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Couplehood and infidelity are subject to scrutiny in Anthony Clarvoe's oblique ode to LA RONDE. "Mr Clarvoe, previously represented in New York by PICK UP AX, a comedy about corporate intrigue in Silicon Valley that got good reviews when it was produced by 29th Street Rep in 1995, finds himself in an unusual position for a young playwright: two of his works are running concurrently in Manhattan. Besides LET'S PLAY TWO, which he wrote several years ago, his newest play, WALKING OFF THE ROOF, is being presented by the Signature Theater Company, the estimable Off-Broadway troupe that devotes each season to the work of one living American playwright. John Guare is the company's featured writer this year; Mr Clarvoe's play has been shepherded to production through a separate program for mid-career playwrights. Like LET'S PLAY TWO, WALKING OFF THE ROOF is an attempt to clear the spoiled air between men and women, only Mr Clarvoe's concern in this case is the end of relationships, not the beginning. With a nod to Harold Pinter's BETRAYAL, the play details a roundel of infidelities committed by a pair of couples, one married, the other not."Peter Marks, The New York Times "Anthony Clarvoe's fine ear for dialogue, and the sputterings of men and women ensnared by longing, juices his nervous, edgy roundelay depicting several couples and their bed manners. Sadness and disconnectedness reign with poignance, wit, and credibility."Laurie Stone, Village Voice

Abraham Zobell is a man like other men. No better, not much worse. But, unlike other men, he has a vital need to lay flowers on an ocean grave before it's too late. Though he's recovering from a recent heart attack, Abe rejects the pleas of his wife and the advice of his doctors, rips out his IV, and sets out on a pilgrimage to the sea. Along the way, he encounters ghosts and memories, music and moonlight, pilgrim strangers, and even stranger friends. "Len Jenkin not only has a vivid imagination, but he also has an artist's command of his craft."New York Times "Len Jenkin has an unusual talent for reaching into shadowy places in the human psyche and coming up with evocative images."Journal American (Seattle) "Jenkin's plays have plenty of plot and delicious language, but the transience of experience is the main theme that runs through Jenkin's work. He manipulates theatrical illusions with a playful manner that recalls Jorge Luis Borges, to disguise meditations on mortality."Village Voice (New York)

"IN A PIG'S VALISE is a musical comedy spoof of the hot-cool private-eye pulp fiction associated with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Except that it's wilder, much wilder. VALISE, among other oddities, features a stubby villain named Shrimp Bucket, an 'ethnic dancer' heroine named Dolores Con Leche (or, as the gumshoe hero, James Taxi, calls her, Sadness With Milk) and, in a bit part homage to Hammett's real-life lover, an undercover F B I agent named Lillian Hellman... Spiced with songs by August Darnell (Kid Creole) that bear such lines as 'Kiss me deadly' and 'Never judge a thriller by its cover' ... [a] broad, winking satire of the language and plot conventions of the old books and movies."Richard Christiansen, The Chicago Tribune

Ibsen's 1881 masterpiece finds a fresh interpretation in Anthony Clarvoe's taut adaptation in which a woman has to face her legacy of religious and sexual repression when her grown son comes home to tell her that he has an incurable sexually transmitted disease and asks her to help him die with dignity.

NO GOOD DEED revolves around the interconnecting stories of three troubled heroes, including a Richard Jewell-like security guard; a firefighter who has rescued a toddler from a well; and lonely teen Josh Jaxon, a budding graphic novelist whose "Hellbound Hero" comes to life as his alter ego."In a lot of ways, I want to hold this production up to the producers of SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK and say, 'This is how you put a graphic novel on stage.'" -Talkin' Broadway"Pelfrey has fashioned a bracingly cerebral and nerve-rattling piece." -Backstage"The twenty-something dudes that really like comic books and video games and seeing people get their asses kicked would totally think NO GOOD DEED is the most awesome play of all time." -The LAist

