Fast!, about the speed-up of everything, won 1st prize in The John Gassner Memorial Playwriting Award Competition [shared with Terrance McNalley], The Purgatory CO Playwriting Contest [$2,000 1st prize and production], was selected by The Edward Albee Theatre Conference and was performed in CO, NY [Soupstone Theater] & Los Angeles [West Coast Ensemble Theatre].
She’s Bad Today was performed at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, CT
Cordially DisInvited, won the 2019 Julie Harris [$2500] Award from the Beverly Hills Theatre Guild.
Trapshod, produced by Actors Voyage East, ran off-Broadway in NYC
Putzi’s Progress is a ‘cinematic’ comedy set in the Nazi film world.
A Second Brilliance, a play set in 1400 Florence, kicked off the Renaissance.
Poison for the Clowns, A.E.O.’s 1000 page comic novel set on three continents during WWII may soon near completion.
Education: Amherst College [BA]; Harvard University [Masters]
Plays
Marilyn and Gregory meet –quickly-- in a fast food ‘establishment’. They interact, engage, attack, separate and reunite…quickly. This is a comedy for today and every other day, in a quick paced and ever faster world. Machines, engagements, business, marriage, and eating are ever faster, rapidly accelerating. Is it possible to put the brakes on, to slow it all down? Marilyn and Gregory think they might have the answers. Perhaps a slow cooked meal, eaten leisurely, with candles and soft music. But they must act fast.
16 year old Mathew's been in and out of rehab, unanchored until he finds someone who can love him and the reason to join the world again.
A comedy of ill-manners. The ever-so-witty and notorious Mitford clan has gathered at the family compound in the English countryside, just before the outbreak of WWII. Six amusing but exceedingly willful sisters vie for pre- eminence in wit, extravagant beauty, or just the last word. In this world apart, the concerns are about being the cleverest, making the best marriage, prominence in the grand family portrait, or who will make the best fascist. Nancy has just published her caustic novel skewering the family, the gorgeous Diana is juggling husbands, Jessica is flirting with fashionable socialism and poor Unity has her rat and a crush on the fuhrer. Inopportunely the turbulent outside world slowly invades, taking a terrible toll on humor and the family.
Putzi’s Progress is unapologetically a comedy. The lead, Putzi Hanfstanegl is based on the unofficial court jester of the Nazi inner circle. He was educated at Harvard, friend of FDR, bon vivant, limericist extraordinaire, film composer, archivist, fascist cabinet member and most emblematic, favorite calming pianist for A.Hitler. This much is true, as is virtually everything in the play, with slight indelicate emendations based on research and imagination. What could be more apropos for our times than an amoral buffoon with access to the highest echelons of political power?
The play, set in a film world plays fast and loose with theatrical conventions, relying primarily on 4-5 main actors, with all the other roles broadly doubled and tripled by the cast, with quick costume changes, various accents, moustaches, beards, capes and mayhem. The set is decidedly minimal and fluid –cinematic- with judicious props, the one essential one being Putzi’s piano: his foil, his security, his undoing, his hedge against insignificance.
Putzi Hanfstaengl blunders his way through the not-very-funny history from pre to post WWII. Forced to baby-sit the ingenuous American Jonathan Chapin, he leads his charge through a succulent detour into depravity. All this takes place in the Berlin Filmwelt [‘filmworld’], a pampered community initially free of Nazi domination. Similar to today, these denizens feel they are immune from the larger evil engulfing the nation. The actors are actually running out the clock until the government replaces these silver screen idols with their own.