Richard
Byrne
Watch The Drowned Girl
Free on Vimeo
Art, complicity, and evil in the Nazi film industry. A once-famous starlet of Third Reich film returns as a water spirit (or Nixie) seeking redemption. Will she grapple at last with her toxic legacy – or remain condemned to her watery oblivion? Watch our 70 minute film FREE on Vimeo -- and find out more at our website for the film.
Listen to "Poison Pens" - a Congressman Davy track by Deano & Jo. ​​​
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True story: Frontier legend Davy Crockett was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The Whig Party courted him as a candidate for the White House. So how did it all go wrong?
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​Congressman Davy is a quintessential Washington, DC story. You’ll meet Anne Royall -- first woman in America to edit and publish her own newspaper -- and a variety of characters in capital city of the 1830s, including hotel proprietors, political wheeler-dealers, a singing bear, and a young editor named Edgar Allan Poe.​
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A new alt-country/hard folk musical with 23 original tunes ​​co-written by Dean Schlabowske (Waco Brothers, Deano & Jo, Wreck) and Richard Byrne.​​
Hotel Mayflower
NOW AVAILABLE! A bilingual (English/German) edition of the play from Moloko Print.
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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.
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Hotel Mayflower imagines how these three lives intersected in a Manhattan hotel in 1939 - a landscape of political refugees, growing fascism, and attempts to rewrite history.
Semifinalist, 2019 Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference.​
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An Evening with Lola Montez
Love. Lies. Riots. Revolution. Spend the night with a firebrand.
The dancer who brought down a king in 1848 tells her picaresque tale of celebrity and scandal.
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"One of the most fascinating Fringe shows I've seen..." -- Broadway World
Nero/Pseudo
"[A] bona-fide hit musical, from the pen of Richard Byrne." - Broadway World
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"... a fun romp that effortlessly links ancient themes of imperial deification & the 20th century cult of rock and roll." - MD Theatre Guide
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World Premiere: May 2014 at WSC/Avant Bard
Plays Pandemical
Six monologues, filmed in 2020 by Pandora Machine and Mind the Gap, explore how COVID-19 rippled through our lives.
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Featured in the Vancouver and Prague Fringe Festivals​​​
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"[A] series of short monologues for YouTube that have captured a world wide following." -- DC Theatre Scene
Recent Writing
The amazing story of how two American women
became war correspondents in 1897 Greece.
Meet Ilse Burroughs. The true story of William Burroughs' first wife and his 1937 marriage.
How the Velvet Revolution - and an American grad student - inspired Bohumil Hrabal.
Was Lola Montez a revolutionary figure? An opportunistic reactionary? Both?
Ivan Sviták, the Soviet invasion of Prague in 1968 -- and free thought in a post-truth age.
How did the streets of Hong Kong become a teeming laboratory for protest in a surveillance state?
 Protest and the Muse: The Late Work of Hrabal |
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 1897: Women War Correspondents in Greece |
 Meet Ilse Burroughs |
 Truth in a "Post-Truth" Age: Ivan Svitak |
 Lola Montez: Revolutionary or Reactionary? |
 Protests in a Surveillance Age: Hong Kong 2019 |
(C) 2025 by Richard Byrne