Stories

excerpts

Follow links to these stories, listed in the order of composition:
"Mutiny on the Hot Line"
"Sacrifice of the Chocolate Man"
"High Noon at Happy Hour"
"Extra Virgin"
"Czech Please".
"Captain, Chef, and Shadow"

At the request of Polk Street Players of Marietta, Georgia, I collaborated on a musical comedy with composer Judy MacLeod Reardon. OUT OF THE LOOP concerns people used to being "in the loop," leaders in a small but growing Southern city. But the Mayor takes them out West on a leadership retreat that goes seriously awry. The play is based on James M. Barrie's 1902 hit THE ADMIRABLE CRICHTON, concerning British aristocrats marooned on an island with two lowly servants.

After some delays, Polk Street Players decided not to do a musical after all. Still, script, lyrics and score are all available. Read more.

Hear Judy's tunes arranged by me for the Overture.

A romantic comedy, HER YANKEE SECRET, (read excerpts) finds humor on the single most fateful day of the Civil War: July 4, 1863. In the besieged city of Vicksburg, Mississippi, the high society has been reduced to eating rats and drinking tea made from tree bark. The Yankee soldiers outside of town have easy access to sugar and, above all, beef, and one socialite sees her chance to beat out a rival if she can somehow snag beef for her Fourth of July picnic. Enter a young Yankee soldier, member of the first black regiment to fight in the Civil War, who can sneak into the city disguised as a slave girl. Unknown to everyone else, the soldier belongs in skirts. I borrowed that idea from Shakespeare, and much else, too, in this comedy. My own students performed it in 2001.

When St. Andrew's Episcopal School in Jackson, Mississippi, started its Middle School in the early 1980s, the principal Dot Kitchings asked me to come up with a stage presentation to do these things:

• cover everything we studied, grades 5 through 8 (i.e., ancient world to modern USA)
• involve music, dance, drama, and art
• relate to our Episcopal heritage
• give all of 320 students something to do
• last under an hour
• be suitable for annual performance

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Collaborations
with
Students

Sixth graders in my class wrote plot, dialogue, lyrics, tunes, and some accompaniment for an opera in three scenes, THE FROG PRINCE. It was their idea for a prince and a frog to switch places, adding a whole new layer to the comedy. My job was to lead brainstorming sessions, and to string their scraps of scenes and songs together. I arranged their tunes. The play has succeeded in staged readings, full-fledged stagings, and on the road in performances for elementary schools. Read the script here, and hear the music, too.

My students in 8th grade drama create their own plays from scratch, such as ROPE BURN and CAPITAL CHAOS depicted above. Read about that here.

Commissioned to produce an original play based on three winning stories by local children of immigrants, I used musical techniques to create THE LANGUAGE TRIO (read the script here). I've further developed this musical technique for non-musical drama to help sixth graders tell family stories in dramatic "quilts" of words and mimed stories, as discussed in the chapter I contributed to the book WRITING AMERICA. (See more at my Writing Instruction page.)

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