Dances of Life – and Death is adapted from Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. Poe wrote the Masque as a sort of horror story and it is written entirely in the third person as told by a narrator, no background and no dialogue. The play frames the story as a morality play, set in the time of the Plagues and the Renaissance. Though set in the past it is, also, about the present. Camus, in his great novel La Peste, wrote about a fictional plague in Oran in the 1940’s. He used “plague” as a metaphor for War, and life in occupied France during WW II. Similarly, the plague here is a metaphor for life in Syria, Iraq, Columbia, Guatemala, Nigeria and Somalia, etc. leading desperate refugees to flee from violence and war. But the reaction of those in safer countries is to withdraw, close their borders and shut their eyes, to keep out the “plague” of feared death and disorder. But such human afflictions can never be enduringly locked out.
 
This play is an allegory and a morality tale, not a fairy tale, nor is it somehow a commedia dell’arte rendering of stock characters derisively satirized.
 
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“Best Original Play”
NY Theater Festival  2015
 
“While your work did not advance to the next round, we wanted to let you know that our readers expressed great admiration for Dances of Life – and Death. Thank you for sharing such quality work with us.”
Eugene O’Neill Theater Center 2016

Searching for a long lost sense of family, a Mathematical Lecturer at Oxford and his friend, take 3 daughters of his Dean on an outing on the Thames and uses storytelling to recreate the family that he lost.

An unproduced play about an aging king and his inability to control his beloved sons, resulting in one son avenging a wrong against his sister by killing his half brother.  After a difficult and unsatisfactory reunion with his Father he eventually schemes to displace his Father as king and ruler. This play is written in verse and uses the language of the King James version of the bible to tell the Biblical story in dramatic form.