Stephanie Fleischmann
c/o Patricia McLaughlin
Beacon Artists Agency
208 West 30th Street, Suite 401
New York, NY 10001
(212) 736-6630
(212) 541-8795 fax
Email:
newdramatists@newdramatists.org
WHAT THE MOON
SAW or “I ONLY APPEAR TO BE DEAD”
A Compendium — a cabinet of curiosities — four miniature plays (an
homage to Hans Christian Andersen) embedded in one larger world.
120 Minutes 5 M, 7 F; Can be performed together or individually
It’s sometime after 9/11/01. Hans Christian Andersen has been given the
key to New York City. And so he makes his way across the Hudson River
towards a changed landscape. But what will he find there?
THE EGG GIRL, or WHY BIRDS SING (inspired by “The Nightingale”):
A girl who’s forgotten how it feels to fall. A duck’s egg stolen from
Central Park. A mayor too worried about what’s decent and what’s not.
FRICTION/THE STEADFAST (inspired by “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”):
The tin soldier, just a regular guy made of tin who’s got an iguana for a
pet, has barely met the love of his life, the dancing girl, when whoosh,
out the window and off to war he flies.
MATCH, or SPOOKY ACTION (AT A DISTANCE) (inspired by “The Little Matchgirl”):
The quantum science of entangled atoms: What happens when two girls from
two worlds trade places for a day?
THE DREAM OF THE DANCING BEAR (inspired by “The Snow Queen”):
The Snow Queen and her Abominable Snowman are at a stalemate. Can the
Dancing Bear find a way to melt the Queen’s heart of ice and wake himself
up from his eternal sleep?
Workshop: Interart Development Series, NYC (2002); MATCH, or SPOOKY:
Lincoln Center Director’s Lab, NYC (2002). THE DREAM OF THE DANCING BEAR:
The Playwrights’ Center General Members Roundtable 10-minute Play
Festival.
VIPER
Full Length 5W
According to her sister Rose, ever since Helen was the Electric Girl back
when she was fourteen, she’s never been quite the same. Now the sisters
are in their sixties, and the sniper is lurking out on the Beltway. When
their schizophrenic cousin shows up unannounced and uninvited, all the way
from Florida via a pair of roller-blades, all hell breaks loose.
THE STREET OF USEFUL THINGS
Full-length Drama 3 M, 3 W
The year is 1950. Having survived the Holocaust by escaping to South
Africa, Antonia Kaspar has returned to what was once her home in Frankfurt
to discover that her great grandmother’s recipe book has disappeared. To
Antonia, for whom love equals cooking, and eating her cooking—all of
it—equals love, that recipe book equals the salvation of future
generations. And so journey through memory and exile she must, in search
of what’s been lost.
Workshop: New Dramatists’ PlayTime (2002). Reading: New Theater, Miami
(2003)
THE WORLD SPEED CARNIVAL
Full-length Drama 2M, 4W
Three generations of female motorcyclists ignite a tale of a woman born
without balance on the ride of her life—from Barstow, California to
Opa-Locka, Florida, and beyond.
Soho Rep Summer Camp 6, (2000)
THE HOTEL CARTER
Music by Jenny Giering
Full-length Music-Theater Work 5M, 6W
A small-town girl who’s pregnant with something bigger than she, and a
cartographer who would be lost if he left his room in the Hotel Carter,
embark on a 24-hour odyssey through New York City, guided by three Hell's
Kitchen kids and a suitcase full of postcards. A journey on the edge at
the end of the world in search of home.
2000 Frederick Loewe Award in Music-Theater, workshop. Developed at
Mabou Mines/Suite Resident Artists Lab (1998).
ELOISE & RAY
Drama, 75 Minutes 1M, 2W
Some Film or Video
Ovid, Colorado. Ray skips town on a mysterious mission only to find, upon
his return, that his Eloise has been sitting on the ground by the side of
the road for three days—the time he's been gone. But what better place for
a 16-year-old girl to figure out who she is and where she stands in the
scheme of things than under the big sky that stretches across the great
rolling plain, her painted face exposed to the forces of sun and wind and
sudden violent rain?
“A finely detailed, layered portrait…a bittersweet, lyrical account of
a love-starved survivor in a vast, lonely place.” —Village Voice
Roadworks, Chicago, IL (2003); New Georges/The Ohio Theater, NYC
(2000); The Hangar Lab, Ithaca, NY (2000); and University of the South,
Sewanee, TN (2000). Readings: Teatro Vascello & Teatro dei Contrari, Rome,
in Italian (1999); HBO Stage to Screen Reading Series (1998).
THE DREAM BOOK OF ORLA CURTISS
10 Minute Play 1W
102-year-old Orla Curtiss, widow of Glenn Hammond Curtiss, reflects on the
turnings of two centuries and her husband’s legacy—the invention of the
aerial bomb.
Reading: To Charles, With Love: Playwrights Respond to Charles Dickens’
A Christmas Carol; The Guthrie Lab, MN (1999).
FAR SEA PHARISEE, a.k.a.
FISH FRY
Music by Miki Navazio
Full-length Music-Theater Piece with Puppets and Live Performers 3M, 4W
and Puppeteers
Pike Solomon, carny barker, aims to save his maritime menagerie from their
imminent doom – the tainted seas. But his traveling aquatic sideshow is in
dire straits: stranded in the middle desert at the mercy of a mad
scientist, who wants to steal away Pike’s treasured trio of rebellious
mermaids. Leave it to Stella, Pike's Ma, a retired bare-back-riding
sprite, to save the day.
"This new music-theater piece is wonderfully bizarre, a story of a
landlocked traveling fish show on the brink of extinction and entrusted to
preserve the last of the sea's species. The language is plangent with
reverie and juiced by lunatic impingencies." —Village Voice
Workshops/Staged readings: Voice & Vision (1998); the Public Theater
(1995). Concert performance: the Knitting Factory (1997).
QUESTA
Drama 1M (a child), 3W (1 girl)
A foster kid who won’t talk; a runaway girl with a big mouth; a woman who
waits every day at the bus station in Questa, New Mexico for her long lost
love; an absentee mother, dreading the impending arrival of the daughter
who left her in the lurch so long ago.
"Fleischmann peoples Questa with strangers bound to each other by
blood, adoption, or a shared horizon line, but each wandering alone
through the as-far-as-the-eyes-can-see space of their lives." --Village
Voice
Road Theater/Charas El Bohio, NYC (1991); L.A. Theatreworks/KCRW (1991).