Richard
Byrne
Helsinki
An actor's Zoom interview for an infomercial reveals conflict between art & commerce. Kool-Aid. Shakespeare. Baldness. Such stuff as dreams are made on?
Featuring Tony Travostino.
Flamingo
Bonnie never thought she'd be at the center of Florida's catastrophic COVID response. But suddenly she's on TV, explaining it all.
Featuring Rebecca Kush.
Let the Darkness In
A government public health official's final message to her team warns about the danger of politicizing science.
Featuring Christa Kimlicko Jones
A Pair of Shoes
Ancient Romans accepted endless wars, a debased currency, and mass execution of rulers' political opponents. Sound familiar?
Featuring Maduka Steady.
Day 21
How does illness lay bare the fragility of our lives?
Featuring Cathy Conneff.
"A stunning performance .." -- DC Theatre Scene
The Garden of
Earthly Delights
What will our post-COVID world look like? An era of the human body?
Featuring Henrietta Weekes.
An Evening
with Lola Montez
World premiere:
July 2019 at the Capital Fringe Festival
Three Suitcases
Semifinalist
2019 Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference
New York 1939: A landscape of political refuges, growing fascism, and attempts to rewrite history.
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
Recent Writing
"I have found pandemic winter brutal. I'm just really over it.”
Chris Hayes navigates a season of COVID-19.
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?
An interview with Irene Zanol on the links between art and politics in the work of
Ernst Toller.
Ivan Sviták, the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 -- and the continuing relevance of his thought in a post-truth age.
The connections between the 1919 victory of Munich revolutionaries at Dachau & the Nazi creation of a death camp there in 1933.
Exploring "weaponized interdependence" and how global networks shape foreign policy with scholars Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman.
A conversation with one of America's great actors - John Astin - about teaching a new generation the tricks of the trade.
