Producing Preparedness
I encourage professional readings of new work and offer both organizational & creative services to ensure that your work is both seen and heard at its best.
The Fall of Theodore Roosevelt
A new play by David Mulei
Summer, 1918. Sixty-year-old Theodore Roosevelt is ten years out of office and shattered by the news that his youngest son, Quentin, has been killed in action in World War I. With his three remaining sons still at the front, Theodore shoulders the blame for inspiring his reckless boys to self-destruction.
It is this six-month chapter, often glossed-over in accounts of the great man’s life, which strikingly reveals Theodore to be a man divided. Publicly, he struggles to mount an improbable political comeback. Privately, he stumbles through the darkness with his wife, Edith, and two daughters at their Sagamore Hill home in Oyster Bay, Long Island. As his once-powerful body and mind come apart, he is haunted by visions of three generations of Roosevelts. It will prove to be Theodore’s greatest battle, a resolute confrontation with the often violent traumas he has spent a lifetime trying to outrun.
Recently secured a Sheen Center Fellowship for playwright, David Mulei.
Brume
Written by Silvia Peto
A mysterious and malignant haze has colonized the city’s atmosphere. Plants are dying and the birds are gone. Numerous suicides are taking place throughout the city and the government has assumed ubiquitous and paternal powers. Soothing music is played through loudspeakers at night. Troubled people are consigned to healing centers, and an acute sense of watchfulness permeates the society.
On a once luxuriant apartment deck garden, four people struggle for normalcy, not only within the parameters of the impending environmental disaster, but with the vagaries of their own human nature.
Brume received a reading at the Berkeley Repertory and was a finalist for the Global Age Project at the Aurora Theatre Company.
Stubborn Things
A new play by David Mulei
Historical documents, real-life expert witness reports, and trial transcripts are woven into the action of this full-length drama, which begins six weeks prior to the start of the 2000 Irving v. Lipstadt libel trial.
Gail is a research assistant struggling to prove that notorious Holocaust denier David Irving’s revisionist claims are not only wrong, but are hateful lies. But as she examines a seemingly endless pile of horrific documentary evidence from her cramped basement office. As Gail races to meet her deadline, she is pressed to the limits of her fierce self-reliance, and must confront the possibility that no one can determine when an innocent mistake becomes a deliberate distortion of the truth.
Winston & The Duke
A new play by Rory Fellowes
Directed by Maureen Payne-Hahner
The play is set in 1925, seven years after the First World War and fourteen years before the Second. Winston Churchill spends the weekend in Scotland with his old friend Bendor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, for a spot of salmon fishing and convivial relaxation. They are to be joined later that evening by the Duke’s latest mistress, Coco Chanel.
Winston is a politician, a liberal Conservative pragmatist, cautious about socialism but sanguine about the future of Britain. He is disparaging of Bendor’s ideas and fears, but he is vulnerable to Bendor’s attacks over the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. Winston envies Bendor his rank and his wealth (Bendor is the richest man in Britain); Bendor envies Winston his eloquence and political power. As old friends do, they are ever ready to push each other’s buttons, especially when they are in private.
But just before they come to blows, Coco arrives!
These are simply three people among many at the time, educated and informed as anyone might be, yet they do not, cannot know what the future holds, and in their different ways they make the wrong guesses.
In the first and last acts, at the river, we watch Winston’s frustrated attempts to catch the Fish (as salmon is known to the aficionados of this delicate sport); we see the man he is and the man he might be. His bulldog determination, Bendor’s teasing, and Coco’s patient coaching form the metaphor of the lessons Winston must learn to meet the burdens only the audience knows he has yet to face.
“Maureen has been an incredible partner in the ongoing journey to take Measurement from concept to stage, from giving creative insights and suggestions based on close reading of the play, to strategizing ways to get it in front of people. I am very thankful for her help.”
— JONATHAN SALEM-BASKIN, PLAYWRIGHT