Bücher von Don Nigro

This collection of seven darkly funny and mysterious plays includes the long one act Pirandello, in which the great Italian playwright, writing alone on the stage of his theatre late at night, is interrupted by the Italian dictator Mussolini, who wants him to write the authorized biographical play of the dictator's life, Pirandello's jealous wife, who believes Pirandello is sleeping with every woman in sight, including his daughter, and an increasingly disturbing group of characters who may or may not be real, leading Pirandello to question the relationship between his theories about the malleable nature of reality to the rise of Fascism and Fascist propaganda; The Recollection Of Green Rain, which tells the mostly true story of two green children found wandering near an English village, who spoke an unknown language and insisted they were from a mysterious green underground kingdom; Pinocchio, in which Gloria's blind date turns out to be an angry puppet with a rather unsettling story to tell; Rusalka, in which a police officer investigating the disappearance of a young girl tries to make sense out of the increasingly odd stories her best friend tells about her; Humpty Dumpty, in which an enormous egg with very bad hair sits on top of a wall and talks about making Wonderland great again; Brimstone Run, in which a family legacy of betrayal and tragedy is played out at the town dump; and Nictzin Dyalhis, in which a legendary, reclusive writer of weird tales is haunted by a sea goddess he may or may not have invented. In each of these plays, in one way or another, compelling characters find themselves lost in a labyrinthine twilight zone of dream variations which combine the Gothic, the surreal and the absurd.Don Nigro is among the most frequently published and widely produced playwrights in the world and has continued to build a deeply interrelated and diverse body of dramatic literature, employing a wide variety of dramatic conventions and styles of presentation. He has written monologues and epics, spare realistic dramas and surreal homicidal puppet farces, plays with music and verse plays. He continues to build the long cycle of Pendragon County plays, which traces the history of America through the lives of several related east Ohio families from the eighteenth century to the present, and features many characters whose lives are traced from youth through middle age to old age in a number of plays that may be presented in a variety of combinations.

FOREWORDby Lawrence HarbisonLisa Soland, teacher, actress and a fine playwright herself, has here assembled a wonderful collection of short plays. Some are comic (laughs), some are dramatic (no laughs), some are somewhere in between. A few of the playwrights whose work is represented here are ones whose work I have published in the anthologies I have edited for Smith and Kraus and Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, such as Don Nigro, Debbie Lamedman, Stephanie Hutchinson, Gary Garrison and Craig Pospisil and Ms. Soland herself, but most are new to me. It never ceases to amaze me when I contemplate the huge number of really fine playwrights. I don't think there has ever been such a wealth of writing for the theatre.If you're a passionate actor, a teacher or a director looking for a play to do, you won't find a better place to start looking than this book.

During the German bombardment of Leningrad, earlier and now St. Petersburg, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, struck on the head by a falling brick, stumbles into a basement for shelter and finds herself unexpectedly back at the long abandoned site of the Stray Dog Café, where in the second decade of the twentieth century the most famous Russian poets, artists, actors, and dancers gathered to drink, sing, argue, and make love, and gradually the Stray Dog comes to life again, when

In this moving and powerful ensemble piece, a police detective investigates the mysterious death of a young Mexican actress in a bathtub. She has been making a film about a girl who dies in a bathtub, directed by a beautiful and charismatic but troubled Russian woman who seems to have cast a spell on the others involved: a cynical, womanizing British screenwriter who wants desperately to sleep with her, a frustrated Irish actress, and a sardonic Italian assistant director. Was it an accident,

Eleven short animal plays which may be done individually or in combination with any of the others.

This collection contains a harrowing tale of the later lives of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two girls obsessed by a movie contemplating homicide, a couple doomed to rehearse their tragedy on the stage of a theatre for eternity, a dark little play about the relationship of leprechauns to cannibalism, the tale of Peter Rabbit told from the point of view of the very disturbed Mr McGregor, a third rate horror movie villain lamenting his life on a zombie island, the end of the observable univers

Contents:Tales from the Red Rose InnChilde Rowland to the Dark Tower CameLucy and the Mystery of the Vine-Encrusted MansionDarkness Like a DreamJoan of Arc in the Autumn Warburton's CookHiggs FieldThings that Go Bump in the NightUncle Clete's ToadMalefactor's Bloody RegisterCapone

Characters: 4 male, 6 femaleInteriorInspector Ruffing, the troubled hero of Nigro's Ravenscroft, Demonology, Creatures Lurking In The Churchyard, The Rooky Wood and Mephisto returns in this baffling mystery that was an audience favorite at the First International Mystery Festival in 2007. In a peaceful house near the Welsh border, an entire family has vanished suddenly without a trace one evening with supper on the table and no apparent violence. Ruffing's atte

Plays included in this collection: The Daughters of Edward D. Boit The Green Man Hieronymus Bosch Specter The Woodman and the Goblins

Dramatic Comedy CharacterS: 2 male, 3 female Unit set. In the first years of the twentieth century, Evelyn Nesbit, the beautiful, teen-age pin up and chorus girl, was the entrancing center of an explosive and deadly love triangle involving Stanford White, her married lover and the architect of many of the most famous buildings in New York, who liked to push her naked on a red velvet swing, and Harry K. Thaw, the wealthy, manic and demented roller-skating

A new collection of shorts from Don Nigro, including: GORGONS (2f ) Ruth and her rival Mildred are aging movie stars in the 1960s. They have in their time been goddesses of the screen, but now both are on the skids and desperate for work. Mildred is doing obscure theatre under spartan conditions when Ruth comes to her with a film script. It's a horror movie called Gorgons, about two insane and homicidal sisters. Both long to be famous again, so they agree to do the movie, with comical results.

Contents:Dutch InteriorsFrench GoldRat WivesRhiannonThe Rooky Wood

Drama / Characters: 4 male, 4 femaleScenery: Unit setA finalist for the National Play Award, this funny drama takes place in Vienna, 1900. A beautiful and brilliant young girl enters the office of Sigmund Freud to begin the most famous and controversial encounter in psychoanalysis. Dora is funny, suspicious, sarcastic and elusive. Freud becomes obsessed by her and he moves like a detective through the mystery of her mind, finding a lecherous father, an obsessed mother, an irritating brothe

Mystery / 1m, 5f / Simple unit setThis psychological drama is a thinking person's Gothic thriller, a dark comedy that is both funny and frightening. On a snowy night, Inspector Ruffing is called to a remote house to investigate the headlong plunge of Patrick Roarke down the main staircase. He becomes involved in the lives of five alluring and dangerous women: Marcy, the beautiful Viennese governess with a past; Mrs. Ravenscroft, the flirtatious lady of the manor; Gillian, her charming but po

Drama / Casting: 1m, 1f / Scenery: Interior This fine work in the Pendragon cycle of plays enjoyed a sold out, critically acclaimed production at the world famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle be

Don Nigro ComedyCharacters: 4 male, 5 female Single SetRosey Snow is trapped in a fairy tale world that is by turns funny and a little frightening, with her stepsisters Goneril and Regan, her demented stepmother, her lecherous father, a bewildered Prince, a fairy godmother who sings salty old sailor songs, a troll and a possibly homicidal village idiot. This play investigates the archetypal origins of the world's most popular fairy tale, contrasting the famili