Glamorgan And Other Plays

Silent film starlet Mary Margaret is alone in her Hollywood bungalow, about to kill herself. A former Shakespearean stage actor, now a drunken silent movie leading man with a bad reputation, calls on her and tries to convince her to face life. In the course of their hilarious conflict, images of the actor's past emerge. His efforts to help Mary Margaret live force him to deal with his own demons and find a way to cope with the terrible secret that eats away at him like the cannibal Laestrygonians in Homer's Odyssey. Funny and rich in character and language, this powerful and unusual love story, part of the Pendragon series of plays, is rich with great audition monologues and scenes. Don Nigro's followers will recognize some of the characters from Chronicles, Anima Mundi, Beast with Two Backs, Autumn Leaves and Dramatis Personae--all plays from his series Pendragon Plays

In Greenwich Village in the late 1920s Al, an artist, moves into a rooming house on Macdougal Street and finds himself being pulled deeper and deeper into the lives of its inhabitants. Above him live Mary Margaret, a lost actress from Ohio, and her philandering poet boyfriend, Jem. Al meets Mary Margaret when she comes home drunk one night and blunders into his bed. He falls in love with her. The landlord, McLish, keeps bursting into Al's room to help him with his romance. McLish, a failed writer, has his own troubles: a beautiful but compulsively disloyal wife. And somebody keeps playing "The Saint James Infirmary Blues." Al's attempt to rescue Mary Margaret is the core of this richly atmospheric love story which vividly recreates the world of artists and writers in this era. (Mary Margaret also appears in his Anima Mundi and Laestrygonians.) In Pendragon Plays.

In the autumn of 1980, Aunt Liz is trapped in a nursing home in the hilly agricultural country of east Ohio while her niece Becky and Becky's revolting husband try to steal and destroy her farm. Her life is further complicated by a harried but sympathetic young nurse, her nomadic nephew, a bewildered friend, and her sisters cranky Molly and Dorothy, a deaf mute piano player. Memories of her beautiful and long dead Jessie also intrude, as well as her outrageous fellow inmate, Mr. Kafka, who tries to teach her about muskrat traps and immortality. This funny and moving play was first produced with great success at Capital Rep in Albany; it has particularly rich roles for a mature cast. November is part of the author's cycle of Pendragon Plays; fans will recognize some of the characters from other plays in the series.

Jane Lamb, an orphan, finds a home at Mrs. Turley's Bunch of Grapes Inn in Boston during the Revolution. The colorful, eccentric and dangerous regulars she encounters there include a demonic roustabout who is a patriot, a traitor or a bit of both; Ophelia, a mad girl who talks to mice, and the Oyster Man, a street vendor obsessed with the Boston Massacre where he received a wound that has scrambled his brains to an alarming degree. Jane learns a vivid lesson about the dark underside of patriotic mythology in this nightmarish world of murder, secrets, betrayal and lunacy. This savagely funny, robust and haunting play is part of the author's series Pendragon Plays.

A geographical history of cricket in England and Wales in a global context.