c/o Patricia McLaughlin
Beacon Artists Agency
120 East 56th Street, suite 540
New York, NY 10022
(212) 736-6630
Email:
beaconagency@hotmail.com
THE
LISTENER
Full-length Play, 90 minutes
3M: SMAK: young man, teens to early 20s, any race; JOHN: man, late 20s to 30ish, any race; NAMER: older man, any race
2W: LISTENER woman, any race; JELLY: young woman,
teens to early 20s, any race Generations
after most of humanity has discarded a ruined Earth for a shiney new
moon colony, the Listener spends her life alone with a sacred radio,
calling out to hoped-for fellow survivors and harboring a vision for the
future of Earth. Her fellow Junk City citizens have their own roles to
play in a fragile, cobbled-together new culture
Unit Set: Junk City; a town built out on and of an ancient garbage
dump, surrounded by wilderness.
Workshops:
JAW/West, Portland Center Stage, July
2006
WET, OR ISABELLA THE PIRATE QUEEN ENTERS THE HORSE LATITUDES
Full-length Play, 105 minutes
4M, 3W Workshops: Summer Play Festival ’04, Portland Stage Company’s
Little Festival of the Unexpected (2005), and Cutting Ball’s "Risk is
This" Festival (2004). Finalist, Humana Festival (2006). Production:
MOXIE Theater, San Diego (2006) "Adams' writing is lyrical and circuitous, with an almost
Shakespearean weight to it. …[Wet] showcases her sly, literary sense of
humor."
Unit Set
Three female pirates and a drag queen seize a half-wrecked ship manned
only by Captain Joppa and two sailors. Joppa is determined to get back
to the war. The legendary Isabella has other plans. But soon the seven
souls find themselves without wind or current on a slowly sinking ship.
A liquid narrative of time lurches and shifting loyalties, blank verse
and sudden violence, transgressive desires…and very bad weather.
"A brilliant satirical drama on the conflicts between authority and individualism, slavery and freedom, Blacks and whites, Queers and straights."—San Diego Indy Media
Full-length Play with Music
3M, 3W
Unit Set
A theatrical, darkly comic variation on the classic
post-apocalyptic genre, Dog Act follows Zetta Stone, a traveling
performer, and her companion Dog (a young man undergoing a voluntary
species demotion) as they walk through the wilderness of the former
northeastern U.S. with their little troupe. They are heading toward a
gig in China, if they can find it…and if they can survive. Five original
songs.
Co-production of Shotgun Players and Playwrights
Foundation (2004). MOXIE Theatre, San Diego (2005). Winner, Will
Glickman Award for Best New Play. Humana Festival finalist. Workshopped
at Bay Area Playwrights Festival and Portland Stage Company’s Little
Festival of the Unexpected. Finalist, Clauder Competition for Excellence
in Playwriting and Primary Stages Bug ’n Bub Award.
“Culture is a mutable, imperiled and hilariously vigorous thing in the
postapocalyptic world of Liz Duffy Adams’ Dog Act.… It’s a bright
dystopian blend of pop and high culture… peppered with astonishing and
exhilarating eruptions of storytelling and wondrous plays within the
play.”–Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
“The real triumph of the two-act, two-hour Dog Act is that it manages to
become more interesting with each scene. Adams spins language like a
juggler twirls chain saws. What could be dangerous and lumbering becomes
deft and surprisingly graceful…. Dog Act is an unusual, challenging play
that creates its own rules but honors the oldest rule of all: good
storytelling is its own reward.” – Chad Jones, Oakland Tribune
“Audiences…were enthralled with her poetic language juxtaposed with a
sort of postmodern Shakespearean structure.” –Callboard magazine
The Reckless Ruthless Brutal Charge Of IT, or THE TRAIN PLAY
Full-length Play, 90 Minutes
5M, 3W
Unit Set
Sex, drugs, and millennial anxiety: One night from dusk
to dawn on a train hurtling towards infinity, eight strangers meet. A
twelve-year-old with the powers of a comic book heroine manipulates time
and the lives of a jaded Earth Goddess, an unraveling physicist, an
Irishman fleeing predatory angels, an embittered travel writer, and
three brothers from Ulyanovsk. When the sun comes up, they’ll all get to
find out what the other side of the end of the world looks like.
