Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “new plays”
Central Works premieres my comedy “The Engine of Our Destruction” on Saturday, October 14, at the Berkeley City Club. Featuring Chelsea Bearce, Louel Señores, Michael Tuton, and Jan Zvaifler, it’s a comic look at attempts to enforce or regulate AI ethics. The play centers on Kamiri (Chelsea Bearce), new Chief Ethics Officer at Bubble, Inc., whose mother is named Chair …
I’ve been slow to add blog posts lately, as I’m working to complete Act II of my new play about ethics in Big Tech. Or rather, lack of ethics. The play was originally titled Zero Tolerance, but that doesn’t really apply any more. The new working title is The Engine of our Destruction. I’m examining the ethical choices of two …
Talkbacks are on my mind, and when they are, I invariably search, find and read Liz Duffy Adams’ “Talkback: A Play About Talkbacks.” There is no other play that more accurately captures the experience in such a hilarious way. In their short play, Adams imagines an audience giving feedback to William Shakespeare on “Hamlet.” Talkbacker 4 jumps in with, “Right …
First of all, the name: “Talkbacks.” What’s up with that? Please call them “audience conversations,” or “dialogues,” or something less confrontational. Why is there always one person in the audience who seems to be gunning for the playwright? Just curious. Playwright Romulus Linney famously (or apocryphally) said, “There are “three basic human needs: food, sex, and rewriting somebody else’s play.” …
The research for this play, the sequel to “The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective,” is involved and dense. It’s also shocking, and quite moving. The topic of women locked up as “insane” when they weren’t is part of a very long and intersectional history of women being treated terribly by the medical profession, women of color worst of all. Horrendous medical …
Did you know you can read all of my full-length plays on the New Play Exchange? You have to create a free account, but then you can download all the plays in pdf format and read them, for free! There’s lots of playwrights (more than 10,000) on the Exchange, many of whom have written only ten minute plays, in case …
Ronald Knox was a mystery writer in the early part of the 20th century who belonged to the Detection Club, a society peopled by such legendary mystery writers as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, and E. C. Bentley. Among his novels: The Viaduct Murder, Double Cross Purposes, Still Dead. Knox was also a Catholic priest, which is perhaps …
At a recent reading of a new play by a playwright I know, an audience member pointed out that racism and transphobia were part of the play, but were not dealt with within the play. For example, an extremely transphobic father deadnames his daughter and disparages her in a number of ways, remaining aligned with the opinion that he sees …
Central Works Theatre has announced its 30th (!) Season, and Bystanders is one of the four plays that will premier there in 2020. It promises to be a kick-ass season, which includes a musical. Central Works produces only new plays. In 2019, three of four plays produced were written by women; next year, their playwright gender parity is 50/50. While …
Found over at the Bruntwood Prize is this list of questions from Amongst the Reeds playwright Chinonyerem Odimba. I find them provocative and inspiring in my own work. How to find the driving question(s) of your play Ask yourself questions about why you are telling this story. What excites you, the playwright, about the possibilities of the story? What moves …