c/o New Dramatists
424 West 44th Street
New York, NY 10036
(212) 757-6960
(212) 265-4738 fax
Email:
newdramatists@newdramatists.org
Lonnie Carter grew up in Chicago's Jefferson Park at the city's major bus-turn-around. His plays—The Sovereign State of Boogedy Boogedy, Lemuel, Gulliver, Concerto Chicago, The Romance Of Magno Rubio and Wheatley—have been performed at the Yale Repertory Theater; the American Place Theater; La MaMa; E.T.C.; Victory Gardens Theater; the Laguna Playhouse, the Long Wharf Theater, the Carlos Bulosan Theatre and the Ma-Yi Theater Company. His play The Lost Boys of Sudan will be produced at the Childrens’ Theater Company in 2006. Organizing Abraham Lincoln, written with Rich Klimmer, was workshopped at the Playwrights’ Center in the summer of 2005. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, twice a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and twice a Fellow of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He is a member of the Playwrights’ Ensemble at Victory Gardens and a resident playwright at New Dramatists. He is a graduate of Marquette University and the Yale School of Drama. He teaches playwriting in the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University.
- CHINA CALLS
- THE ROMANCE OF MAGNO RUBIO
- CONCERTO-RING-A-LEVIO
- BOLLYWOOD
- LEMUEL
- GULLIVER
- GULLIVER REDUX
- BABY GLO
- THE SOVEREIGN STATE OF BOOGEDY BOOGEDY
- BRER CLARE
- CHOCOLATE CITY
- IZ SHE IZZY OR IZ HE AIN’TZY OR IZ THEY BOTH
- BICICLETTA
- NECKTIE PARTY
- THE GIRL IN THE SHINY BLACK HELMET
- THE ODD WOMEN
- MOTHERS AND SONS
- POPS
- SIRENS
- THE LOST BOYS OF SUDAN
CHINA CALLS
Comedy/Drama 3M, 3W, 1-4 Asians
The author's fictionalized account of his commuting between Beijing and
Chicago in 1998-99.
Staged readings at New Dramatists
1999, and 2000; Staged reading at Aurora Theater, San Francisco, 2002.
THE ROMANCE OF MAGNO RUBIO
A Play with Music 5M, all Asian (Filipino where possible)
Magno Rubio Filipino Boy/Magno Rubio Fili-pinoy/Magno Rubio four feet six
inches tall/ Magno Rubio dark as a coconut ball searches for love amidst
the cabbage, asparagus, and tomato fields of central California. Based on
the short story of the same name by Carlos Bulosan.
Workshop production by Ma-Yi Theater
Company at the Blue Heron, NYC, 2002. Off-Broadway production 2002, Union
Square, again by Ma-Yi.
CONCERTO-RING-A-LEVIO
A Concert of Works 2W (African-American and/or Asian)
Songs, raps, riffs, sonnets, et cetera, from seven or eight plays.
Victory Gardens, 2003.
BOLLYWOOD
Comedy/Drama 2W, (1 African-American and 1 Asian)
Two highly articulate, successful women of color talk and resolve
everything under the sun that never sets.
Staged reading new Dramatists 2001.
LEMUEL
Comedy/Drama Rap-Opera 9-12 Multi-ethnic Ensemble (African-American
male lead)
All-purpose, All-transmogrifying Bench
LEMUEL is the story of Lemuel Louis Gulliver, an African-American man born
in1942. It chronicles his life from his birth through 1987, when he fully
commits to life as a preacher-politician.
“In his language-drunk play Lemuel,
Lonnie Carter has drawn on everything from the spiraling patter of
modernist writers Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, to the embroidered
exhortations of Jesse Jackson, to the infectious rhythms of rap, hip-hop
and funk. Lemuel is dazzling chamber theater.” –The Chicago Sun-Times
La MaMa E.T.C., 1996. Victory
Gardens Theater, Chicago, 1996.
GULLIVER
Comedy/Drama 9-12 Multi-ethnic Ensemble (African-American male lead)
Lemuel Louis Gulliver is a present day African-American preacher/activist
living the experiences of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver from Lilliput to the
land of the Houynyms.
