c/o Joyce Ketay
The Gersh Agency
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New York, NY 10010
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Email:
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Glen Berger’s Great Men of Science, NOS. 21 & 22 won the 1998 Ovation Award for Best Play, as well as the A.S.K. Playwriting Award. His Underneath the Lintel ran Off-Broadway for over 15 months, and the Los Angeles production won the Ovation Award for Best Play. His O Lovely Glowworm won the 2005 Portland Drammy Award for Best Script. He was a recipient of a Children’s Theater Company/New Dramatists “Playground” commission, as well as a Manhattan Theatre Club/Sloan Foundation Grant, with which he wrote the musical, On Words and Onwards (workshopped at the 2001 A.S.K. Theater Projects Writers Retreat). Mr. Berger has also written the book and lyrics to A Night in the Old Marketplace, a musical that received a National Foundation for Jewish Culture grant and the 2004 Frederick Loewe Award. He was nominated for three Emmys for his work on the PBS children’s series, Arthur and Postcards from Buster. He has also written episodes of WGBH’s Time Warp Trio and Peep, and is the head writer for Fetch, which will debut on PBS in June, 2006.
GREAT MEN OF SCIENCE,
NOS. 21 & 22
Two-act Comedy 4M, 2W
It is Paris, 1738, and the Royal Academy of Sciences has just announced
their annual contest—“prove or refute that there is wisdom and design
behind the seeming randomness of the universe.” Jacques de Vaucanson shall
prove it, and thereby win the heart of Gabrielle du Chatelet, by
constructing the first biologically accurate automata the world has ever
seen—a clockwork duck, that flaps its wings, eats, and excretes…just like
a duck. A half-century later, the Reign of Terror in full swing, Lazarro
Spallanzani labors to complete his one last experiment, if only his
long-suffering housekeeper would stop distracting him.
“The strength of Berger’s mesmerizing piece of storytelling lies in
putting science in its place by showing its early practitioners as dreamy
romantics bent on proving the existence of a rational God…” –L.A. Weekly
“The strength of their belief and their passion to strive beyond their
reach is admirably noble, and, in this brilliant playwright’s hands,
supremely intelligent, totally absorbing, and above all, riotously funny…”
–Backstage West
“A remarkable piece of sustained, intelligent and archly comic
writing…a delightful and thought-provoking intellectual adventure,
anchored in amour, outrage, provocations and curiosities…” –New Haven
Advocate
Workshop production in New York
(1998); thesis production at Yale School of Drama (1998), college
production at University of California, Berkeley (1999); Produced by The
Empty Space Theatre (2001), Florida Stage (1999), and Circle X Theatre
(1998). Ovation Award and LA Weekly Award for “Best Play” (1998).
THE WOODEN BREEKS
Two-act Comedy 6 M, 3 W (one 12 to 14-year-old boy)
A darksome comic fairy tale about the nature of loss and memory.
A tinker named Bosch, mourning the death of a long-ago love and cursing
the orphaned son she left behind, spins a tale about a conniving
saleswoman who comes to the miserable town of Brood, and makes it even
more miserable. This Miss Spoon hopes to play on the fears of a populace
pale with fright after hearing about randomly unearthed coffins found to
contain scratch marks on the inside of the lid. Fears that doctors are
mistakenly pronouncing people dead, who are merely in comas, touches off a
panic that inspires Miss Spoon and the chartered company of Bodum and
Wattney to market a Bell Device. Installed over a grave, with a wire
stretching into a coffin, this device will ring to alert the populace that
their loved one is alive and well under the ground. But can one ever give
up on a bell that never rings?
Workshop productions at Annex
Theatre (1991), Toast Theatre (1996), and Open Fist Theatre (2001).
Co-production between Perseverance Theatre and Actor’s Express in Juneau
and Atlanta, World Premiere (2002). L.A. Weekly nomination for “Best Play”
(2002).
UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL: An Impressive Presentation of Lovely Evidences
Full Length, 80 Minutes
No Intermission 1M
His odyssey began when a Baedeker’s Travel Guide—113 years overdue—was
dropped through the evening slot. Now a Dutch ex-librarian travels the
world, renting auditorium space, to prove to any who will listen that his
box of scraps contains irrefutable evidence that he is on the trail of the
mythical Wandering Jew.
“Glen Berger’s modern fable is a blissfully ludicrous vision quest,
outrageously funny, madly literate…The one-man play is a stunner, a Tom
Stoppard look-alike if ever there was one, but with a spiritual
sensitivity that extends the Librarian’s search for an alternate truth to
Everyman.” —L.A. Weekly
“One of a handful of great plays written in the last five years…”
—Seattle Weekly
“The most important, rewarding, nourishing show that I’ve seen all
season. It’s a gorgeous, unforgettable tale. Berger’s text is dazzlingly
rich and deliciously engrossing. Underneath the Lintel, so simple and
unassuming, is the most profoundly moving and wise play on the stage in
New York right now.” —Martin Denton, nytheatre.com
Actor’s Gang (2001); Soho Playhouse
(2001); Ovation Award for “Best Play” (2001); Time Out New York’s “Ten
Best Plays of 2001.”
O LOVELY GLOWWORM
Two-act Comedy 4M, 2W (Minimum)
Our narrator—a blind, deaf, formerly dead, stuffed goat—finds himself
alive again and in terrible pain. Out of desperation, he conjures up
“scenes of great beauty” to distract himself from the pain and to figure
out just how he wound up in this conundrum. A heroic story of love and
heroism devolves into the heroic story of how the Silent Valveless Water
Waste Preventer was invented. Inspired by scraps from a Dublin rubbish
heap, circa 1918, that blew in front of the tethered goat before blowing
away again.
Winner Bug n’ Bub Award 2002,
Primary Stages; Workshopped at Portland Centerstage’s JAW WEST Festival as
well as at Madison Rep.