WRITING PROJECTS
When a knight cannot please his lady wife, he makes a monster who can.
New York's Greenwich Village.
The pinnacle of anticommunist fervor and the folk music movement.
A folksinging trio (Iggi, Bobbie, and Squirrel) faces federal investigation into its alleged affiliation with the Communist Party. Joe McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee intensify their probe after a wild talk show appearance in which the band debuts an incendiary antiwar anthem rather than the love ballad they were booked to perform. The band descends into heartbreak when in the face of a new charge of homosexuality, Iggi takes a plea deal, forcing Bobbie to flee to Sicily for eight years. After this period of banishment, Bobbie returns stateside to confront Iggi at Squirrel’s funeral.
Music by Angela Sclafani. Book by Charlie Sutherland.
C O D E I N E
(original TV drama)
Maureen “Codeine” Barber is the junkie-loser of her Wild West Virginia town, strung out on soldier’s joy and a laundry list of other narcotics. When a phone call unearths dark truths about what happened to her brother in the Iraq War, it forces her out of a years-long opiate daze. With sheer will, cleverness, and a fierce commitment to making “amends” of the violent, Old Testament persuasion - the CODEINE way - she goes undercover as the linchpin in a precarious cold war between local cops, bumpkin oligarchs, and a mercenary army in order to better understand what happened to her brother in Iraq and biblically punish those responsible.
THIRTEEN SILVER DOLLARS
Smoggy 1860s Pittsburgh. The height of the American steel industry.
A band of pissed-off outcasts, homeless travelers, steel workers, and Civil War vets arrive at the doorstep of millionaire and national treasure Andrew Carnegie, armed with a guillotine and a tall list of demands. The leader of this outfit is the surrogate who Carnegie paid to serve in his stead in the Union Army.
“The Catbird”
A low moon stops in anxious wait
Darkling trees alight
The limbs begin to swash and croon
Crackling song takes wing
The world’s gray music leaking in
Louder than a falls
The chickling rages outward, blind
Rasping fires churn
Our downy pilgrim squirms with grief
Moated back from life
And doubly does the effort cost
Nameless is the pain
A bubble forms to span the break
Muzzling voices rough
This cattle-spotted jellybean
Boiling on a shelf
A gasket blows, a levee fails
Ancient feathers fly
Four eyes receive the babe among
A catbird’s-egg-blue dusk
