Plays
two headed calf
June is doomed. She’s been called away from her life at the University to run her family’s failing farm only to find herself tormented by her Mother’s ghost. And just as her Mother has prophesized, everything around June dies. But then, a two headed calf is miraculously born, which could spell unexpected wealth for the farm. Now June faces an impossible decision – should she nurture or end the legacy she’s inherited?
Stargazers
A grieving mother contemplates selling her Kansas farm — guided, she says, by the ghost of her daughter. While her ex-husband and neighbors fight to keep the land, an East Coast developer hopes to build a progressive utopia that would alter the landscape forever. Stargazers is a play about land — land that hosts campfires and funeral pyres, pasture parties and picnic tables, ABBA and boxed wine, and skeletons buried in the corral. But most of all, it’s a nocturne about the women who love a place even when it has no place for them.
Tent Revival
Rural Kansas, 1957. A farmer-turned-preacher searches for inspiration, his wife for hope, and their daughter for a sense of stability. When a seeming miracle turns their makeshift church on its head, young Ida follows her parents across the state as they spread the word of their newfound convictions. But when the miracles begin to multiply, and the demand for spiritual healing grows faster than anyone expected, Ida must confront the cost of deeds done to inspire faith.
Every Anne Frank
For Majkin, a white public school teacher, the lessons of The Diary of Anne Frank feel impossible to instill within her students who seem to disrupt her teaching at every turn. For Destiny, an eighth grader whose office referrals are quickly accruing, those lessons are already manifest in the daily struggle of being a Latina student in the middle of Kansas. For Mrs. B, being a principal means being pressured to adopt the rigid and punitive systems of punishment of her male counterparts. Every Anne Frank is an exploration of how history, betrayal, and power repeat themselves unrelentingly — even in the most mundane corners of everyday American life.
Skinflint
Once upon a time, in a land destroyed by unfettered capitalism, rugged individualism, and toxic masculinity, where a person’s worth is literally a person’s worth, a narrator tells the tale of a bear of a man, felled by the forces he himself has promoted. Lovers scrounge for post-coital sustenance, neglected girls hunt for a prize to justify their care, and a son challenges his father for his life’s savings. Skinflint is a nihilistic fairy tale about surviving a world that values a person only for the coins in her pocket and the meat on her bones.
Dog Pack Play
A feral pack of dogs stalk a small town in rural Kansas, driving the townspeople to construct a wall to fortify themselves. After a young boy has been attacked and killed, the residents are on high alert, neglecting the imminent dangers being posed by their neighbors and friends inside the wall. The Dog Pack Play is about how our terror consumes and morphs us into our greatest fears. Oh, and it’s a comedy.
Quickmatch
It’s the Fourth of July and Amber, manufacturer and marketer of illegal fireworks, can’t catch a break. Handcuffed to a tree downtown, she becomes witness to a man, mind crumbling from opioids and religious delusions, convince his wife they must leave this town before he sets fire to it all. As the town burns, Amber must face her own complicity in the disaster.
The Quonsets
Quonset huts — cheap, prefabricated, circular sheds — are a common sight on farms in Nebraska or Kansas. In one, you might find seed bags, a post-hole digger, or bailing twine. You might also find a pair of teenage siblings grappling with a visitor’s assumptions, or a woman confronting her husband about mishandled money in the wake of a drought. This duet of intertwined plays, co-written with playwright Alex Lubischer, invites you to huddle close, rather than merely fly over.