“Gulliver, Mr. Carter’s latest
explosion, takes the hero of Jonathan Swift’s on a tour that makes
American politics seem even more lunatic than it is.” –The New York Times
“Gulliver at the Berkshire Public
Theater shows Carter at his most brilliant…a Skin of our Teeth for the
90s.” – The Hartford Courant
Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights’
Conference 1989. Berkshire Public Theater, 1990. La Mama E.T.C. 1993.
GULLIVER REDUX
Comedy/Drama 9-12 Multi-ethnic Ensemble (African-American male lead)
All-purpose Modules, Creative Backdrops, Op-art
GULLIVER REDUX continues the political adventures of Lemuel Louis
Gulliver, preacher activist in the Swiftian-cum-Jesse Jackson mold after
the Democrat’s 1988 convention. Lemuel Louis Gulliver has lost the
presidential nomination in 1988. He goes into seclusion in the poorest
region in Africa, and is hounded out of the jungle by the international
media. He returns to his home on Chicago’s Great South Side; revisits his
old school; re-strengthens his resolve to be a political force; and
travels to Chocolate City for an African-American convention of far-left
and far-right brothers, sisters, and everybody in between.
Staged Reading: La Mama E.T.C. ,
1994.
BABY GLO
Comedy/Drama 3M, 3W African-American cast (one woman must play 12 years
old)
Creative Block
Baby Glo is the 12-year-old daughter of Lemuel Louis Gulliver,
African-American preacher/activist. It’s 1987. She’s just come back from
South Africa. This is the fourth play of The Gulliver Quartet, telling the
story of Lemuel Louis Gulliver, and now his family. His 12-year-old
daughter has just returned from South Africa where she has met Nelson
Mandela. She finds her father’s brand of activism outdated and demands a
more confrontational method. Conflict between daughter and father reaches
a peak as another daughter, 30, enters to confront them both. The ghosts
of their mothers completes the fray.
Workshop at Victory Gardens Theater, 1997. Staged reading at New
Dramatists, 2000.
THE SOVEREIGN STATE OF
BOOGEDY BOOGEDY
Comedy/Drama 3M, 3W ( Mostly African-American)
Fantasy Courtroom
A retelling of the “Book of Daniel” from an African-American perspective.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, having survived being thrown into the
fiery furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar, now put Ole Kind Neb on trial. His
lawyer, Danielle, has survived her own den of lions.
“Wildly inventive celebration of
language, modeled on Tom Stoppard, but grounded in jive vernacular.”– Sid
Smith, The Chicago Sun-Times
“Carter is a ‘New Elizabethan’” –
Hedy Weiss, The Chicago Sun-Times
Victory Gardens, 1985. Chicago
Theatre Company, 1985. New Federal Theater 1986. Revised for the 25th
Anniversary of Victory Gardens in 1998. New Federal Theater anniversary
production, 2003.
BRER CLARE
Comedy/Drama 9 Multi-ethnic Ensemble (African-American male lead)
Ante-bellum Fantasy Stuff
Uncle Tom’s Cabin as seen through the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill Trial.
Harriet Beecher Stowe meets Clarence Thomas. Thomas is pulled back and
forth from the nineteenth- century ante-bellum to the twentieth-century
confirmation hearings. Will Anita Hill have the last judgment? A sprawling
piece, which takes gargantuan performances and a lot of imagination.
CHOCOLATE CITY
Comedy/Drama 10 Person Ensemble (African-American lead)
Peter Pan Set, Bare Bones and All
Peter Pan, a 40-year-old African-American who lives in Chocolate City,
steals into the Vanilla Suburbs, abducts white children, and brings them
back to Chocolate City. He’s been doing this for quite a while and the
‘burbs are getting emptied out. The frightened parents, all of whom are
politicians in the District of Chocolate, are convinced he’s leading them
into perdition. Of course, he’s not.
IZ SHE IZZY OR IZ
HE AIN’TZY OR IZ THEY BOTH
Comedy 3M, 3W
Fantasy Courtroom, Creative Modules
Comedy courtroom kinder gentler gender reversal Gilbert and Sullivan
rolling in their crypts. Perfect for high schools, colleges, small theater
companies and anyone who wants unadulterated “60s mayhem.”
