Cast: 2-4 Performers (Flexible Casting)/Length: 5-10 min./Performance Rights: $15 per Performance

Sample Script

Production Script ($15 per Copy)

PDF Script ($7 per Copy)

The basic premise for The Cabin in the Woods is as generic as they come – five college stereotypes head off to a remote cabin (in the woods) for a weekend of debauchery.  We have the jock and his sexually-charged girlfriend, the “good-girl” getting over a bad relationship, the “nice-guy” destined to win her heart, and the obligatory stoner.  However, even from the movie’s opening moments, we sense that this isn’t going to be your average horror film.  The film begins with a conversation between two lab technicians, Sitterson and Hadley (played with brilliant comic timing by Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford), setting events in motion for the five unwitting victims, and we’re given a peak behind the curtain to see the orchestrators of the carnage about to occur.  But what this shadowy organization and why are they toying with a few college kids looking for some weekend fun?

The Cabin in the Woods is one of the most original horror films to come along in years.  Director Drew Goddard and his co-writer Joss Whedon bring a manic glee and energy to this upending of (and yet loving homage to) genre conventions.  It’s not so much that the movie is chock full of shocking twists and unexpected turns, it’s that the film very logically takes you from the cookie-cutter horror template into completely new territory.  Unlike movies that rely on their twist endings, The Cabin in the Woods is a film that will undoubtedly be just as entertaining on second or third viewing as it is the first time.

And did I mention it was funny?  Because it is.  Full of delightful banter, self-referential in-jokes, and moments of absurdity, The Cabin in the Woods is funnier than any of the Scary Movie parodies and scarier than any of the entries into the Scream franchise.  Goddard and Whedon understand the genre inside-out and are able to poke gentle fun at the movies they so obviously love.

But the brilliance of The Cabin in the Woods (and yes, I did say brilliance), is in the way it indicts the viewer and implicates the audience in the characters’ suffering.  When we watch a horror movie, we want to see the characters suffer and die in horrible ways.  How often do you hear horror aficionados lament the fact that there weren’t enough cool or imaginative death scenes in the latest Saw movie?  Through the convention of the technicians and their cohorts, Whedon and Goddard point out our own lust for sex and violence.  It’s a thought-provoking layer usually absent for horror films – even ones with more serious matters at the foreground.

Even with these layers on meta-commentary on genre and audience, The Cabin in the Woods is a lot of fun.  Yes, there are buckets of blood and gore, but through the laughter and the scares, you’re constantly being reminded that these cinematic characters wouldn’t be meeting their gruesome fates if it wasn’t for you, the audience, paying to see them suffer.  It’s something that will linger long after the credits have rolled.

More and more, I find myself being drawn to tragedy.  As an artist, there’s something about the tragic form that allows us to explore the difficulties and pain of life without resorting to easy cliches.  That isn’t to say that there isn’t any value in comedy – in the use of laughter to lighten our spirits (though I do prefer satire and dark comedy).  I’m just discovering that the art I am drawn to create exists more in the realm of tragedy.  I love the ability of tragedy to challenge its audience to explore the pain and suffering of another, to empathize with a stranger.  And to me, tragedy isn’t the hopeless morass that it is for many people.  Hope comes in identifying with “the other” and asking how we can change a broken world for the better.

The Trojan Women is a very “talk-y” piece – some characters have three, four page monologues.  So throughout the play, I really tried to find moments of silence and stillness on stage.  Silence is another thing that I am gravitating towards more and more.  Sometimes it feels like we have to keep barreling along, always talking, never pausing for fear of being interrupted or losing our audience’s attention.  And while I had originally hoped that The Trojan Women would only run about an hour and a half, with the moments of silence we found, the play ran closer to two hours.  At first, I started to second guess my instincts – it’s time to cut, cut, cut and move the play along at the pace of a speeding rocket.  But we kept the silence and the effect was astounding.  It gave our audiences time to process the dense language and time to sit with the grief of these twelve characters.  Yes, I’m sure there were some audience members who checked out, but the silence that is so antithetical to our consumerist culture was so essential to the final production.

As an artist, I find that I second-guess myself quite a bit.  The Trojan Women was one of the most difficult pieces I’ve ever directed and there was quite a bit of second-guessing involved.  It was a tragedy, the text was difficult, the play was long, the show featured twelve actors crying onstage for nearly two hours…  And yet, as I sat and watched the production night after night, I became more and more certain of the production.  This was the play I set out to direct.  It may not be to everyone’s taste.  It may not have been everyone’s favorite show.  But I am so proud of the final product.  And the people who did respond to the production, were ecstatic about play.  Some of our panel discussions following the performances featured lively conversation about the need for collective grief, the unseen victims of war, and those who are marginalized.

It was a beautiful, moving experience from start to finish, and I wouldn’t have changed any of it.

I just opened a production of The Trojan Women that I directed for quiet, the company I co-founded and where I serve as Artistic Director.  This play has consumed my energy and artistic fortitude over these last seven weeks.  It’s been the most challenging play I’ve directed, but it’s also been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had in the theatre as well.  Trying to take a two-thousand-year-old play and make it relevant was just one of the struggles I found – along with trying to help my cast find the incredibly deep wells of grief the text calls for and attempting to block twelve actors who never leave the stage during the play’s two-hour running time.