Uncle Sam was a novelties salesman who died one night, alone and broke, in a Pittsburgh hotel. But he was also a larger-than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew - who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story. His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive nightclub singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny, sometimes hair-raising episodes as the nephew "becomes" his uncle in his youth and journeys to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course - all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror. In the end it is really the landscape of the mind that is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the "truth" still remaining tantalizingly out of reach."Mr. Jenkin's play is in the first place a loving but rarified pulp-fiction parody, full of ingenious and peculiar turns of language." -The Village Voice"Jenkin's plays are, in a sense, loony detective stories, a pilgrim's progress through thickets of American hype and ignorance." -The New York Daily News"By the end of this imaginative evening, one could say that the play is a journey of self-discovery, a pop art fairy tale, or an investigation into the American psyche." -BackStage"... it's a wonderful piece, astonishingly imaginative and challenging." -The Bergen Record

A kaleidoscopic, surrealistic overview of contemporary America, set forth in the bizarre, highly theatrical style which characterizes this writer's distinctive voice. Produced by New York's highly regarded Public Theater, the play employs brilliantly imaginative avante-garde techniques to highlight both the dreams - and delusions - which infuse and motivate our modern world. The play is made up of a series of concurrent actions, some set in a tacky motel, some elsewhere, involving a group of disparate but curiously related people. There is the young night clerk, Pauline, who studies her high-school English Lit notebook, while growing increasingly fearful of the unseen and unwanted suitor who lies in wait in the motel parking lot; a raucous carnival barker touting his giant crocodile, Bonecrusher; a pair of seedy bar denizens who occasionally break into song; a dim-witted handyman, Chuckles, who performs pointless errands; a deranged scientist who believes that he is in contact with creatures from outer space; an abandoned woman who waits restlessly for a lover who will probably never return; and a mysterious drifter, Faber, who, somehow becomes the catalyst which fuses all these divergent elements into a cohesive, and often wildly funny whole. And, in so doing, makes the play both an encapsulation of the American myth and, at the same time, a telling comment on what is right - and wrong - with this myth."... it has a cumulative, atmospheric effect, tantalizing our senses at the same time it creates a haunting iconographic world ... AMERICAN NOTES is itself sui generis - bearing the unmistakably original signature of Len Jenkin." -The New York Times"[AMERICAN NOTES] is a kind of anti-OUR TOWN. The weird backwater in which it's set is a little surreal and a lot seedy, populated by nighthawks, drifters, pimps, and hucksters." -Chicago Reader"Twice as ingeniously written as any play in town ..." -The Village Voice"... a mythic vision of America ..." -Drama-Logue

The mysterious causes and devastating effects of a steel mill explosion are seen through the eyes of a defiant young widow."It's a straightforward enough story, but Nemeth tells it in a way that stunningly recapitulates the crazy-quilt patterns of memory. Creating a collage of time, sensation, inner thought and overt action, she twists the past and the present so that the intensity of pleasure, pain and loss becomes truly excruciating. And in the process, she reminds us of how ephemeral life is, and how crucially important each minute should be, though, of course, never can be." -Hedy Weiss, Sun-Times (Chicago)"MILL FIRE is a tense, brooding piece, a cross between a thriller, a social documentary and a requiem ... Nemeth's subject is pain, whose precise causes may never be known, and she draws its map like a cartographer of hell." -Hugo Williams, The Times (London)

Among the most imaginative works of the 20th century, Eric Overmyer's ON THE VERGE OR THE GEOGRAPHY OF LEARNING captivates with its abundant invention. Three Victorian lady travelers take it upon themselves to discover the mystery of things as they set out for Terra Incognita and discover the future."Cross the wordplay of S J Perelman with the world-in-a-time-warp vision of Caryl Churchill and you might approximate the special flavor of ON THE VERGE. In Eric Overmyer's chimerical new comedy, three Victorian lady explorers set out on an adventure that takes them to darkest Africa, highest Himalaya and Terra Incognita ... Blending Tom Stoppard's limber linguistics with the historic overview of a Thornton Wilder, Mr Overmyer takes his audience on a mirthful safari ... spinning into time travel. Three 'sister sojourners', each a prototypical Victorian lady explorer, equipped with dialog as pithy as their helmets, thwack their machetes through the wilderness while telling tales of past jaunts among the natives. As intrepid trekkers, they put the lie to any charge that they are representatives of a weaker sex. Mr Overmyer has written a play that is joyfully feminist. Heroines to their heart, the explorers can accommodate themselves to any emergency (natural or man-made), although they are momentarily disoriented as they approach modern times. In their kaleidoscopic adventure, they journey through a rain forest of hundreds of artifacts from the future - household utensils, mechanical contrivances and a side-view automobile mirror that reads 'Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.' How does one deal with such a chimera? ... In the play there is wit within the palaver. As one traveler says, 'I have seen the future and it is slang.' The author himself is an ecologist of language and a shrewd observer of our quest to control our environment - and the environment of others ... A frolicsome jaunt through a continuum of space, time, history, geography, feminism and fashion, Mr Overmyer's cavalcade is on the verge of becoming a thoroughly serendipitous journey." -Mel Gussow, The New York Times

