Plays

Acting like Children

Acting like Children

A black comedy about two busy, middle-aged children who hire actors to play them at the celebration of their aging Bohemian parents 50th wedding anniversary. Directed by Kirsten Sanderson. Kelli Lynn Harrison, pictured here, read the role of Louise, the parents' caretaker

The Rape

The Rape

Written in 1989, the play, by Sa’dallah Wannous, dramatizes the use of rape and torture as interrogation techniques by the Shin Bet during the first Palestinian Intifada.

The Dictator

The Dictator

Absurdist political play by Lebanon’s most renowned playwright ‘Issam Mahfouz. Takes place during an offstage, and perhaps imaginary, coup directed by a general and his faithful assistant, Saadoun.

Drone Pilots

Drone Pilots

Drone Pilots is an adaptation for the radio of the stage play Unmanned, about two very different drone pilots operating out of a trailer in the American southwest.

Rituals of Signs and Transformations

Rituals of Signs and Transformations

One of the most important plays in the contemporary Arab canon. A Shakespearean drama with themes of clerical corruption and homosexuality.

Twilight Country

Twilight Country

A progressive southern white writer, and the African-American mother of a World War II veteran who has died in an apparent lynching, meet in Asheville, North Carolina in 1948 and help each other overcome their traumas by reading Dante’s Inferno.

Unmanned

Unmanned

Two drone pilots work for a private contractor out of a trailer in the American southwest. He is an aging former fighter pilot from Alabama who is afraid to fly, and she is a young video game whiz from Cleveland who has never been in a plane.

Painting Persia

Painting Persia

About the extraordinary expedition to Iran by French geographer Xavier Hommaire de Hell and painter Jules Laurens in the 1840s during a revolution led by a female ‘heretic’ who publicly removes her veil.

Baghdadi Bath

Baghdadi Bath

Shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Two brothers meet in an abandoned Turkish bath they would visit with their father when they were boys and try to scrub clean the wounds caused by family friction and the geopolitical events that have divided them.

Mesopotamia

Mesopotamia

Story of the British occupation of Iraq and its creation by Britain’s Oriental Secretary, the Arabist Gertrude Bell. Dramatizes the brutal quelling of an insurrection and the installation of a monarch from Arabia.

Cats of Renèe Dick

Cats of Renèe Dick

Against My Heart

Against My Heart

Set in 1862 after British Shakespearean actress Fanny Kemble has divorced her American husband because he owns a plantation. She must decide between losing her daughter or revealing the horrors of slavery and helping to prevent Britain’s entry into the American Civil War on the side of the South.

Perfectly Clear

Perfectly Clear

Tragicomic rendering of Watergate scandal using White House tapes of Richard Nixon, his relationship with Pat Nixon and cover-up by Nixon and his aides of 1972 break-in of Democratic headquarters by Republican operatives.

The Lynching of Leo Frank

The Lynching of Leo Frank

Based on the infamous historical case of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager from New York who is convicted of a child murder he didn’t commit in Atlanta in 1913.

Dead of Night

Dead of Night

The historical story of Fred Hampton, the leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, who was murdered by the Chicago Police, and his bodyguard, an FBI informant who is haunted by his role in Hampton’s death.

Heartland

Heartland

Black comedy about a paranoid white supremacist group in middle America whose members lionize a racist radio talk-show host. Their foibles turn deadly when a domestic terrorist with a plan of action appears among them.

Atwater: Fixin’ to Die

Atwater: Fixin’ to Die

Atwater helped create the infamous campaign commercials featuring a black man who committed a rape while on a furlough granted by Bush’s opponent. After Bush is elected and Atwater’s life takes a tragic turn, he begins to face the consequences of the win-at-all-costs political strategy he has helped to create.