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.
13 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 Locust”
The plague-locust knows no king
nor any don
Her city bound by crazy, crooked sutures
The honking blocks alive with cigarette voices
Madder and more rancorous than viper pits
Jelly whitecaps of worry lifting like flame
Thunderclap of the downtown heartbeat
The beautiful transient with the
knockoff explora-dora
Backpack jangling with green quarters –
Green the color of a beggar’s belief
In the otherworld-shore –
The dancing bear takes a bow
The false-king in the highway shoulder
dons an oura ring
Masts of moonlight, plays of shadow
Panes of non-water
Yellow black phlegmy and bloody
Nicknames carved in a phone pole
nora & don
Letters blued by time and rain
One of us – me or you –
Is on the wrong side
Of the city
Or maybe it’s not my season
Because when I take the cross-town bus
I see your face amid
tornadoes of faces
All going the other way