Both a riff on lounge acts and a lounge act itself. Time Out calls the show, "Enveloping, sad and entirely hilarious, the most fun you'll ever have watching the American Dream disintegrate.""Annie and I saw DREAM EXPRESS last night. I absolutely LOVED the writing, I was blown away. To my ear it is simultaneously sublime and gritty. Both lyric and comic. Cynical and romantic. Dark and light. Annie too was enamored of the writing. 'This town is holding onto the planet by its teeth.' I have been repeating that one and am waiting patiently for a moment in life when I can use it (with attribution). I wish I could be there every night. What a f#%king killer piece of theater." -Paul Lazar, Big Dance Theater

A promising Ethiopian soccer star in Israel is courted by an American sports agent. The athlete is involved with another Ethiopian who risks being deported. Meanwhile, there is also a reckless, clandestine operation afoot to airlift one last group of Falasha Jews from Ethiopia to Israel."In 1996, Israel announced a blood shortage and urged its citizens to give generously. The Falasha-Ethiopian Jews who were new immigrants and eager to embrace their spiritual homeland-turned out in record numbers. A newspaper report later revealed that all of the Ethiopian blood had been discarded, untested, because of a fear of AIDS and other diseases. The Ethiopians were humiliated, and the Israeli government, thrust into damage control, recognized that the people rescued from oppression from Northeast Africa (through airlift operations nobly named 'Moses' and 'Solomon') were now facing discrimination in the very state meant to be a safe harbor for all Jews. Israel's complex relationship with the Falasha (which literally means 'stranger') provides the foundation for A JEW ON ETHIOPIA STREET, Allan Havis's new play." -Caroline Palmer, American Theater"A play about the fascinating story of Ethiopian Jews." -Max Sparber, Citypages

A fantastical "Kafkaesque" journey through time and space."TIME IN KAFKA is a playful, luminous trip ... Len Jenkins's 90-minute fantasy about a young scholar so in love with the work of Franz Kafka that he imagines the famous writer's spirit has appeared to tell him the whereabouts of a lost manuscript. What ensues is a poetic and often hilarious meditation on the mystical connection between writer and ardent - part dream reverie, part time travel and often mesmerizing theater ..." -Martha Heimberg, Turtle Creek News"TIME IN KAFKA is full of literary allusions, but it doesn't feel much like the work of its eponym, Franz Kafka. It's more like Thomas Mann on psychedelics." -Lawson Taitte, Dallas Morning News"'Time in Kafka is always broken. Every moment leads back to itself. Chronological and eternal.' The opening (and closing) lines for Len Jenkin's new play TIME IN KAFKA could not be more concise in their description of Kafka and the play itself, a fun romp ..." -Jennifer Smart, Pegasus News"... one surprise after another ... a vibrant celebration." -Christopher Soden, Arts & Culture Magazine

L J Freeman - beloved quarterback for the current Super Bowl champs, "American hero," husband to a beautiful woman, father to two young children - has made a really terrible, really stupid mistake. His senseless crime was caught on a security video which is now all over the media; his football career is over; his family is falling apart - and his nine-year-old has seen what her daddy did. With dark humor, WOOF examines the very raw, honest story of one man watching his world crumble around him and discerning what he must do to move forward."Playwright Y York is getting at something very interesting in WOOF, her bold drama ... In fact she's digging up a whole tangle of thorny reflections about race, celebrity, parent-child relationships, infidelity, the need to stop poisoning our planet and heaven knows what else. At times you think York has taken on too much, then somehow she makes a persuasive connection and the idea that seemed out of left field proves pertinent to her peculiarly gripping narrative. Yet even more than what York is saying it's how she says it that makes WOOF challenging and rewarding. She'll make one point obliquely so that it sneaks up on you, then land the next one smack on the nose ... the upshot is WOOF keeps surprising you ... keeps ringing true ..." -Everett Evans, Houston Chronicle"Y York's WOOF is one of those rare pieces of theater that scream brilliance, perfection, and soulfulness from beginning to end. WOOF in its purest essence is about relationships, particularly family relationships, under extreme pressure. It is about life. It is about love. It is about making mistakes. It is about forgiveness and redemption. It is funny. It is theater at its finest and most blindingly brilliant." -Buzz Bellmont, Houston Chronicle online

