Richard
Byrne
Three Suitcases
Semifinalist, 2019 Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference
True story: Long before finding fame as a writer, Beat Generation icon William Burroughs met a German Jewish woman named Ilse Herzfeld Klapper in Dubrovnik. A year later, they were married.
Ilse Burroughs received a U.S. visa from this marriage and arrived in New York in 1939, where she worked for exiled anti-fascist German writer Ernst Toller.
Three Suitcases imagines the intersection of these three lives in Manhattan's Hotel Mayflower in 1939 - a landscape of political refugees, growing fascism, and attempts to rewrite history.
Coming Soon
The Drowned Girl
A fable about art, complicity and evil in the Nazi film industry.
Congressman Davy
A new musical about Davy Crockett's political rise and fall.
Music by Dean Schlabowske (Waco Brothers, Wreck)
Plays Pandemical
Six broadside-style monologues, filmed at various moments in 2020, reflect on how COVID-19 rippled through our lives. How did pandemic change our views of science, history, art, government -- and ourselves?
Featured in the Vancouver and Prague Fringe Festivals
All works filmed in a socially-distanced manner, in collaboration with Pandora Machine and Mind the Gap Theatre.
"[A] series of short monologues for YouTube that have captured a world wide following." -- DC Theatre Scene
An Evening
with Lola Montez
World premiere:
July 2019 at the Capital Fringe Festival
Nero/Pseudo
"[A] bona-fide hit musical, from the pen of Richard Byrne." - Broadway World
"... a fun romp that effortlessly links ancient themes of imperial deification & the 20th century cult of rock and roll." - MD Theatre Guide
World Premiere May 2014 - WSC/Avant Bard
Recent Writing
How the Velvet Revolution - and an American grad student - sparked a classic book by Bohumil Hrabal.
How did the streets of Hong Kong become a teeming laboratory for protest in a surveillance state?
Ivan Sviták, the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 -- and the continuing relevance of his thought in a post-truth age.