Three Suitcases
2019 Semifinalist, Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference
True story: In 1937, long before his fame as a writer, Beat Generation icon William Burroughs married an older woman to help her escape the Holocaust.
Ilse Herzfeld Burroughs arrived in New York in 1939. She was hired as a secretary by German playwright and politician Ernst Toller -- a fierce anti-fascist who was public enemy number one in the eyes of the Nazi regime.
Three Suitcases is set in landscape of political refugees and exiles, growing fascism, and relentless attempts to erase or rewrite history.
Click here to find out more about Three Suitcases.
Read about Ernst Toller, the Bavarian Revolution, and Dachau here.
An Evening With Lola Montez
Love. Lies. Riots. Revolution.
Spend the night with a firebrand.
The biographers of Lola Montez have been bedeviled by the legends and the fabrications attached to her story. But what did Lola say about her extraordinary life? An Evening with Lola Montez draws upon lectures she gave in her last years.
"An Evening With Lola Montez is one of the most fascinating Fringe shows I've seen..." -- Broadway World
"[T]he crafty script weaves through the circuitous passages in Lola’s rise to international acclaim." -- DC Theatre Scene
Recent Writing
Nero's dead, right? Or perhaps his biggest fans won't let Rome's cruel but entertaining emperor exit the stage just yet.
In Nero/Pseudo , a strangely improbable but true tale of imperial impersonation from ancient Rome and Greece collides with the glitter and bombast of glam rock.
"There are plenty of reasons to check out this bona-fide hit musical, from the pen of Richard Byrne."
(Broadway World)
... a fun romp that effortlessly links ancient themes of imperial deification and the twentieth century cult of rock and roll."
(MD Theatre Guide)
Header photos: (Left) Lee Liebeskind as Stratocles and Gillian Shelley as Chrysis in Nero/Pseudo. Photo by Teresa Wood. (Center) Mary Murphy as Lola MOntez in An Evening with Lola Montez/. Photo by Bryanda Minix. (Right.) Daniel Flint as Edward Kelley in Burn Your Bookes. Photo by Teresa Castracane.
Page photos: Daguerrotype of Lola Montez (1851) from the studio of Southworth & Hawes . Photo in the public domain; Detail from a collage by Jiří Kolář from Bohumil Hrabal's book, Automat Svet , Photo by Richard Byrne; Gillian Shelley as Chrysis in Nero/Pseudo (center), Photo by Teresa Wood.