Subtitled "A History of Science (A Chronicle of Folly, Wisdom, and Madness)," PORT TWILIGHT has been described as "an end-times extraterrestrial vaudeville.""Len Jenkin's dark, whirling comedy, PORT TWILIGHT, follows several storylines as they trail throughout the fantasy city of the title. All of the stories involve what might be called decoding messages and 'alien contact.' ... thanks to Len Jenkin's language, PORT TWILIGHT makes for a haunting, mind-altering experience." -Jerome Weeks, Art & Seek"... PORT TWILIGHT is a distinctly playful and yet somber, introspective piece about the foibles and heartbreak of humanity, and its quest for solutions ... It is one of the most original shows I have ever seen. It combines insouciance, weariness, zeal, cynicism, comic relief, melancholy, the indecipherable into a poetically wistful and radiant experience." -Christopher Soden, Pegasus News"Len Jenkin's zippy, atmospheric dialogue. There's a beautiful lyrical quality to it." -Jonathan Pacheco, Slant Magazine

An elegy for the lost souls in the dying plains of Kansas, 1936, who clung to their blighted homesteads like bees to a poisoned hive."If a poem is a form of dense evocational shorthand, Sally Nemeth's HOLY DAYS is a stage poem. It is uncommonly affecting - an elegy for the lost souls in the dying plains of Kansas, 1936, who clung to their blighted homesteads like bees to the poisoned hive. Not as a matter of choice, but of inevitability. This is The Grapes of Wrath in reverse. There is not much plot. What there is, is simple and stirring ... It is not the action that counts, but the chiseled characters. Nemeth is a miniaturist. Is there a play in this? There is. Amazingly. A majestic and gripping one. There is beauty and wisdom in this little piece." -Sylvie Drake, Los Angeles Times"Set in Kansas during the Dust Bowl, this play tells the story of two farmer brothers and their wives struggling to make it through the drought and winds that hit the southern Great Plains during the 30's, blowing away as much withered hope as dried-out topsoil ... But the play is less about plot than quiet emotion and reflection ... the deep hope Dust Bowlers had to draw upon to carry on." -Monica Eng, Chicago Tribune"The power of this play derives partly from its unerring choice and arrangement of events. It begins, in the aftermath of devastation, focusing exclusively on how the characters cope with disaster, and presenting them in an initial state of shock, so that bits of basic exposition gradually come to light during the action, as they regain strength to face the facts. The whole gesture of the piece is to show the shattered group pulling themselves together and making survival plans; and, crucially, holding on to the ceremonies of everyday life." -Irving Wardle, The Times (London)

PURE SHOCK VALUE centers on the plight of three longtime Hollywood friend - Ethan Johnson, his brother, Tex, and Ethan's girlfriend, Gabby - who are trying their damndest to make a film called Barking Spiders. How low will they go to get the film made?"Think the Hollywood satire has been done to death? Think again. Playwright Matt Pelfrey sets the format's tired tropes of murderous Tinseltown greed among the most desperately delusional of wannabe edgy filmmakers and snarks them up with ever more outrageous sex, gore, movie jokes and violence ... SHOCK pulls off the rare feat of becoming funnier and more acute the more over-the-top it goes." -Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle"Matt Pelfrey's PURE SHOCK VALUE brilliantly updates the scathingly bleak Hollywood satire for a post-Tarantino generation of Silver Lake slackers." -Rob Avila, San Francisco Bay Guardian"You'll laugh, you'll feel terrible for laughing, and you'll laugh some more watching this Grand Guignol send-up of those trying to make it in Tinseltown." -Matt Sussman, San Francisco Flavorpill"Astonishingly witty dialogue and riotous situations." -Kevin Langson, EDGE SF"PURE SHOCK VALUE is a great black comedy." -Richard Connema, Talkin' Broadway

