Richard
Byrne
Helsinki
An actor's Zoom interview for an infomercial reveals conflict & collusion between art & commerce. Kool-Aid. Shakespeare. Male pattern 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 response to COVID-19. But suddenly she's on TV, explaining it all.
Featuring Rebecca Kush. Directed by Andrew Bellware.
Let The Darkness In
A public health official's last message to her team explores the collision of science and politics in a time of pandemic.
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 a stunning performance .." -- DC Theatre Scene
The Garden of Earthly Delights
What will our post-COVID world look like?
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.
