THE PLAYS OF WAYNE PEASE: THE PLOTS

1. Flames Will Not Feed Us: Gauguin joins Van Gogh in the south of France to start an art colony. They disagree about almost everything. Van Gogh gradually goes over the edge and tries to kill Gauguin with a knife (onstage). When Gauguin escapes, he cuts off his own ear (onstage).

2. The Rite of Spring: The old American frontier. A mother who ran off with another man returns secretly to her family of moonshiners. The boys pursue other women. Husband and wife reconciled (and sounds of them making love end the play).

3. This Friday They Call The Good: An American community theater of the time re-enacts the death of Lincoln (which has just taken place) in a poetic elegy.

4. How Red The Rose That Is The Soldier’s Wound: During the Vietnam war, a young college visits a badly wounded friend and eventually becomes a draft resister (in the last scene at the draft board where he can’t take the final step).

5. Siege Of The Anti-Christ: Nietzsche’s sister hires a group of actors to do drama therapy on him in an attempt to cure his madness. A series of scenes around a set of graphic images (Nietzsche crucified, etc.)

6. Grandma: A grandmother put in an old folks home, the story told by the boy of how she attempts to escape to Mexico and starts a revolution instead. (Done off-off Broadway. A real hit with seniors.)

7. Jonah: A modern re-telling of the tale where Jonah and God the main characters, Jonah refusing to go to the big city and preach to the heathens. He ends up on the Statue of Liberty.

8. American Gothic: Set in Oregon around 1900, the wife of a trapper (she has TB) falls in love with her doctor and ends up making love with the black boy helper. At the end the boy kills the trapper and runs away. The woman re-appears, yet we do not know if she is alive or just a vision.

9. Now Is The Time (For All Good Men To Come To The Aids Of Their Country): A gay social worker in a city hospital faces his death with humor and cynicism, heading a band that performs onstage.

10. Old MacDonald Had A Farm: Set in the Midwest during the farm crisis, a neighbor wants to believe the preacher who says the Jews the cause of it all. His wife threatens to leave him and his neighbor kills his own family (onstage/offstage Greek style), only the little girl escaping. The play partially based on The Cherry Orchard.

11. Grandpa: A grandfather returns home to his son and family after running away to Mexico years ago. The son is running for city council and this taking place during the attempt to reconcile father and son. The father gets the son stoned and the son goes into a monologue about saving the world.

12. The Holiday Trilogy: Three full-length plays set at Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving. 1. Smart Alix A son comes home from college, except he’s changed himself into a beautiful girl (literally, played by a petit blond) and has her Indian boyfriend in tow. This is a preacher’s family with hidden alcoholic and incestuous secrets. 2. The Skeleton (in the closet): The aging lovers and butler of the man who perfected the condom and grew rich from it use a séance to kill him and get his money. In the middle of the play they do a celebratory inflated condom song and dance. 3. The Disciple: A family of circus performers who’ve retired to a farm discover their son has helped his Indian guru escape from the law and is hiding him upstairs. The hypnotist handyman ends up taking the guru’s place in the world. And the family finally relents and lets their daughter join the circus.

13. Old Man Finding The Desire To Live: Late at night, after-hours, a 16 year-old-girl visits her hero, a nightclub singer at his piano in a deserted club. Songs and flashbacks to his romance with and death of his wife. The girl brings him the hope of a renewed ability to love.

14. Loving Archetypes: A musical based on a series of stories about a Jungian therapist and how he finally finds true love (and a long-lost daughter is united with her father).


SHORT PLAYS:

1. This Foolish, Maybe Chosen, Beast: The poetic life and death of Francois Villon in medieval France.

2. Robots Have No Tails: Based on a memory of the sci-fi book of the same name. A robot and his maker work out their relationship.

3. The Strangler: A one-person piece where the protagonist gradually reveals to an unknown force outside the door that he is the serial killer.

4. Upon A Painted Ocean: Leonardo da Vinci tries to reach the prince who has hired him but cannot find his way into the castle. (Partially based on Kafka’s The Castle.)

5. The Metamorphosis of Franz Kafka: A re-telling of the tale, done with a musician center-stage setting the tone.

6. The Clown: A clown entertains the ill daughter of a rich woman in Virginia City during the frontier, silver days. The woman and clown have an affair. The daughter dies of laughter at the end of the play.

7. Gaius Caligula: A re-telling of the insane emperor’s escapades.

8. O What A Rogue And Peasant Slave Am I: The country cousin visits the city cousin and then the wife of the former revealed. All three characters played by the same character in a lightning fast farce.

9. The Poetry Reading: A poet enters to do a reading but ends up talking a lot about poetry and mostly his wife. It is left up to the audience to realize she has just died. (Inspired by Chekhov’s monologue On Tobacco.)

10. The English Teacher: Another monologue where the high-school teacher talking to the class lets out his affair with a student.

11. Henry and Alexandra: A Sahara desert journey of a poet and his on-again off-again girlfriend as they meet and part and encounter strange people on a trip to Cairo.

12. The Wedding Of Love And Death: The surrealistic account of the marriage between opposites.

13. The Mothers: Three on-act plays: 1. A Sentimental Education: A high-school teacher and her principal enact the battle of the sexes. 2. The Prodigal Son: Four monologues where the main character never speaks. The mother tells her last in the first one. After she dies the father and son search for a reconciliation. 3. Wine: A daughter becomes her father’s lover, then after he dies she becomes the lover of her son. All this without judgment.

14. Voyages: Three one-act plays: 1. Southern Cross: Two mis-matched would-be lovers drift off in a lifeboat at night in the South Pacific. 2. The Poetry Lesson: Having found a bunch of books at a used bookstore with the name of the former owner in them, a college student visits the retired lady professor and learns the secret of passion. 3. While Salome Dances: A girl about to go to a prom is terrified about her looks and clothes. Three former models who are now the angels of beauty appear in her bed to help her prepare.

15. Forever And Never: A contemporary deconstruction of a fairy-tale, Hansel and Gretel, their difficult journey thru modern times.