MINGUS TAKES (3) consists of three one-acts: SPEAKER'S HEAD, IF ONLY WE KNEW, and UPTOWN! It is dedicated to Charles Mingus Jr's ingeniousness, his humor and revolutionary spirit, and his great contribution to American classical music more commonly labeled jazz. In SPEAKER'S HEAD, a speaker introduces his concepts on America's "eminent world domain." In IF ONLY WE KNEW, An African immigrant in New York describes how he was shot by police. In UPTOWN!, a drunk tramp named Psyche strikes up a conversation with Opal on the bus. At first she's very wary of him. But gradually Psyche's penetrating insights begin both to unnerve and intrigue her."...there are only a very few dramatists who come immediately to mind when thinking about the major contemporary African American playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Aishah Rahman. Although she has not had the general name recognition of her contemporaries, Aishah Rahman has been widely celebrated for the craft, language, and vision of her plays. Her daring, innovative fusion of form and function has positioned her in the forefront of American women writing for the theater, and in the forefront of those playwrights who expand the limits, refuse the boundaries, and seek new territories in the formal and stylistic properties of drama as a genre and the theater as a medium." -Thadious M Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University

A tender, quirky play about two white women and a black man living in Seattle in 1992, as the nation and the media are transfixed by the trial of four Los Angeles police officers accused in the beating of Rodney King and the outcry of protest after the verdicts. "... [an] unassuming gem ... A comedy with serious implications, Y York's neatly crafted play explores the impact of preconception and miscommunication upon a Seattle Environmental Protection Agency office worker, her black colleague and her new neighbor, an East Coast visitor researching a book on 'hidden prejudice' in America. The action unfolds in 1992, with the media dominated by the trial of Los Angeles police officers for beating Rodney King and the subsequent riots after the 'not guilty' verdict. Yet while that is the backdrop, the play is so low-key it would be easy to overlook just how much it has to say and how well it says it. Though treating weighty issues, York doesn't clobber you with them, instead maintaining a light touch. While her theme may be familiar, she has found a fresh and individual approach to it. Best of all, by accurately capturing the quirks of human attitudes and interplay, York keeps the play consistently funny, unflaggingly true and, at times, surprisingly touching. The central factor in its success is a memorable protagonist: the unglamorous, opinionated and outspoken Haddie. She's the sort you'd instantly peg as a bit of an oddball, likely a loner: the type who blurts out opinions and random pronouncements; who offers unsolicited advice to strangers at the supermarket ('buy this one, not that'); and who conducts long, heartfelt conversations with a pet fish in a plastic bag. She has taken as her own (and parrots) many notions she heard on T V or read somewhere, without thinking them through. Naturally, a lot of these ideas have a touch of paranoia about the inevitable 'they' who make all the world's trouble. Haddie is eccentric, exasperating, yet so desperate to connect that she's strangely endearing. Despite its early-'90s setting, this astutely observed play's themes are absolutely relevant. York gets exactly the way many people view issues of race and class, how people adopt any overheard opinions that sound reasonable enough, how the 'big story' at any particular moment colors our everyday perceptions. AND L.A. IS BURNING makes you laugh, then leaves you with plenty to ponder and discuss." -Everett Evans, Houston Chronicle

An interrogation tale inspired loosely by the detention of Colombia's Patricia Lara in the mid-1980s. Two INS agents detain and try to break a Latin American journalist and a Brooklyn rabbi - both suspects believed to be involved with terrorist groups. The interrogations go very badly and the tables are turned against one of the INS agents."... To say that HOSPITALITY by Allan Havis betokens an auspicious beginning is an understatement of fairly large dimensions. Nearly everything about this production is first-rate. The script, an interrogation drama which brilliantly defeats the normally static two-characters-and-a-table configuration of the genre, not only is tough and taut, but gratifyingly witty and urbane ..." -Nels Nelson, Philadelphia Daily News"... a trenchant political drama that belies its innocuous title ... An exceptional script ..." -Hari., Variety

