Garden Sanctuary (a one-act play)

Overnight, like Wilde, he became an unemployed and unemployable pariah. The only way he could make a living was by working for a sleazy pornographer and accepting the financial help of a converted Russian Jew intent on converting the dying Beardsley to Catholicism.

Play Details

Beardsley has had three productions. Life in the theater! In , Beardsley was given its third production, this time in London, by Stage One. Set and costume designers had a field day with Beardsley and used his black-and-white drawings as their inspiration. In , Katherine Shepard, the actress who played Charlotte, the ever-so-elegant lesbian mother, in Blood , commissioned me to write a short piece that she could perform at the International Conference on Semantics to be held at Yale. I wrote a minute comedy called Tourists for her. In it, she played an archaeologist researching an ancient pyramid in Central America and trying to explain her findings to a bewildered Midwestern housewife visiting the pyramid on a cruise.

Later, in Portland, I met an actress named Leigh Clark, who had the uncanny ability to transform herself into different characters in front of your eyes. For Leigh, I expanded the number of tourists in Tourists to four: Bertha Johnson, the Midwestern housewife; Dr. In Leigh gave an astonishingly brilliant performance at the Portland Civic Theatre—and nothing of it survives except one cassette tape recording with awful sound quality. Produced by Cygnet Productions in , the show enjoyed a sold-out run. The Garden Plays was inspired by my love of gardens and history. I wanted to write three one-act plays, all set in gardens at different points in time, using the same four actors in each.

The first play, Barbarians at the Gate , was set in a Roman garden in A. In , the three-act version was given its first reading by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company with Susannah York playing the lead female roles. It was frankly thrilling.

This was a small, beautiful, and quite powerful production in a lovely little theater located in what had been the Masonic Temple now part of the Portland Art Museum. The two plays—a garden in Rome in A. Traveling around the state of Oregon as a travel writer, I heard stories about three very different ghosts that reputedly haunted three very different locales.

One was the wife of a lighthouse keeper in a remote house on the Oregon coast; one was a young woman who sometimes appeared in a mirror in The Eagle Tavern in North Portland; and the third was a Gold Rush-era cowboy who roamed the Geiser Grand Hotel in Baker City. Four actors played all the different roles, and I wrote a couple of ballads for the folksy narrator who introduces each of the stories.

Oregon Ghosts was chosen for the Readings in Rep series at Willamette Repertory Theatre in Eugene, and given the favorable audience response, I thought the theatre would snap it up for production. Unfortunately, I have no photos of this production. As with novels, so with plays. You can spend months or years writing and rewriting a novel or a play and never find a publisher or producer for it.

And in the case of my first novel, it took some 20 years to find a publisher, but a publisher did appear. I have two plays that I absolutely love and that have been given fabulous readings by fabulous actors, but they both remain unproduced. Fanny, who was the mother of the great novelist Anthony Trollope, thought she was going to a comfortable Utopian community in Tennessee founded by a fiery young Scotswoman named Francis Wright. Brecht and Hays The Duchess of Malfi ed.

Hampton An Enemy of the People trans. Lenkiewicz An Enemy of the People trans.

Crowley Great Expectations adapt. Friel Hedda Gabler trans.

David Edgar (playwright)

Marber Hedda Gabler trans. A Portrait of M. Stoppard J audio J. Eldridge John Gabriel Borkman trans. McGuinness John Gabriel Borkman trans. Eldridge The Lady from the Sea trans. McGuinness The Lady from the Sea trans.

Proposal: Darmstadt Sanctuary Garden – Spora Studios

Greer, Wilmott Lysistrata trans. Set in the Greek city of Ephesus , The Comedy of Errors tells the story of two sets of identical twins who were accidentally separated at birth. Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant, Dromio of Syracuse, arrive in Ephesus, which turns out to be the home of their twin brothers, Antipholus of Ephesus and his servant, Dromio of Ephesus.

When the Syracusans encounter the friends and families of their twins, a series of wild mishaps based on mistaken identities lead to wrongful beatings, a near- seduction , the arrest of Antipholus of Ephesus, and false accusations of infidelity , theft, madness, and demonic possession. Because a law forbids merchants from Syracuse to enter Ephesus, elderly Syracusian trader Egeon faces execution when he is discovered in the city. He can only escape by paying a fine of a thousand marks. He tells his sad story to Solinus, Duke of Ephesus.

In his youth, Egeon married and had twin sons. On the same day, a poor woman without a job also gave birth to twin boys, and he purchased these as slaves to his sons. Soon afterwards, the family made a sea voyage, and was hit by a tempest. Egeon lashed himself to the main-mast with one son and one slave, and his wife took the other two infants. His wife was rescued by one boat, Egeon by another.

Published Reviews

Egeon never again saw his wife or the children with her. Recently his son Antipholus, now grown, and his son's slave Dromio left Syracuse to find their brothers. When Antipholus did not return, Egeon set out in search of him. The Duke is moved by this story, and grants Egeon one day to pay his fine. That same day, Antipholus arrives in Ephesus, searching for his brother.

He sends Dromio to deposit some money at The Centaur , an inn. He is confounded when the identical Dromio of Ephesus appears almost immediately, denying any knowledge of the money and asking him home to dinner, where his wife is waiting. Antipholus, thinking his servant is making insubordinate jokes, beats Dromio of Ephesus. Dromio of Ephesus returns to his mistress, Adriana, saying that her "husband" refused to come back to his house, and even pretended not to know her. Adriana, concerned that her husband's eye is straying, takes this news as confirmation of her suspicions.

Antipholus of Syracuse, who complains "I could not speak with Dromio since at first I sent him from the mart," meets up with Dromio of Syracuse who now denies making a "joke" about Antipholus having a wife. Antipholus begins beating him. Suddenly, Adriana rushes up to Antipholus of Syracuse and begs him not to leave her. The Syracusans cannot but attribute these strange events to witchcraft, remarking that Ephesus is known as a warren for witches.

Antipholus and Dromio go off with this strange woman, the one to eat dinner and the other to keep the gate. Antipholus of Ephesus returns home for dinner and is enraged to find that he is rudely refused entry to his own house by Dromio of Syracuse, who is keeping the gate. He is ready to break down the door, but his friends persuade him not to make a scene. He decides, instead, to dine with a courtesan.

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After she exits, Dromio of Syracuse announces that he has discovered that he has a wife: Nell, a hideous kitchen-maid. He describes her as "spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her". Antipholus jokingly asks him to identify the countries, leading to a witty exchange in which parts of her body are identified with nations. Ireland is her buttocks: He claims he has discovered America and the Indies "upon her nose all o'er embellished with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain; who sent whole armadas of caracks to be ballast at her nose.

The Syracusans decide to leave as soon as possible, and Dromio runs off to make travel plans. Antipholus of Syracuse is then confronted by Angelo of Ephesus, a goldsmith, who claims that he ordered a chain from him. Antipholus is forced to accept the chain, and Angelo says that he will return for payment.