But my cast is outstanding, committing wholeheartedly to the play’s emotional depth, and our audience seem to be really connecting with the material – even if the text is dense and can be a little overwhelming at times.

Now that we’ve opened, you’d like I’d have a lot of extra time to devote to the web site, wouldn’t you?  No such luck.  I’m in a marathon dash to try and write three scripts over the next month and a half.  I have to finish writing the book for a new musical revue that is being produced by the High School at Life Center in Tacoma.  Then I need to get a new draft finished for The Gentleman’s Guide to Getting Laid (which I’m hoping to get into Seattle’s Bumbershoot Music and Arts Festival) and I have to get the first draft written for A Time for Butterflies, a new script I’m developing for quiet that we’ll produce this August.

So, all this is to say that it might be a while before I update the website again.  I hope that isn’t the case, but I figure it’s best to go ahead and assume the worst.

Jeanne and Simon, fraternal twins, attempt to carry out their mother’s last wish – deliver two letters to the father they thought was dead and the brother they didn’t know they had.  So as they hunt down the two missing family members in a fictional, war-torn country, Jeanne and Simon begin to piece together the untold story of their mother’s life in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war between Christian and Muslim militia groups.  Past bleeds into the present and the present is haunted by the past as the twins discover that, although their mother fled the violence while they were still infants, the legacy of war is still with them every day of their lives.

Incendies is a stunning film, elegantly directed by Villeneuve.  Rather than a ponderous exploration of war and its effects, the movie is a tightly paced mystery, moving from revelation to revelation with a deliberate, unhurried sense of inevitability.  The film effortlessly flows between the past and the present, allowing us to piece things together as the Jeanne and Simon make their discoveries.  By the time the film reaches its final, shocking conclusion, an ending that in a lesser film could easily come across too melodramatic, we are able to buy into the revelation of the father and the son – both as the logical outcome of the twin’s search and as a symbolic statement on the lasting consequences of war.

Lubna Azabal, playing Nawal (the twin’s mother) at a range of ages, is an absolutely riveting anchor to the film.  From her first scenes of innocence and loss, to her fierce determination to find her missing child and the dignity with which she carries herself in the face horrible oppression, Azabal is consistently mesmerizing.  It’s a powerful performance standing out in the midst of many other great actors: Jeanne (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin), Simon (Maxim Gaudette), and Remy Girard as the notary who sends the twins on this impossible assignment.

For so thoughtful and compelling a film, I do wish the piece would have been a little more honest about the brutality and violence that occurs on both sides of a bloody conflict.  We only see one side to the conflict and every member of the other side is portrayed as sadists wantonly dispensing violence to every man, women, and child of the enemy.  It undercuts some of the films power, turning one side into victims and the other side into easy villains, distancing us from the immediacy of violence and preventing us from realizing how easy it is to fall into these endless cycles of retribution.

Nevertheless, Incendies is still an important, powerful film that encourages us to take a fresh look at the conflicts of our own time and the deep consequences such conflicts have on every one of us.

The Gift can be used on its own, or as part of a larger Christmas production featuring choral and solo musical numbers.

Cast: 2 Women/Length: Up to 2 Hours/Performance Rights: $50 per Performance

Sample Script

Production Script ($18 per Copy)

PDF Script ($8 per Copy)

The Sleeping Beauty is French director Catherine Breillat’s second film in a planned trilogy of fairy-tale reinterpretations.  In her take on the classic story, a young princess, Anastasia, is cursed by a witch to die on her sixteenth birthday.  Three fairies blunt the curses effects so Anastasia with only fall into a deep sleep for one hundred years.  During her sleeping, the princess will have fantastic adventures and, instead of falling into the sleep at sixteen, she will begin her sleep when she is six and when she wakes one hundred years later, she will be sixteen.

There are some truly beautiful sequences that take place during the princess’s dreaming adventures.  She spends time with a mother and son, Peter.  She falls in love with the boy and once she has lost him, she spends the rest of her dream trying to find him once more.  She journeys into a majestic palace with albino rules.  She’s kidnapped by bandits and travels by deer to the frozen wilderness of her imagination.  And when she wakes up in the modern world, she isn’t sure she’ll be able to cope with the present.

As you can probably tell from my attempt at a synopsis, Breillat’s plot meanders all over the place.  The film moves from plot point to plot point – sometimes there is a connection to the previous sequence, sometimes we simply lurch ahead, dictated by directorial whim and fancy.  Character motivations are spurious and half-formed.  Why did the witch curse the princess?  The film doesn’t seem to care.

In fact, it feels like Breillat is almost embarrassed by the story’s early magical elements.  We rush past the witch and the fairies as convenient plot points.  She devotes a little time to the story of Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen, but mainly as a way to sweep the princess’s love off to places unknown.

The movie’s strength is in its symbols – heavy-handed though they may be.  The idea of childhood being a sort of dream that one awakens from at the onset of sexuality isn’t a new idea, but it is cleverly illustrated here.  The Snow Queen freezes Peter’s heart, causing his love for Anastasia to grow cold.  She can’t understand this change of heart which happens in many relationships and spends the rest of her childhood looking to recapture that love.