“Classic bit of 60’s mayhem.” –
Newsday
“A work of great verbal elan and
inventiveness, combined with a Marx Brothers-like physicality.”– The New
York Times
Yale Repertory Theater, 1969. High
schools, universities, various theater groups throughout the States.
BICICLETTA
Comedy/Drama 1M, 4W (Color Blind) Suggestion of a Nunnery
Sister Bicicletta came to her vocation late-in-life after a successful
stage and film career. Sister Bicicletta, despite excursions to the
outside, has retreated to the nunnery run by Mother Ubbidienza, joined by
Sister Poveretta, Sister Chastitata, and now brother Stuzzicadenti. This
is not Ken Russell, not Agnes of God, not Bunuels’ Viridiana; it is its
own special take on spirituality in the modern age.
“First-rate play. Don’t give it to
anyone else. I’m doing it.” – Joseph Papp
Staged reading at the Public
Theater, NY (1978). Theater Colonnades (1983).
NECKTIE PARTY
Comedy/Drama 3M, 2W (Mostly African-American)
Clean Stage. Ready for Lynching.
1987. Today, Earl Colt and Daniel Winchester turn 45 years old. Their
wives, Alice Colt Winchester and Evanescent Wilco Winchester Colt, join
them for their celebration. A mix of basketball, race, miscegenation, and
sex—all resolved dues ex machine—against the backdrop of Chicago’s
Riverview Park, an amusement park fallen on seedy times.
Victory Gardens Theater, 1987.
THE GIRL IN THE SHINY BLACK
HELMET
Comedy/Drama 2M, 3W
Suggestion of Ship, Train, and Movie Set
The silent film actress Louise Brooks, the model for Betty Boop, on the
set of her 1928 film Pandora’s Box. Louise Brooks is chosen by the famous
German film director G.W. Pabst to play the classic German femme fatale,
Lulu (also the subject of the Alban Berg opera Lulu). Louise arrives
knowing no German, and is immediately plunged into the tumultuous
post-World War I Germany. Caught between the wars, this classic story
culminates in the triumph of Jack the Ripper, yet the actress survives to
love another day.
Radio version at WNYU, 1984.
THE ODD WOMEN
Drama 10 Member Ensemble
Clean Stage
THE ODD WOMEN is an adaptation of George Gissing’s novel of the same name,
published in 1893. People who know his work usually know New Grub Street,
which dramatizes what it was like to be a struggling writer in the late
nineteenth-century. The Odd Women is Dickensian in style, but without the
pathos. It helped define all sorts of male/female relationships. The title
refers to the overwhelming number of women to men (500,000 more women than
there were men at that time). Sort of like the reverse of present day
Colorado.
Staged reading: Classic Stage
Company, 1990.
MOTHERS AND SONS
Comedy 2W
Clean Stage
Two recently divorced, 40-year-old women with 17-year-old sons who live
with their fathers, meet every morning to jog and jaw. This is an activist
play–both women stretch, walk, jog, run, sprint for the length of this
30-minute play. There are interior monologues; rapid stichomythia; and a
good deal of sweat, blood, tears, and laughter.
“Flashes of Ginsburg’s ‘Howl’” – The
Chicago Sun-Times
WNYU radio, 1984. Victory
Gardens-Body Politic as a winner of Play Expo, 1987.
POPS
Comedy/Drama 1M, 3W (All African-American)
Creative Horns
Louis Armstrong late in life reviews his career with the help of his
mother, sister, and four wives.
Workshop at La MaMa, 1994.
SIRENS
Comedy/Drama 1M, 1W
Suggestion of Cabin
Two people locked in romance: the man, a writer. The woman, a firefighter.
It’s 1979. Ross and Holly fight to keep themselves together in the midst
of the sirens of fire alarms, real and metaphorical.
“Defines male-female relationships
of the late 70’s.” —Gail Merrifield Papp
Staged reading at the Public
Theater, 1979.
THE LOST BOYS OF
SUDAN
To be produced by the Childrens’ Theater Company in 2006.