Dr. Gilbert Chesnet “diagnoses” 18-year-old Alice Barbin (played by a woman) as a biological male, triggering for both of them a strange journey through the labyrinth of their gender-segregated, name-obsessed society. While Barbin embarks upon a Kafkaesque new life as a man without a past, Chesnet unexpectedly finds himself attracted to the “man” Barbin. Barbin's former lover, Agathe, searches for the woman she has lost. When the assumed boundaries between female and male, medicine and religion, “the love of enigma and the enigma of love” erode, Chesnet, Barbin, and Agathe all face the disintegration of their most fiercely defended certainties.

This play was inspired by the 1868 memoirs of H.A. Barbin, and won an Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation 2002 Playwriting Grant, and first place in the ATHE PlayWorks 2002 awards.

       Three-Act: 1 hr. 30 min. – abstract, minimal sets

       3M: 20, late 30s, 40-55

       6F: four are 16-25, two are 40s (one may be F2M or woman-born-woman)

Venice, 1355. When the Senate refuses to punish a graffiti artist with the death penalty, Doge Marino Faliero — an aging war hero — decides to murder the Senators and establish a dictatorship in the interests of national security. Can he accomplish “regime change, leader stabilization” without setting off the jewel of the Republic’s defense system — the mysterious Ratapult?

A genre-bending satirical variation on (George Gordon) Lord Byron’s “closet drama” “Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice” (1823).

       Two-Act – 75 min. – minimal set

       #M: 4 – playing ages: 70, 40s, 30s, 25-30

       F: 2 – playing ages 30 and 25-35

London, 1918. Noel Pemberton-Billing, M.P. claims that Toronto-born Maud Allan (AKA “the Salome Dancer”) is one of 47,000 spies recruited by the Germans from Britain’s lesbian, gay, “enemy alien” and Jewish populations. As Allan fights to save her career and her closeted relationship with a politician’s wife, Billing’s accusations dragnet an expanding blacklist — including her lover. When distinctions between fantasy and reality, entertainment and terror collapse, Allan must rethink her escapism, in life and art, into the network of self-reflecting illusions she calls the “diamond net.” Based on a true story.

       Three-Act: 1 hr. 30 min. – abstract, minimal sets

       6M

       4F