The Sleeping Beauty is an intriguing, if deeply flawed film.  There are some interesting ideas, but they just don’t connect to the larger story in any meaningful way.

Cast: 1 Woman/Length: 15-20 min./Performance Rights: $15 per Performance

Sample Script

Production Script ($15 per Copy)

PDF Script ($7 per Copy)

Phantom India is comprised of seven fifty-minutes episodes, each focusing on a different aspect of Indian culture, from the caste system and religious rituals to modern political struggles and the tribal minorities who exist on the fringes of society.  Malle takes us from one end of the country to the other and avoids focusing on the Anglicized, English-speaking two-percent of the population to instead show us how most Indians live.  Calcutta is narrower in scope than it’s companion piece, an immersive look at one of India’s largest cities.  The film spends much of its time silently juxtaposing the wealth and poverty that often exist within a few blocks of one another.

Though both documentaries are classically shot and edited, Malle and his cinematographer allow the camera to linger, never rushing or in a hurry to move from moment to moment.  This allows us, as viewers, to fall into a sort of reverie as we contemplate the scenes, taking in the people and places of India.  There is no attempt to the fact that he and his film crew are intruders in another society.  The camera isn’t hidden, observing from a distance.  It’s right in the midst of villages and cites, temples and fields.  His subjects stare directly into the camera, directly at us, creating a sense of unease as we watch from the comfort of our own home or the cushioned seats of a movie theater.

As his own narrator, Malle states that he doesn’t want to come to India with any preconceived notions, and he avoids many of the sentimental feelings Westerners have about Indian culture and religion.  In fact, there are times that Malle burns with a rage at priests who exploit the poor and a social system that causes people to believe they deserve their fate.  Western pilgrims are seen as naive and foolish.  In Calcutta, he constantly contrasts the lives of wealthy Indians (racetracks, golf, country-clubs) with those of the poorest in the very same city, living in run-down shacks amidst filth and refuse.  That isn’t to say Malle is unable to appreciate the beauty of Indian culture.  A lowly civil-servant’s devotion – praying at the temple each day in seclusion – and two young women studying dance and worshiping through their movements allows us a chance to see authentic and genuine Indian culture at it’s best.

Both films were met with resistance when they were released.  Britain’s large Indian community were angry that Malle chose to focus on India’s poverty rather than the nation’s economic growth.  But isn’t that how it always goes?  Do we ever want to face the poverty and decay in our own culture, our country, or our lives?  We try to hide our faces from the problems of society, pretending that it really isn’t as bad as they make it seem.  We complain that the people who are suffering deserve what they get because they’re lazy or devious or untrustworthy.

Near the beginning of Phantom India, Malle and his crew come across the dead buffalo being picked apart by wild dogs and vultures.  While it’s a common site for Indians, these Western filmmakers dwell on this image for a long while.  We can’t just ignore the problems of our country.  We can’t turn our backs on the most vulnerable members of our society.  We can’t just ignore the dead buffalo and the scavengers tearing it apart.

Gil, the hero of Woody Allen’s latest comedy Midnight in Paris, certainly lives in the past.  He’s visiting Paris with his fiancee, Inez, and her parents, but he seems to be the only one of this American quartet truly enraptured by the City of Lights.  He longs to walk the same streets his favorite authors and artists walked, to eat in the cafes where they ate, but his traveling companions would rather stay away from the sights of Paris and just take in an American movie.  When Inez runs into some old friends, Gil finds himself alone most evenings, walking the streets of Paris, where he is transported back to his favorite time and place in the world – Paris in the ’20s.

Midnight in Paris is a delightful comic fantasy, one of Allen’s most purely enjoyable films in recent years.  The parade of literary and artistic figures is a joy – from Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to Corey Stoll as Hemingway and Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein (not to mention a deliriously funny turn by Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali).  The cinematography is luscious, warm and inviting.  The entire film is Allen’s love letter to the Paris of yesteryear as well as the Paris of today.  Owen Wilson fills in nicely as the film’s Allen substitute and the brilliant Michael Sheen is hilarious as Inez’s smug and pedantic friend.

I do wish that Rachel McAdams, as Inez, would have been given more depth and humanity.  Instead, she plays the shrew, condescending and cloying and slowly pushing Gil further and further away.  Yes, it allows the audience to root for Gil’s blossoming romance with Adriana, a mistress of Picasso, but instead of focusing on the very real incompatibilities between Gil and Inez, Allen paints her as an irredeemable caricature.

As Gil continues his midnight journey into the past, he begins to discover that no one is really ever content with the present.  Even his sublime literary friends wish for a return to an earlier time.  Allen hammers the moral home a little to obviously, but it’s still a worthwhile point to be made.  We all need to stop living in the past – whether it’s nostalgia for an America that never was or a desire to relive your youth – and realize that the present can be a pretty spectacular place.  And if it doesn’t quite live up to our expectations, we need to be willing do the work it takes to make the here and now the place we long and hope for.