I am very happy to say I had a great time the other day attending a staged reading of my play “Shadows of Men.” The reading was arranged by the Baltimore Playwrights Festival and directed by veteran director Barry Feinstein. Barry did a wonderful job selecting his cast and preparing the actors for the reading. I received excellent, useful feedback from the reading and am commencing the re-write process tomorrow!

The reading was held at the wonderful Fells Point Corner Theatre in the Fells Point section of Baltimore. I enjoyed absorbing the theatrical surroundings and also walking around the Fells Point neighborhood.

Many thanks to Miriam Bazenksy, festival producer, and the other sponsors of the festival!

Check out this press release here!

Check out my play “Shadows of Men” in Baltimore!!

“Shadows of Men” will receive its first staged reading at Fells Point Corner Theatre on March 26, 2016!

You can find more information about the play and also the Baltimore Playwrights Festival here.

Today, I also received the comments written about the play by the readers who recommended it for the festival. One reader summed up the play as an “outstanding fleshing out of history” focused on  “studying ideas versus human life” and also commented on the  “well written characters and story.” Another reader complimented the “smart and witty” dialogue smart – and, to my especial pleasure, passed this comment: “the playwright provides a good balance between the sharp, sometimes biting humor in some exchanges and the more fundamental exchanges in others.”

Come and see the reading to see if you agree!!

I am pleased to announce that my play “Shadows of Men” will be featured in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival (BPF) of 2016. My play will be given a reading at Fells Point Corner Point Theatre on March 26 at 11am. Admission is free to all those who would love to attend. The mission of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival is “to provide an environment that nurtures the talents of Maryland and DC playwrights. The BPF does this through public readings, discussions, critiques and workshopping of new plays.” Their subsequent summer season “is devoted to the presentation of these newly developed works, for the entertainment and cultural edification of … audiences.”

The Baltimore Playwrights Festival was kind enough to give my play “Fifteen Men In A Smoke-Filled Room” a reading back in March of 2013. Check out this little tidbit from Memory Lane.

I used to live down in Baltimore and Washington, DC while studying for my master’s degree at Georgetown University (2007-2008). It’s always a pleasure to go back down to the area!

I want to extent my sincere thanks and appreciation to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center located in my home state of Connecticut. I learned today that my play “Shadows of Men” is a semi-finalist for the extremely prestigious O’Neill Theater Conference.

From the O’Neill website:

“Each year a community of professionals gathers in the serene setting of the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in order to support playwrights and new works for the theater.  The National Playwrights Conference strives to create a supportive environment that empowers playwrights to their own process and to experience the play with a professional company.

In the years since its inception the National Playwrights Conference has developed more than 600 plays… Virtually every major American playwright has been part of the Conference, including Julia Cho, Rebecca Gilman, Regina Taylor, John Guare, Israel Horovitz, David Henry Hwang, David Lindsay-Abaire, Adam Rapp, Lanford Wilson, Wendy Wasserstein, and August Wilson.”

The very fact that my play is a semi-finalist is a tremendous distinction of which I am very proud. It is very difficult to get a nod from the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.

This nod makes me very happy.

Today I received the news that my play “Shadows of Men” ended up as a finalist in the TNT POPS! New Play Project of 2016. “TNT” (or “Texas Nonprofit Theatres, Inc.“) is “a statewide service organization” designed to promote and support theatrical organizations in Texas. My script about John Dos Passos during the Spanish Civil War made it into the top 15 scripts submitted for the contest – a great honor!

My play “Encore, Encore” was previously a finalist in the 2014 TNT POPS! New Play Project contest. The play has since gone on to receive one staged reading and three productions.

Thanks so much to the judges for their interest and best of luck to the eventual winner!

I am pleased to announce that I have recently finished a new play – “Shadows of Men.”

I have been working on this play for the past 7 months or so. I have long meant to write a play about this particular incident in history because it touches a theme deep in my intellectual heart. The play itself is a story about the dignity of the individual and the survival of human friendship and loyalty across the abstractions of man-made ideologies.

In terms of plot, “Shadows of Men” is a two-hour historical drama about the search by novelist John Dos Passos for his dear friend, José Robles, who mysteriously disappeared during the struggles and turmoil of the Spanish Civil War. This obsessive search ends up isolating Dos Passos from many of his literary colleagues – especially the blustery Ernest Hemingway – who believe that Dos Passos’s focus on friendship is rather pedestrian when the survival of “democracy” is at stake. As Dos Passos investigates his friend’s fate, however, he gradually begins to understand the madness swirling around him, exposing a murky, cold, often heartless world where human beings are subservient to the abstractions for which they fight.

You can read a synopsis of the play here and a sample !