A grieving widower must accept his wife's death to save himself and his relationship with his daughter. David loves his wife, Gillian. Unfortunately, she died two years ago. David deals with his grief by continuing his romance with her "ghost" during walks on the beach at night. While David lives in the past, other family problems crop up in the present. Brother and sister-in-law Paul and Esther visit to try to help David's daughter, Rachel. She has lost her mother and needs her father to snap back into the real world for her sake."... Though TO GILLIAN begins as a simple dramatization of its hero's obsessive mourning, it gradually expands to become a richer form of family drama ... [Mr Brady] writes with a rueful sophistication that keeps his story's sentimentality at bay ... TO GILLIAN is peppered with sharp, evenhanded observations about the tenuous ties that connect husbands and wives and parents and children ... if TO GILLIAN is a play that sends a ghost flying out of [the] heavens, its appeal derives from its author's keen sensitivity to life down here on earth." -Frank Rich, The New York Times"This first major work by Michael Brady has well-dimensioned characters, solid conflict, piquant writing and gives off a warm, affirmative glow ... When it has become not uncommon to encounter plays with no sympathetic characters, audiences will respond affectionately to everyone In GILLIAN. Working on a small canvas, the author is in impressive control of his material ..." -Richard Hummler, Variety

UNFINISHED WOMEN deals with the events in a home for unwed mothers on the last day of jazz musician Charlie Parker's life, March 12, 1955. The play digs beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teenage mothers."UNFINISHED WOMEN is an underground classic. It reaches beyond statistics and sociological theories to find the unarticulated, half-understood longings of teen-age mothers ... The title implies the central conceit of the play: the juxtaposition of the Hide-A-Wee Home for Unwed Mothers (the unfinished women) and Pasha's boudoir, where Charlie Parker (the 'Bird'), the brilliant black saxophonist of years past, spent his last days. Many types of girls find themselves in this home: the child of middle-class upbringing who got 'caught'; the innocent who was raped; the savvy, street-smart girl who let the music make love to her, as well as the strict nurse who turned her illegitimate child into a 'niece.' Charlie Chan, that stereotype of Oriental inscrutability, presides over all, a comment on the power of images in our society. The play focuses on that moment when the girls must decide whether to keep their babies or to give them up for adoption. Despite their fantasies of rescue by 'caring' young fathers, they must decide alone. Meanwhile, Bird slowly dies in the plush boudoir of his longtime mistress, trapped in a narcotic fog and the lost dreams of his exploited talent." -From Margaret B Wilkerson's introduction to the play in 9 Plays by Black Women

Loosely based on a Grimm fairy tale, THE HANDLESS MAIDEN weaves together three stories, that of a miller and his wife who have fallen on hard times and whose story includes devils, wizards, and cross-country treks; that of an ambitious New York lawyer who decides to give it all up and travel to Seattle to see Bill Gates' mansion, her magic castle; and that of a man who is about to be married in Seattle but decides he must first see an old lover. Their stories ultimately converge in an enchanted diner."Jeremy Dobrish's delightful new comedy combines a Grimm's fairy tale with two contemporary stories, which being with a man planning his own wedding and a woman who is made a partner in her law firm before her husband is. Eight actors in dual roles segue easily from comedy to seriousness, from farce to realism and the piece brims with goofy charm. Three cheers for all involved ..." -The New Yorker"... crafty intermingling of folklore, musical comedy and soap opera ... another lighter-than-air vehicle on which to float an evening of stylish daffiness. Adobe productions resist categorization; THE HANDLESS MAIDEN can count among its inspirations the work of Stephen Sondheim, Rod Serling, Sid Caesar, Walt Disney and even Agnes Nixon." -Peter Marks, The New York Times

An urban family of three is faced with a medical crisis upon a second financial crisis. Structured as a memory play, this story for four actors highlights the surfacing identify of a young man caught between filial loyalty and freedom. As the mother attends to both men, a domineering father is in free fall."One young man's experience of grief and loss. A fraught father-son relationship, a tight mother-son bond. Nathan is lost and confused, trying to revisit and understand himself and the last twelve months of his life. His mother was erroneously diagnosed with cervical cancer. Heartache Number One. Then his successful, entrepreneurial father, being hounded by the I R S, is in peril of imprisonment. During the traumatic process, Dad suffers a life-threatening heart attack and later, a stroke. Nathan's safe, self-involved little world - his parents at a geographical distance, his girlfriend kept at an emotional distance, his academic life far away from the family business - spirals out of control. He has to be forced to remember, look back, process the whole series of events, by an other-worldly muse of memory ... There's a poetic and ethereal quality ... There's a deep and moving family story here, a parable for our times. As a new work, it shows considerable potential." -Pat Launer, San Diego News Network