Produced by Clubbed Thumb in NYC and Crowded Fire in
San Francisco. Finalist for the Clauder Competition for Excellence in
Playwriting (1999).
“Adams gets us where we want to go. With a comedic and mellifluous
verbosity, she plumbs the metaphoric depths of her setting… A playful
derailment of American dreams and apocalyptic nightmares.” –San
Francisco Bay Guardian
“Packed with rapid-fire, dense dialogue and characters whose motivations
are anything but immediately obvious, the show isn’t for those whose
idea of entertainment nirvana is Everybody Loves Raymond… As each of
these travelers hurtles toward a metaphorical apocalypse, viewers, too,
inevitably are thinking about their own place in a complex, often cruel
world.”—San Francisco Examiner
POODLE WITH GUITAR AND DARK GLASSES
One Act, 45 Minutes
2M, 3W
Unit Set
A dog portrait-painter loses control of her brush. A romance writer loses control of her heroine. An English teacher loses control of the to be verb. A neighborhood activist suffers an alarming transmogrification into a migratory seabird. In an urban art, located over an after-hours club, five people struggle with the perils of living or working according to formula.
Lincoln Center Theater Director’s Lab at HERE. Published by Applause in Best American Short Plays 2000-2001.
10-minute Restoration Comedy in Rhyming Couplets
1M, 2W
Unit Set
Antwerp, 1660. Aphra Behn, poet, spy, and soon to be the first professional female playwright, is flat broke and waiting to meet her contact: an ex- lover, the double agent William Scot. She must use all her wiles and wit—and seduce the landlord’s daughter—to pay off her inn bill and get back to London. Hot, fast, and poetic.
Women’s Project & Productions’ Tandem Acts Festival, 2001.
10-minute Science Fiction Play
1M, 2W
Unit Set
It’s the year 2509—exactly ten minutes
before the end of the world—and the oldest living human, 512-year-old
Earthling, refuses to evacuate. Can the Captain of the last transport
and her gravity-challenged Lunatic adjunct persuade her to leave?
Women’s Project & Productions’ Tandem Acts
Festival (2000), New Georges’ Perform-a-thon (2000), Estrogenius
Festival (2001). Published by Playscripts, Inc.
ONE BIG LIE
Full-length play with music, 110 minutes
Unit set 3 M, 5 W (some gender flexibility)
A music-theater epic spanning centuries—from the ancient world to our
own near future—and interweaving stories of gods and mortals. Lu-Lu the
God of Lies is banished from the celestial realm and makes her way among
humans to plot revolution against her fellow gods and their eternal
abuse of power. Meanwhile a young woman sets out to rescue her sister
from a lustful god—a sister who is learning all too well the lessons of
ruthless brutality. With music by Bay Area composer David Rhodes.
Co-production, Crowded Fire and Playwrights
Foundation, San Francisco 2005
“A merry musical about death, destruction and devious deities… reaffirms
that Adams is a voice meant for our time.… One Big Lie, [an] exercise in
lively, kinetic language, teases us with the answers to all the world’s
problems…. [A] blend of humanism and righteous nastiness [with] terrific
dialogue and fantastic sense of humor.” –Chad Jones, Oakland Tribune
“[A] savvy, tantalizing, funny…beguiling dance with the problem of evil…
another vigorously meta-theatrical trip through one of Adams’
fantastical constructs…. As penetrating as it is entertaining.” –Robert
Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle
“[A] play with truth-telling and the problem of power at its core…a
word-dazzled, politically savvy new musical… A cleverly satirical…take
on the idealization and reverence for power in the minds of its victims,
One Big Lie is a deadly serious frolic with a wary eye on the immediate
future.” –Robert Avila, Bay Area Guardian