Selected Summaries

Currently a 2024 O’Neill New Musical Theatre Conference Semifinalist.

Featherdreamer starts off as a Golden Age musical: boy sees girl, becomes infatuated, and pursues girl (regardless of her actual desires.) At the culmination of the grand love ballad, he confesses his love— to the actress playing the female lead, not the character herself.

The metatheatrical fallout deals with the power of the stories we tell and the responsibility that comes with that power in a world that has so often silenced or warped certain stories.

Sophytos is a Greek youth in 200 BCE, in what is today Kandahar, Afghanistan. Mac is the fiddle player in a failing folk band in 1970s London. Jay is an Indian-American playwright living in NYC during the present day. What binds them together?

As Bactrians invade his home, Sophytos leaves to seek his fortune and purpose, traveling as far as Pella, the heart of Macedonia. Seeking enlightenment in Eastern philosophies, Mac and her band follow the “hippie trail” to India. And Jay, determined to write an “Indian play” without actually writing an Indian play, travels by car and plane with his girlfriend to Paramaribo, Suriname.

As the travelers seek themselves in communities and places quite removed from their original lives, their timelines begin to bleed into each other in strange counterpoint, forcing each traveler to confront the meanings and purposes behind the journeys themselves.

An indie-pop adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest based on Enyn’s concept album. Prospero is determined to retell the old play his way: neither littered with the racist undertones of the original, nor quite a post-colonial recontextualization.

However, the Spirit of the Story seeks to assert itself as the familiar events of the play occur around the island.

Eve is a middle-aged American professor (of musicology, with a specialty in pre-1600 vernacular English music) who has just begun her sabbatical in Cheshire.

However, her new house is haunted (twice over!)

There is Widsith: a force of change, both omnitemporal and well-traveled, who urges Eve into the unknown. He is based on the Old English poem in the Exeter Book: he was originally a 5th-century scop, but has come to represent something greater.

Then there is Amleth: a force of history. He is quite close to Saxo’s version of the same Amleth that Shakespeare based his Hamlet on, and quite resents the Bard for the change in his name.

The ghosts don’t quite bother Eve, but she is much more concerned with the knocking at her door. Something is trying to get in.

In the 1880s, the body of a young woman was pulled out of the River Seine. One of the morticians was supposedly so taken by her beauty that he made a death mask of her face - said mask became a wildly popular accessory in Bohemian households as her character became something of a muse. She is often imagined to have died by suicide, due to the expression on her face and the lack of marks of violence on her body.

Vera, a modern-day museum researcher, is putting together an exhibition on this woman - known today as L’Inconnue de la Seine. One of her secondary sources is the girl as imagined by Beauregard, a Bohemian writing letters in the 1940’s. As the three timelines converge, the nature and purpose of romanticization and fantasy are called into question.