Richard
Byrne
Plays & Films
Congressman Davy
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A new musical about Davy Crockett's political rise and fall!
Frontier legend Davy Crockett was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. The Whig Party courted him for a White House run. How did it all go wrong?
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A free streaming podcast of Congressman Davy will appear in June 2026 -- along with a CD/digital release of all 22 songs in the show. You’ll meet Anne Royall -- first woman in America to edit and publish her own newspaper -- as well as a panoply of characters in America's burgeoning new capital city: hotel proprietors and boarding house keepers, wheeler-dealer politicians, a singing bear, and a young editor named Edgar Allan Poe.
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Music by Dean Schlabowske (Waco Brothers, Wreck) ​
Hotel Mayflower
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True story: In 1936, future Beat Generation icon William Burroughs (then 22 years-old) met a German Jewish woman named Ilse Herzfeld Klapper (36 years old) in Dubrovnik. A year later, they were married.
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Ilse Burroughs received a visa which allowed her to escape Nazi Germany. Safely in New York , she was hired as a secretary by exiled anti-fascist writer and activist Ernst Toller.
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Hotel Mayflower imagines encounters between these three travelers in the Mayflower Hotel in 1939. Can a writer change the world with words? Or should the author stand apart from levers of power?
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2019 Semifinalist, Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference
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Published in 2024 in a bilingual edition by Moloko Print.
An Evening with Lola Montez
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Lola Montez was one of the most notorious figuers of her age -- dancer, performer, lover of geniuses and kings.
But when she could no longer endure the physical strain of performing, Lola wrote and delivered witty, self-penned lectures until her death in 1861 in New York City.
This play depicts one of these lectures, given in Brooklyn in 1858. Woven with a clever and engaging mix of truth and fabrication, her lectures were, by all accounts, greeted with intense curiosity and rewarded with rapturous applause.
World premiere: July 2019 at the Capital Fringe Festival
Plays Pandemical
Six monologues, filmed at various moments across 2020, reflect on how COVID-19 rippled through our lives. How did pandemic change our views of science, history, art, government -- and ourselves?
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All works filmed in a socially-distanced manner, in collaboration with Pandora Machine and Mind the Gap Theatre.
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"[A] series of short monologues for YouTube that have captured a world wide following." -- DC Theatre Scene
OBE: (Overcome By Events)
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How far would you go to spill a dark secret -- or to keep it?​
OBE (Overcome by Events) is set in a sizzling Washington DC heat wave. It traces a mad scramble that ensues when a whistleblower rips the lid off an intelligence scandal that blows up the 24-hour news cycle. Will journalists get to the bottom of it? Or can the bureaucrats and spin doctors cover it up?
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The play had two readings in February 2018 in First Draft at The Rose Theatre -- an acclaimed new play development series.
Nero/Pseudo
In Nero/Pseudo, the true story of an ex-slave and lyre player who impersonated the Emperor Nero in 69 AD collides with the world of glam rock.
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The play features 10 songs written with Jon Langford (Mekons) and James Elkington (Tweedy).
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Nero/Pseudo was developed as part of Emerging Artists Theatre's New Works Festival (NYC, 2013) and was produced in 2014 by WSC/Avant Bard in Washington, DC.
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Bradley Foster Smith (Pontus) in WSC/Avant Bard production. Photo by Theresa Wood.
Burn Your Bookes
A play about Renaissance alchemy and the power and price of knowledge, Burn Your Bookes retells the magical, strange, and sordid tale of Edward Kelley -- medium and alchemist to Hapsburg Emperor Rudolph II -- and his step-daughter Elizabeth Jane Weston -- one of the few women poets of the 16th Century.
Winner, 2007 Prague Playwriting Contest.
Productions in Prague and Washington, DC.
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Esther Williamson (Jane Dee) and Daniel Flint (Edward Kelley) in the Taffety Punk Theatre Company production of Burn Your Bookes. Photo by Teresa Castracane.
Untangling Ava
In 1989, thanks to the generosity of A.E. Hotchner (author, Hemingway biographer, and co-founder of Newman's Own), Washington University in St. Louis founded an award for graduate and undergraduate playwrights at the school.
My first play, Untangling Ava, was the winner of the inaugural A.E. Hotchner Playwriting Festival and received a full production (directed by Jeffrey Matthews) in the Drama Studio at the university in May 1989.