About these plays: The 13 short plays in this collection require small casts, minimal staging with low tech lights and sound. Casting choices, age and gender and race are completely up to the artists who are putting on the show to decide if they wish to disregard my guidelines, effectively the same goes for cuts, changes and embellishments, there are no art police, it's up to me to withhold my blessing or threaten a lawsuit, it's up to you to make it your own. I would be pleased if these plays get read and used even if they're done wrong, these are rehearsal scripts to be used for presenting live small potatoes theatre performances. Go nuts. h These plays were all written after 2006 and have been revised numerous times. Some have been previously (self) published. Many have been sent off to contests and festivals and a few have been work-shopped or had readings and of course "published" on my electronic media sites but none have had a professional run in a real theater, so you know, here's your chance for a world premier. These are north and south American plays, apolitical and unpatriotic, with magical American names and words: Poughkeepsie, Tornado, Dude, Clang, Cheater -Reader -Speck, Belmar by the Sea, SCRAM! roach clip, Trixie Quin, Magic-Fingers, Motherfucker, Kid, Babe, Doll, Zombie, Rosco, Shack, Dakotas, Spork, Frisco- these words are important sounds, they have a pitch and timbre and meter with secret meanings. When interpreting these scripts for performance, actors and directors need to recall when and where they've heard these sounds coming out of American mouths, and just hang all their craft, tricks and artifice, all the things that one normally manipulates to make a play, on these sounds. Words like "Grilled Cheese Sandwich" transcend the dream reality of politics and commerce and debt and greed and jealousies: all the enslaving structures we mostly waste our time and energy and soul on. That core, the base mettle underlying guts of our American essence, our humanity, which responds to the sound of the musical phrase "Grilled Cheese Sandwich" is the dancer that's got to shred these paper chains we've handcuffed ourselves with to the radiator in the cheap hotel of insecurity all these years. All these years that I've been alive, since my ears have worked, I've listened to my neighbors make these sounds that can say both, "This is Fucked" and "Fuck that" simultaneously. Say these words aloud, they will reverberate and become more than the sum of their parts. It's true, these immaterial immortal sounds, these words and phrases bop and they wail and you can not shoot a hole in 'em. These plays are not ordered particularly thoughtfully but 3 or four of them might be put together for a perfectly serviceable evenings entertainment. I conceived them for performance in a live, low tech theatre setting, but they may work in a tavern, gallery, outdoors or for film or video or as radio plays. If you are involved with a small destitute art group whose members also earn groceries and rent in restaurants, bars and nightclubs, the trades, are employed as temps in offices, drive cabs, paint houses, but are making your own theatre however you can, I hope these plays move you. Maybe you are young. If you have theories and philosophies and drive and are inspired, if you make your own costumes and sets and are crazy and talented and the establishment won't give you a second look or the time of day, if you perform in alleys and on roofs and in warehouses, if you've ever slept in your car or hitch-hiked a thousand miles and howled at the moon or been laughed off the stage, and forgotten your cue -or your shoes, climbed out a window, or broken your nose, if you are dead sexy but weird looking or so ugly you're cute... well then, This book is for you
About the Author: About the author: Born in New York City in 1959, C.M. Brophy has written, directed and acted in plays and films in New York, San Francisco and Canada. Founding member and artistic director of Dude Theater Frisco, Bindlestiff theater of 6th st. and Splanchnic Theatricals international as well as many other Union and pirate theater houses and film production projects as collaborator, hired gun and featured solo artist. He was impresario at Random Ax guerrilla arts. He was songwriter and bass player in the Scropes, a 1980's S.F. musical ensemble. He built, operated and sold a little pizza parlor outside Washington D.C. He works as a plumber these days and has been a cab driver, short order cook, tradesman, clerk, miner, lookout, mover, driver and decoy. He's done some modeling. He ran for Mayor on the platform that if elected he would not serve. He's run a marathon. He paints and sculpts and can dance and sing and swim. His opus for solo piano, "Roommate Torture" is almost finished, so yes, he is also a composer. He is full of love- and hate. Adventures, which he believes are not meant to be fun while they're happening, have taken him in small boats down rivers and across vast bodies of water, in trains, old broke down cars and commercial jet airliners. Brophy has traveled to the Arctic Circle, Mexico, South America, the British isles, Ireland, Europe and the middle of the desert. He has walked upon a frozen sea. He has a home in the suburbs, sons and a spouse, 2 dogs and a mortgage, has rolled in the gutter, been bloodied and blotto, tattooed and transformed, redeemed, broken boned, stitched back together, honored and ignored. A college dropout, he writes in bed or standing up, most prolific away from home. C. M. Brophy is a boxer and a poet. He is destined to continue to write outside the confines of commerce, fully field testing the experimental theory, "Perfect is the enemy of done.". intending to complete volumes of plays, novels and stories before he dies, hoping one day an editor will come along to help make sense and dollars from the rough concentrates of raw material, refining and extracting punctuation, spelling, formatting and structural contradictions into a slim faultless volume. Posthumously would be fine with him. Christopher Michael Brophy is very busy living.