Booth

This is a true story—as true as any true story can be.

His rise to fame was bumpy but he traced a straight descent to infamy.

There was the first pregnant girl when he was 13, and a second when he was 17. Just steps ahead of the consequences, he tramped off for Europe with a ratty troop of actors, missing Napoleon at Waterloo by a few months and a few miles. He returned home to England with a pregnant Belgian bride. Three years latter he abandoned bride, child, and a burgeoning London stage career to abscond with yet another pregnant lover to the New World. At least he was hoping for a new world.

In American he became the preeminent Shakespearean actor of his age but wrestled with a madness as legendary as anything he did on the stage. He remained true to his London flower girl, his Mary Ann, who bore him ten children: one son, Edwin, who would eclipse him on stage and another, John Wilkes, who would eclipse them all.

Lear, Hamlet—neither of them suffered as completely as Junius Brutus Booth.

 The Zelda

The drama behind the drama—an exploration for television of the millions of ways actors make it onto the stage. An amalgam of magic realism, documentary, reality, and cats. So many cats.

The Providence Plays

Death by an Act of Providence and Just South of Providence are the two one-act plays that make up The Providence Plays evening. Both center around difficult mother, father, and daughter dynamics—especially when one or more of the dynamic dies before the comedy ends. Dark, funny, insulting, tender, with both magical diseases and diseases you’ve probably heard of. Also some real bad luck.

The author hopes that the three leads in each of the one-acts will be played by the same actors—a stretch of heroic proportions.