Three Plays for One Actor

Three Plays for One Actor Book Cover

Three Plays for One Actor, a collection of three verse monologues that I wrote and performed near the end of the last century and the beginning of the current one, is now available as an audiobook at Audible.com and the iTunes store. It’s also available in paperback and ebook versions, and (for those with the patience to listen online) as free streaming audio on the pages linked below.

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I first performedGroup Theory in December 1994 at Theatre X. It’s the story of how a week’s worth of misdelivered mail leads an apartment dweller on a journey through his dense and diverse urban neighborhood, a journey that seems to be telling him something about the refracted symmetries of self. Although the world of the monologue is technologically obsolete—the main character manages an independent video store, the U.S.
Postal Service actually connects people, and the HIV/AIDS virus is still a death sentence—I find that the piece still resonates. This audio version was recorded in June and July of 2017.

In Parsimony, a man returns home after a car crash, drugged up and teetering on crutches, to find a that a strange new neighbor has moved into the back room behind his kitchen. I gave a public reading of this monologue in August 2001, at Nicholas Frank’s Hermetic Gallery, and then broadcast an audio version on September 10, 2001 as part of the Hermetic Radio Hour. The challenges of performing it very much informed the slight revisions and new recording of August and September 2017: as an actor, I chose to play the central character as a normal guy who can’t imagine being anything else.

Although it was the first monologue to be written and performed, I’ve chosen to place Teratology at the end, because this narrator speaks to the listener from the other side of a chasm he has already crossed. In the long night of this monologue, the distant arching dome of an old train station looms over four stranded travelers, four unsociable strangers who do their best to ignore each other. I first performed it in December 1993, at Theatre X, under the title Teratology, or the Monstrosity Here Beside Me. I took the time to make good recording in 2005; for me, that recording is now the authoritative text.

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