c/o Morgan Jenness
Abrams Artists Agency
275 Seventh Avenue 26th Floor
New York, NY 10001
(646) 486-4600
Agent Email:
Morgan.Jenness@abramsart.com
Email:
newdramatists@newdramatists.org
American Theatre Magazine named interdisciplinary artist Daniel Alexander Jones one of fifteen up-and-coming artists “whose work will be transforming America’s stages for decades to come.” His plays and performance pieces have been presented to critical acclaim, including Blood:Shock:Boogie, Earthbirths, Ambient Love Rites, clayangels, and La Chanteuse Nubienne. Daniel developed his directorial style on productions of new plays by award-winning American writers and was resident director at Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre in Austin. He has performed across the country, notably N.Y., Boston, Austin, Seattle and Minneapolis and abroad in London, Manchester and Dublin. Jones is currently a member of the Faculty in Goddard College’s MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts Program. Daniel was the 2000 NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence at Boston's Theater Offensive and a Howard Foundation Playwriting fellow for 2002-2003. A native of Massachusetts and resident of Manhattan, Jones holds a Bachelor of Arts in Africana Studies from Vassar College and a Master of Arts in Theatre from Brown University.
BEL CANTO
Full-length Drama
2M, 4 W
Flexible Set
Bel Canto is an operatic play set in late 1970s New England. Marian
Anderson, astral-projected in the sky, sings to Benjamin Turner–newly
arrived in Massachusetts in the middle of winter with his mother,
Bessie, who has left Berkeley, California to start nursing school on the
East Coast. Benjamin’s father, Percy, a draft-dodger, has not returned
from hiding in Canada, leaving Benjamin and Bessie to deal with his
absence and silence. Benjamin soon meets two people who will alter the
course of his life–Terence, a shy outcast at school with a mysterious
secret, and Barbara Scarlatti, a former opera singer, who sweeps
Benjamin into the world of singing with hurricane force.
Premiere, Theater
Offensive/Wheelock Theater (2003); Actors Express, Atlanta, GA (2003).
Workshops/Readings: Sundance Theater Lab (2002), New York Theater
Workshop (2002), The Public Theater (2001).
“Daniel Alexander Jones’s play is a remarkable blend of mysticism and
reality. It has Marian Anderson hovering angelically in the sky, a
single mother with both feet on the ground, and its teenage hero somehow
in between. It has a sweet story of first love and an undercurrent of
searing loss, operatic arias, and Jimi Hendrix riffs. Somehow it all
comes together in a story that feels at once logical and
surprising.”—Louise Kennedy, Boston Globe
EARTHBIRTHS: THE BLACKBIRD
CIPHER
Drama
6M, 3W. May be double-cast creatively
Single Unit Abstract Set
EARTHBIRTHS is a jazz play, rooted in the avant-garde structural
experiments of artists like John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra and
Pharaoh Sanders among others. Harper, a young protagonist, is visited by
ghosts from his father’s childhood in the South. Struggling to understand
the fragments and their meaning in his own young life, the central
character interrogates the silence surrounding his father’s family’s
participation in the Great Migration from South to North. What was hidden
by the parent comes to light through the child -- in order for this father
and son to truly experience freedom, the road to that freedom, the journey
itself must be scrupulously remembered. Lessons. Riffs. Sweetness at the
end.
“[Jones] blends a love of language, an innate feel for music, a
yearning heart, and a wicked sense of humor into a singular wellspring of
theatricality.” - Austin Chronicle
Premiere at Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre (1995); Workshops/Readings at
The Jungle Theatre, Center Stage.
BLOOD:SHOCK:BOOGIE
Performance Text/Comedy
3M or 2M, 1W
Flexible Set
A “Generation X Superhero Creation Story.” Luna learns to fight, love and
survive in his urban community of the early 1980s. The soft, tender
discovery of his homosexuality is juxtaposed against the brash sound and
movement of an increasingly polarized larger popular culture. Finding
solace in vivid imaginings of comic book heroes, Luna becomes the moon to
save himself.
Premiere: Frontera @ Hyde Park Theatre (1996), The Theater Offensive
(1996), Outward Spiral Theater (1997), Indigo Productions (1997). Readings
The Playwrights’ Center.