Subtitled "a light and dark skin comedy," CHIAROSCURO is set on a cruise ship peopled by black singles where "pretty" means light-skinned, and all the men are dark, and Papa Legba, the African trickster spirit, is disguised as a ship steward."... there are only a very few dramatists who come immediately to mind when thinking about the major contemporary African American playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Ntozake Shange, and Aishah Rahman. Although she has not had the general name recognition of her contemporaries, Aishah Rahman has been widely celebrated for the craft, language, and vision of her plays. Her daring, innovative fusion of form and function has positioned her in the forefront of American women writing for the theater, and in the forefront of those playwrights who expand the limits, refuse the boundaries, and seek new territories in the formal and stylistic properties of drama as a genre and the theater as a medium." -Thadious M Davis, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University

A kinky, deranged comedy built on the sale of a vintage Ford Mustang and an unidentified body in the car. Two women meet and against their better judgment cross the border into Mexico for an unusual resort weekend. "Allan Havis, who co-directs the playwriting program at U C S D, earned his reputation for mordant wit and chilling dramatic climaxes everywhere but San Diego. Now, finally, one of his weird dramas has opened here - the creepy and highly entertaining PRIVATE PARTIES ... Billed as a Thelma and Louise kind of show, it is that, but with layers and a jaunty, laid-back So-Cal tome that'll curl your painted toenails ... the fun and provocation of this 80-minute two-hander. The gals live and breathe in the writing ... You may not want to know them better, but you come away feeling that however fantastical their trip, they're the real thing." -Anne Marie Welsh, The San Diego Union-Tribune

A golf magazine is the setting for David Wiltse's farce on the intrigues of the office. "The editorial office of a golf magazine seems an unlikely place for a comedic farce. But it makes perfect sense in the context of SCRAMBLE! By David Wiltse ... Actually, SCRAMBLE!, isn't about golf at all; it's about a very typical small office and the Byzantine romantic intrigues that go on there. The fact that this office houses a golf magazine is merely secondary to the struggles over sex and power that are the real focus of the staff's interest. The play's title, SCRAMBLE!, does owe a nod to a variation of the game of golf by that name. In the basic game of Scramble, each member of a four-person team tees off on a hole, then the best of their tee shots is selected and all players play their second shots from the location of that best tee shot, continuing on until the ball is holed. There are numerous variations on the theme, such as Texas Scramble, Florida Scramble, Reverse Scramble, and so on; there is even an organization called Scramble Golf America that organizes Scramble golf tournaments. Wiltse's play is a lot like the game, in that nobody knows quite who's on top and who's doing what to whom from one moment to the next. The plot is almost secondary to the jokes and silliness that result ... Wiltse is one of today's most versatile playwrights, but although he refuses to be limited to one genre, he is consistent when it comes to creating memorable characters. The split-second exits and entrances, the double entendres and the mistaken identities are all delivered in classic farcical style, but the characters are the ingredients that make SCRAMBLE so much fun to watch. The six players in SCRAMBLE all inhabit the too-close-for-comfort headquarters of a golf journal that is reportedly about to be sold, making all the employees extremely nervous about the future of their jobs. But even with unemployment looming, that doesn't stop the three men and three women from trying out several variations on the theme of interoffice love (or, as some would call it, workplace sexual harassment). There's sexy Temple, who doesn't know much about golf but definitely wants to get ahead in the publishing world, no matter how she has to do it. There's Jane, a high-strung copywriter with kooky layers of mismatched clothing and the unfortunate habit of talking so fast that only her true friends can understand what she's saying. There's Carter, who is a bit too comfortable in his job, considering how hard he works at it. On the management level are Sam, an editor with the instincts of a dominatrix, and Otis, the only member of the staff who seems to actually play golf. Finally, there's Johnson, a tongue-tied newcomer and Man of Mystery. Is he a genius? A poor nebbish? A spy dispatched by the new owners to report on the antics of the staff and decides who should stay or go? When these six characters collide, anything can happen. Wiltse has shown once again that he can master any stage genre ... There are plenty of quick sight gags, sound effect jokes and pratfalls going on here, in addition to all of Wiltse's clever wordplay ..." -Jackie Lupo, Scarsdale Inquirer

