PORTFOLIO

At the conclusion of the 1919 Spanish Flu, a murderer crept through the streets causing mass hysteria. And apparently he loved jazz music. He wrote an op-ed to the Times-Picayune addressing the townsfolk of New Orleans, instructing each and every one of them, to play jazz music and a life would be spared. Presented as a radio drama for a trio of actors and accompanying jazz-based chamber ensemble, Axeman delves into the psychology of making profit off human suffering and an exploration of the American Dream.

Fizz & Ginger traces the steps of the 1920s New Yorker nightlife reviewer, Lipstick, as she enters a party in pursuit of a story. Hot on the heels of her rum-running boyfriend Benny, she finds him at The Crossroads, an underground speakeasy, mixed with company she’s never seen before. Old Tom Bullock is in town slinging drinks fresh out of his cocktail book while Marjorie croons the tunes of a lover lost to the Great War. Nellie, a writer for Harlem’s The Messenger magazine, is there to support her Bohemian best friend Bruce who is necking with a man he shouldn’t be in cahoots with.

HOME, presented as a radio drama for female narrator and chamber ensemble, is a theatrical update of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist essay "The Home: Its Work and Influence". Inspired by the world around us, HOME explores the psychology of a woman trapped within her house while a virus runs rampant outside. She is faced with a lineage of ladies who have been longing to leave their homes, and have an identity of their own.

PAPER DAUGHTER tells the story of a family in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1900 Bubonic Plague. Our story begins on Lunar New Year as a Grandson lights incense for his Mother. Grandfather tells the tale as he remembers it— beginning with patient zero through the quid pro quo shook on in the Oval Office to suppress the news and blame the Chinese. This play provides insight into the arduous immigration process the paper sons and paper daughters had to go through to get in through Angel Island. PAPER DAUGHTER provides an insight into the timelessness of family relationships, prejudice and violence, politicians and oppression and of course, illness.

Princess Maleine, a retelling of a Maeterlinck play, is based on a Brothers Grimm tale. The princess is expected to marry Prince Hjalmar, of a neighboring kingdom, but their fathers start a war. Maleine is consigned to a tower but escapes with her handmaiden. Boldly concealing her identity, she becomes a servant in the house of Hjalmar. The prince is by now engaged to Ursula, whose mother Queen Anne has insinuated herself into King Hjalmar’s court. Anne discovers Maleine's identity and coaxes the King to help her kill her daughter’s rival. Horrified by the murder, the prince kills Anne and then himself.

Witness one woman's journey on the road to madness in the one-act interpretation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, divided into thirteen fated 'journal entries. The story depicts the effect of extreme loneliness and solitude, common to women of that station, on the narrator's mental health and her descent into psychosis. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. But there is something else about that paper – the smell! ... The only thing I can think of that it is like is the color of the paper! A yellow smell."