Five Tellers Dancing In The Rain

A hilarious and moving story of one girl’s fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal phrase containing all the letters of the alphabet, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is "a love letter to alphabetarians and logomaniacs everywhere" (Myla Goldberg, bestselling author of Bee Season).

The story of friendship between two women in their sixties is played out over the course of ten years, each year representing another reunion for Beverly Duggins and Addie Spools, two participants in a series of annual "tableaux" sponsored by the Museum of Dix, in a small city in the South. Within human diorama settings as simple as a frontier cabin porch or the cow stall of a local dairy barn, and as elaborate as the "Spit and Curl" beauty salon (circa 1930) and the front seat of Thelma and Louise's plummeting convertible, Beverly, the lonely urban professional, and Addie, the down-home pharmacist's assistant, chart the course of each other's lives, while fending off incursions from the officiously bothersome fellow-poser Maureen. Through the ten scenes which comprise the play, the two women are forced to endure the constant in terruptions of the museum "promenaders" who "ooh" and "ah" at the lifelike presentations, offering up their comical comments, both kind and cruel. Though they see one another only one weekend a year, and in spite of their very different backgrounds, Beverly and Addie nurture a growing and abiding friendship. In the end, it becomes the strongest and most sustaining friendship of their lives.

An extra-terrestrial "invasion" of the suburban, middle-class community of Susqua Creek Acres, Pennsylvania places its human residents and visitors under sudden house-bound quarantine. Secrets get revealed, conflicts erupt and recede, long festering wounds are dressed, and friendships and relationships terminated or reinstated. Offering the rare opportunity for large ensemble casting, A Delightful Quarantine presents audiences with the interwoven stories of a mother reunited with the daughter she gave up for adoption thirty-two years earlier; a man with a secret that upends his marriage; a woman with fourteen cats, all invisible; a foiled house burglary that must wait three days for the police; a rekindled high school romance; two young couture-obsessed little girls "home alone" for the duration; and a brother who cannot honor his sick sister's greatest wish.

Dramatic Comedy / 9m, 8f (cross casting and double casting possible) Inspired by Pygmalion, Shaw's classic drawing room tale of language and class division, and its musical incarnation, My Fair Lady, the play tells the story of one Eliza Doolittle-the daughter of a hardscrabble Mississippi pig farmer-who sells homemade pork rinds at the Tri-Counties Fair and Livestock Show, and dreams of someday working as a waitress at "one of those nice downtown barbecue restaurants where all the tourists go.

"Before there was Truman, there was Frank! Frank is the star of his own soap opera. Frank's Life. Unfortunately for poor Frank, he doesn't know it. Nor does he realize that his wife, his mother, his sister and best friend, indeed everyone he has met since the age of 3 are actors. But the elaborate deception can't last much longer: ratings have dropped, revenues are down--even the network itself is in trouble. As cast members are asked to take pay cuts, they begin to leave the show--killing themselves off in unseemly soap-opera ways. Frank's gnawing feeling that something about his life just "doesn't seem right" grows to near paranoia before he makes the painful discovery that he's been duped by everyone he cares for. Then there's the little matter of "what to do with Frank." A darkly funny allegory about an everyman honest, good and true--who learns that he has lost title of his very life--and his final showdown with corporate powers to win back that life and stake out his own spot in a world without artifice. And in the end, as Frank reclaims his humanity, the actors who surround him discover theirs as well."--Publisher's website