Four middle-school girls, played by adults, remind us of what it meant to be eleven years old and how adulthood is perhaps less removed from the needs and desires of childhood than we may wish to acknowledge or admit. "Why would adults go to see a play about eleven-year-olds? Possibly because none of us ever really stop being eleven. Y York's new drama, BLEACHERS IN THE SUN, holds a mirror up to grown-ups to darkly illuminate the world of modern adolescent girls, which is just like ours, only amplified. Love, betrayal, sexuality, addiction - all the virtue and vices of humanity are present here - distorted through the eyes of the youth to become something at once monstrous and beautiful. The premise is deceptively simple: four middle-school girls meet behind the bleachers to engage in the secretive business of growing up. One is fat; one is smart; one is rich; one is poor. All are confused and lonely. BLEACHERS is a version of ourselves we had hoped to leave behind on the playground as maturity and experience taught us to hide behind masks of civility and social custom. Eleven-year-olds, however, hover on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, occupying a brief and rare space in which their personalities are completely developed but they are not yet expected to behave as adults ... It is both funny and frightening ... Put simply, BLEACHERS IN THE SUN is a fantastic play." -Rachel Brown, Honolulu Weekly

In a house poised between land and sea, a husband and wife, both academics, are facing personal and professional crises when a mysterious young woman enters their lives. Many secrets from past and present burst open as the husband's life begins to unravel and as his wife seems more and more under the illusion that he is her onetime hero, Charles Lindbergh. A witty, imaginative and perceptive play about marriage, family, betrayal, redemption, and the forces that try to pull a couple down as they struggle to rise above them. "Compelling! ... High art ... a play about life's seemingly neurotic nuances that challenges the viewer to admit that we all have to fool ourselves sometimes in order to deal with life." -John de la Parra, Red Bank.com

The perfect rent-controlled New York City apartment has one fatal flaw - the roommate from hell. The play takes place on the day the newest roommate can't take it anymore. Classic humor of mistaken identity mixed with new-age twists. THE WALL OF WATER is farce with all the sharp edges showing - it is an intractably woven tale that tackles subjects as serious as death and as important as scientific inquiry, and everything in between. A farce about the nature of madness, the way it is infectious, how we treat it and how we decided who is and who isn't. A play with four leading roles for young women about strong women and the men who love and sometimes sedate them. "... THE WALL OF WATER quickly bursts through the dam of conventional theater for two hours of the kind of inspired and breathtaking chaos so rare on America's stages that we may have forgotten the word for it. The word is farce ... Even though Sherry Kramer's play is gleefully packed with all those most cherished elements of classic farce - mistaken identity, miscommunicated messages, misunderstood orders - the exasperations which fuel the play's wacky fires from start to finish are recognizably - and sometimes grimly - contemporary ... What distinguishes Kramer's farce from even her most esteemed European counterparts is four strong female roles at the heart of this eloquent craziness ..." -Margaret Spillane, New Haven Independent

"FATHERS AND SONS contains many pungent exchanges, and a meaningful subject: the estrangement of fathers and sons through several generations of African-American men and how it might be healed. The omnipresent phantom Benard Goodwater is the bad daddy incarnate-a trumpet-toting, be-bopping ne'er-do-well, who serves as a jive Greek chorus. He was clearly a lousy father to his haunted son Leon. And Leon returned the disfavor to his own offspring Marcus, by becoming a coke-sniffing, child-neglecting womanizer himself. In FATHERS AND SONS, the two living relations, and the ghostly one, confront one another during a family crisis… Bradford's dialogue can sizzle and sting, and he exhibits a real flair for sexy romantic banter. That gift is exploited in the more intimate, sensuous scenes… Clearly, the playwright wants to explore how a man like Marcus can overcome a legacy of parental neglect and misogyny to forge a committed marriage-and maybe even a reconciliation with his father." Misha Berson, Seattle Times