THE STORIES: Wandering. First presented at the Mark Taper Forum, in Los Angeles, as part of an omnibus program entitled
The Scene, and then Off-Broadway as part of
Collision Course, a similar program. This brilliantly inventive short play covers the span of a man's life in a matter of minutes. Striking harmonics of uncanny depth and pertinence through its rapid fire dialogue, the play not only constructs the outline of a human existence but also catches and illuminates the essentials of all that is or can be. (2 men, 1 woman.)
The Sand Castle. Initially presented at Off-Off-Broadway's Cafe La Mama, this vivid and affecting study of the sometimes disturbing, sometimes funny crises that lie between youth and adulthood was also produced with great success on the National Educational Television (NET) Network. The scene is a ramshackle beach house on the California coast, where Irene, a widow and poet and college teacher, is summering with her children and the friends who make their place a second home. Owen, her older son, and Joan, her daughter, are college students—old enough to feel the need to strike out on their own and yet still young enough to be vulnerable to the hurts that can result. Owen has conceived a hopeless passion for the pregnant wife of Calvin, a graduate student; while Joan is drawn to Clint, her mother's gentleman friend. As the play moves ahead gently in the summer twilight passions erupt, and sadness, joy and the pains of growing up are made real—as are the strength and wisdom of a loving mother who has learned the need for patience, forbearance and an understanding heart. (3 men, 3 women, 1 boy.)
Stoop. This brief play was initially presented on New York's Channel 13 (Educational Television) as part of a special program on pollution and conservation entitled
Foul! Both touching and disturbing, it centers on three aging ladies sitting on the stoop of a run-down city brownstone, commenting quietly on the inexorable disintegration of the quality, and possibility, of life. Their mood is resigned—but terrifying as well—as they accept the ebbing away of freshness and beauty and the element of hopefulness that was once so easily taken for granted. (3 women.).
Sextet (YES): Commissioned by the Los Angeles Center Theatre Group (Mark Taper Forum). Written in a striking contrapuntal form, this imaginative and haunting short play is compromised of the thoughts and recollections of six characters, who sit at random, answering each other's revelations with a quiet "yes." Out of the pattern of their memories, the interweaving of their destinies, emerges a sense of their frailty, and humanity, and the disquieting vulnerability of life itself. (3 men, 3 women.).
