1980's

Intro	60's	70's	80's-Now

      Doc and the Widow (cast of 4) is a play my mother asked me to write. Doc Maynard was married to my great great grandfather's sister.  My mother had  copy of Doc Maynard's diary of has covered wagon trip to the Northwest.  I was able to get a production at the Museum of History  and Industry (in Seattle) in 1982.  Phil Lucas, a respected Native American actor and film maker, played Chief Seattle and because of his involvement many prominent Northwest Indians, including Vi Hilbert and Bernie Whitebear, attended.  We also had a panel of historians discuss the play and early Seattle History.  Ron Hilbert did a drawing for the program.  Among those on the panel were Murray Morgan and Bill Speidel both of whom wrote books on Maynard.  Doc Maynard founded Seattle and named it after his friend Chief Sealth (pronounced See-akkk in Lushootsie).  The agreement among the panel was that Chief Seattle famous speech was great frontier literature but not what the Suquamish Chief said on the dock in Seattle in 1851.   The play had a successful reading at Reader's Theater in 2003.

      The Rebellious Horse (cast of 3) was a play I wrote about Ethan Allen, founder of Vermont and leader of the Green Mountain Boys.  I went to Vermont to research the play and visited Fort Ticonderoga. The play has had several public readings.  Ethan Allen wrote in his book REASON THE ONLY ORACLE OF MAN: .."we have  positive existence, we can not ultimately fail, of being better than not to have been."  I agree with him.

      I moved back to Seattle from California with my family in 1981 and was living near where I had spent the first fifteen years of my life.  I'd been gone thirty years but realized Seattle was where my character was formed.  I went 7 summers to Camp Orkila and was in the Boy Scouts and went to Camp Parsons.  The Neptune Theater where I had seen so many Westerns was still showing movies.  My old grammar school, University Heights, was the same but had been made into a community center.

    My first contemporary Seattle play and my first play directed by Bruce McLean was, Woman on the Bridge (1983) and in time, it became a musical.  A couple of musicians: Ralph Buckley and Jill Harden, contributed songs. A woman running from a born again Christian community becomes involved with a punk rocker who isn't much help.  He doesn't try to stop her from jumping off the Aurora Bridge but she lands in the water and lives.  He is impressed that she did it.

      My next play was a one act that is fairly long called Sable Colored Eyebrows which Bruce McLean acted in.  He worked with me, usually as a director, on ten plays that were performed at John Kazanjian's New City Theater Director's Festivals in the '80's and early '90's.  We moved many of the plays to other venues after the festival run.  A few of these plays were developed into longer pieces.

      Sable Colored Eyebrows is about an old man with a catheter who is over medicated by his grand daughter who hates taking care of him.  A substitute homecare worker comes in on a Saturday night so the grand daughter can go out.  The old man has managed to not take his pills.  He raises hell and the worker manages to effect a reconciliation between him and his grand daughter when she comes home.  Then he dies.

      I collaborated with Michael Roger Smith, a quadriplegic, on Xerxes's Reward ( 1985). The play has a cast of 4 and is about a woman who keeps falling in love with supermen.  Her best friend is disabled and in a power chair. Michael was interested in a book called The Goddess in Every Woman and had fun using the archetypes in the book to describe someone trying to become a new woman.

      Chris Mathews worked with Bruce and me along with the late Rae Ann Hodder- Kukka on Undefined Relationship, cast of 5, about a homecare supervisor who takes a special interest in a woman who refuses to go to a nursing home.

      I wrote a large cast play called Old Flame in the Boiler Room .  At one time it had a cast of over 30.  The play recreates a phone sales boiler room where they're selling rodeo tickets as  fund raiser for a mounted patrol.  Two phone sales bosses (one a cocaine addict) vie for the same woman,  The play had many successful readings including one at Reader's Theater in 2007.

      I later wrote the same play with just 3 characters and called it Seagull on the Mast.  That version was produced for the New City Director's Festival and then had a 3 week run at The Rendezvous on 2nd Ave.  I like the big cast version better.  I like to create a community of people in a play.

    An Occasional Impala  was developed in Doric Wilson's playwright's workshop.  Each week I'd bring in a short scene which actors would read.  Eventually I managed to tell the story using  a single set.  A Mercer Island woman in an unhappy marriage gets involved with people who come to her door or with whom she has casual contact.  She end up leaving her husband to go live with an artist who she meet when he's working as a parking lot attendant.  At the end of the play she tells him: "I've always carried around in me a world that's better than the one I live in.  There isn't room for it in this big house on Mercer Island but there is in your studio apartment in Belltown."

      Tim Mooney produced the play in 1993 at Second Stage in Waukeegan, Illinois.

      In 1994 Roi-Martin Brown  directed Kubla Can't (1994) first at the New City Theater festival then at the Seattle Fringe Theater Festival.  With  cast of 9, the play is about some women on a llama pack trip who make  surprize visit to some men who are running a dredge on a mining claim on the American River.     In 1995 Roi-Martin directed The Safe Sex Party (1993) in both festivals.  With a cast of 8 the play is set at an espresso stand outside a social service agency the morning after a safe sex party.

      Christmas Brotherhood (1994)is the story of a lesbian who's partner does it with her brother to get pregnant with the idea the baby will have the family genes.  However she falls in love with the father of her baby.  The play was done at The Seattle Fringe Theater Festival.

      Riding the Lettuce  has a cast of five and is about three women bureaucrats running  homecare agency.  They try to get rid of a rule breaking male supervisor they don't like.

      Desire Under the Pines  cast of 5, set in the Sierras of California, was directed by Heather Newman for the Seattle Fringe Theater Festival.  A bi-polar teacher goes off her medicine and  large gray pine falls over on a weekend that she and her friend are having a yard sale.  Truths are revealed about things that happened many years before.

      In 2003 an actor and mountain climber who sometimes trained women boxers, suggested I write a play about women boxing.  The Woman Who was Like Steve McQueen (2007) was given a workshop production at The Odd Duck on Capitol Hill (Seattle) in the summer of 2007.  Roi-Martin Brown directed.

      With the help of my son Jack I've created this website and am making  organized effort to send my plays out and get productions.

      I'm also thinking about a new play set in a hotel.

ONE ACTS/SKIT/NARRATIVES/OTHER WRITING

Over the years I have written skits, and short plays whenever the opportunity occurred.  I had many one-act plays produced.

Sable Colored Eyebrows is one.  Tomb of Beercans is an army play.  Of the many plays I wrote for the New City Festivals are: Sitting Ducks, The Top Two, and  Anxiety in Society. In the late 90's and early part of the new century I wrote: Dopers Lament's, Mrs. Alenduff's Party,  Johnny the Shark and Farewell to a Soldier.

      My one, kind of interesting, novel is Dead Cow Valley  set on The San Juan Ridge in Gary Snyder's domain and I have a contemporary western screenplay called: Slade Ruled Supreme.  My best personal narrative, fictionalized, is The Vatos Sit Over Here.

So this is the end of this narrative, biography, list of titles and self promotion.