 Home
for the Holocaust is a full-length a black comedy about a
dysfunctional suburban family and a mysterious terrorism investigation
and plot. Brief synopsis: story revolves around MARIE, an elderly
suburban grandmother going a bit wacky in her loneliness and desperate
Catholicism, facing off with her two grown sons, one, MILO, who
is just returning from the desert where he eked out a living as
a minister of a strange church, and the other, TIM, who stayed
at home and is a successful politician and council member, and
now thinks that his mother should enter a retirement home. MARIE’S
husband, a government scientist, died years before. The brothers
fight with each other about ideology, the mother fights with them
about abandoning her. MARIE’S plight is further complicated
by the light-hearted wooing of her Jewish next-door neighbor,
STAN. Enter two mysterious G-PEOPLE who say they are with Homeland
Security, which is investigating MILO on suspicious agricultural
equipment purchases and general radicalness --but they've got
the wrong man.
Download
scene one of Home for the Holocaust.
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 The
Third Walking Gentleman
A play in two acts
Nine scenes, 9 roles (3 women, 6 men) Synopsis:The Third Walking
Gentleman takes place on April 15, 1865, in the dressing
rooms and backstage of Ford’s Theatre in Washington City,
and in the Greenback Saloon next door to the theatre. That evening,
John Wilkes Booth walked into the dress box of Ford’s Theatre
and shot Abraham Lincoln point-blank in the back of the head.
But that afternoon found the Ford’s Theatre actors in the
middle of rehearsals for their hit comedy, “Our American
Cousin.” Likewise, employees of the Greenback Saloon next
door were just going about their jobs. Almost everyone in the
capitol city was cautiously celebrating the end of the brutal
Civil War, as Lee had just surrendered the Confederate forces
the previous week.
The play extends a wealth of historical facts into possible fictions:
History may have been about to take place offstage, but in the
meantime, on stage and in front of our eyes, a host of characters
go on with their daily lives – desiring, dreaming, struggling,
despairing– not knowing they were in the shadows of a momentous
event. Harry Hawks, the company’s leading man, is suspicious
that Booth is involved romantically with Hawks' fiancee, May Hart,
who also appears in the play. (She is in fact concealing a short-lived
romantic affair with Booth.) As the play builds, Hawk’s
desperation grows until he decides to challenge Booth to a duel.
“Our American Cousin” is seen in rehearsal in the
early scenes – and in The Third Walking Gentleman’s
penultimate moment, the audience sees the infamous second scene
of the third act unfolding behind a scrim at the back of the stage,
as Hawk has a chance (and all the wrong reasons) to stop Booth
from killing the President for all the wrong reasons.
What if something different had happened that afternoon? What
if out of all the possible confluence of events, someone had decided
to put an end to John Wilkes Booth’s life? Peanuts Burroughs,
the young man who infamously held the reins of Booth’s horse
while Booth went in and shot the President, has been encouraged
by Booth in his dreams to become an actor. Throughout the play
Peanuts rehearses the same three lines that Booth has given him
to practice from Shakespeare’s Richard III, beginning “Tut,
tut, my lord, we do not stand to prate.”
Peanuts dreams of becoming a “third walking gentleman,”
jargon of the day for an extra in a theatrical production, but
in his conversations with other characters that day, he discovers
that many others have been instructed in parts in the same play,
a reflection of the shifting loyalties and complicity Booth cultivated
in his friends and acquaintances in his months-long conspiracy
to kidnap and kill the President, and more importantly, a reflection
of Booth’s own mania and madness in identifying with the
murderous, crippled King Richard III.
Download
the first two scenes of The Third Walking Gentleman.
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