canonize her. When Alzheimer's debilitates her, she is visited by the students she has influenced most. Through a series of flashbacks and ritualized devotionals,the sacred and profane nature of the bond between this guru and her disciples is exposed.

A PLAY BY BARB AND CARL

In March 2017, playwright Carlyle Brown's wife and dramaturge Barbara Rose-Brown had a stroke leaving her with right side weakness and unable to speak. A dramaturge had lost her access to language. Playwright had lost his dramaturge. As a way of dealing with their situation they decided to write a play. This is that play.

A WORK-IN-PROGRESS

This reading created an intimate and informal space for the playwright and collaborators to hear an early draft.

SCENE STUDY 1969

Acting classes in the East Village, NYC, a year where our troops were fighting a bloody, immoral war in Vietnam and people were raging in the streets, where the Black Panthers were being jailed and feted, where a group of young aspiring actors encountered an intrepid teacher who cajoled and hammered them to act.

WHERE WOMEN GO

WHERE WOMEN GO is a series of three short one-acts for a diverse cast of women of various ages. Tina Howe’s eccentric plays explore the humor and absurdity of women’s daily lives as they visit the dermatologist, eat at Subway, and go shopping.

SOLITARY MAN

Vivid, tough, brilliantly funny characters who grapple and tear at the universe--and each other. A real family story.

LOTTERY BOY

This reading offered the team an opportunity to hear a first draft among a supportive room of colleagues.

SOUL IN A BOX

Jago Solo, a conservative and extremely ambitious Black attorney, takes on a controversial case defending two white men involved in the death of a young black man in hopes of igniting his career.

THE HILDEGARD PLAY

A visionary nun emerges from obscurity after forty years of confinement in a men's monastery.

Hildegard of Bingen was one the most brilliant minds of the Middle Ages, a prophet, composer, artist, poet and gadfly of cardinals and kings. What was she? WHO was she? There was a man and a woman who knew.

KATE SUSPENDED

Follows a journalist of a certain age whose career, and life, hangs by a thread. She embarks on a picaresque journey to say goodbye to her father, her younger self, and the alternate selves she meets along the way. A comedy about grief, regret, and moving on.

WHERESOEVER THEY LIE

Wheresoever They Lie tells the story of a middle-aged Black man reeling from a sudden, unanticipated break-up, who then searches for deeper love and affection both inside and out.

NEVER MOSCOW

Presented in partnership with The Sol Project, Migdalia Cruz's Never Moscow is what happens when a dying playwright gets to converse with his own characters outside of the confines of his play, because they really don’t want him to die…He might take them with him.

GENTRIFIED: METAPHOR OF THE DRUMS

Gentrified: Metaphor of the Drums is set in contemporary Harlem USA. When Reggie Green, an African-American lifelong resident of Harlem meets Shannon, a white female resident of the new Harlem, an exploration of culture, race, economics, history, and sex takes place, initiating a journey of the past, present, and future, filled with drama, comedy, the absurd, and magic.

CODE RED

Code Red follows the lives of four teachers as they are forced to navigate

the complexity and dread of firearms on their high-school campus.

THE LEVERET

The Leveret is a dramatic monologue about Antonio Cruzado (1725-1804), a Franciscan friar who drew the plans and gathered the forced labor of the Gabrielino Tongva to build the San Gabriel Mission in Los Angeles.

WOMEN IN JEOPARDY!

Mary and Jo are suspicious of their friend Liz’s new dentist boyfriend—he’s not just a weirdo; he may be a serial killer! After all, his hygienist just disappeared. Trading their wine glasses for hiking boots, a couple of divorced ladies try to discover the truth and save their friend in a hilarious off-road adventure.

NAKED WITH STRANGERS

Magic and medicinal, Naked with Strangers is a darkly comic look at how addiction, perversion, and toxic love are the key ingredients to a happy ending.

KISS ME SOMEWHERE ELSE

Love seems impossible when tiny Teena meets giant Eddie, especially when Teena's monstrous mother insists Eddie's not-monstrous father keep their adult kids apart. But in this incongruous outrageous fairy tale crashed into a Borscht Belt feminist comedy, the opposite happens to all of them, and love changes everyone.

PARADISE STREET

A deeply intelligent, provoking, and witty play, Paradise Street wrestles with important questions of class and gender in this country. It takes you for a wild ride through the transformation of several characters dealing with what feminism has done for, and to, their lives.</p>