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Plays
A Good Smoke is an in depth study of a small family that faces the large problems of addiction, alienation and the feeding of a newborn baby. The mother of the family suffers from a history of an abusive childhood and tries to erase her pain with narcotics and cigarettes. At best, these drugs only distort her thinking and wreak havoc on her emotional life. The rest of the family has been trained to take care of Mom. This includes a hard drinking Dad, the two sons, Dave and Joe, and the daughter, Susan. But, the balance has been upset because Susan just had a baby and the baby is not thriving. And the same day Susan gave birth, not to be outdone in the attention department, Mom went into a psych ward brought about by a drug withdrawal. The family is functioning at its worst level when it needs to be functioning at its best. Dave flies in from the other side of the country and manages a shrill dose of blame. Joe, who has never left home, retreats even further into taking care of his mother. And Susan, sutured and exhausted, follows her basic biological need to get her newborn child to live. Who saves the baby is what this story is about. The one act version of A Good Smoke was performed at The Moving Arts Theatre in Los Angeles under the direction of Michael Cooper featuring Carol Hickey, Tim Orona and Jonathan Del Arco. Shortly thereafter, the whole troupe was invited to join in The Turnip Theatre Festival in New York. As a full length play, A Good Smoke has had readings at The Black Dahlia Theatre and West Coast Ensemble Theatre in Los Angeles. The full length version of A Good Smoke had its world premier in winter of 2008 at The Chandler Studio Theatre in Los Angeles produced by The Production Company. It was directed by Don Cummings, with (in alphabetical order) Blake Anthony (Joe), Dennis Delsing (Dad), Madelynn Fattibene (Susan), Barbara Gruen (Mom), Henry Gummer (Dave) and Mary McBride (Betty). Set and Lighting Design by August Viverito. Costumes by Zoe Buck. Sound by Bob Blackburn. A Good Smoke was a semifinalist for The Eugene O’Neill Playwrights Conference 2008 season. A Good Smoke had a reading at The Public Theater, in New York City, on June 14, 2009, directed by Pam MacKinnon with the following cast: Grace Gummer (Susan), Henry Wolfe Gummer (Dave), Debra Monk (Betty), Joe Paulik (Joe), John Rothman (Dad) and Meryl Streep (Mom). A Good Smoke has been optioned for a Broadway production. A Good Smoke reveals the power that exists in families even when they are functioning at their lowest level. LIVE WORK SPACE yields two couples into their futures. One couple makes it. The other one?...Set in a new loft building in downtown Los Angeles, there is restlessness, reflecting our shifting urban times. Satisfactory levels of commitment, sex and intimacy are all in question. Especially after so much recent death in the lives of a few of the main characters’ extended families. Frances, an executive at the height of her catalogue career, is married to Tad. Frances is exceptionally powerful and craves strong, physical love. Tad, an inventor, is grieving his dead pothead brother and grabs at the past and the future at once, missing the present entirely. Next door are Alan and Drake, a writer of questionable sociological nonfiction and a mid-level television executive who likes to cook, with their enticing open relationship as a possible model for connubial modernity. But this path only gets everyone into trouble. Gus, an actor who aims to please and Michelle, Drake’s oldest, clinging friend, want what they want, too. Career fulfillment, human warmth, something. By the end of the play, the walls clear out and the finale sits atop of the building with an annoying, useless helicopter flying overhead, offering no escape. Disney Hall gleams in the distance. And some very important things do fall apart while some lesser ones remain. It is sad and funny, like a marriage that survives and a marriage that does not, in a chronic culture where closeness is desired but very difficult to achieve. Live Work Space shows us the new Los Angeles, the one where not everyone works in the entertainment industry (though some do), where not everyone is self involved (though some are), where love is sex is love is maybe nothing more than a reliably grilled steak with your man at home or a night out trawling for sex with some stranger in a sterile corporate clam bar. Live Work Space had its first public reading in July, 2009 at West Coast Ensemble in Los Angeles with the following cast: David Youse, Kimberly Bailey, David Kaufman, Daniel Alemshah, Carla Barnett and Blake Anthony, directed by Ben Campbell. Six people. Six problems. Two houses side by side in upstate New York on a bucolic autumn hillside that is slowly being turned into subdivisions. In one house lives a married couple who long to have children but who are not physiologically able. They are religious, rural and traditional. Beverly once taught school but has stopped since, "Children don't really understand Christ." In the other house lives a hip musician, James, and his even hipper artist best friend, Martha. They are weekenders from New York City who just want to make their marks on earth as artists. James is gay. Martha is busy getting ready for the opening of her huge art show of sculptures hewn from lard. They are atheist, urban and very modern. Certainly, they don't think too much of their townie neighbors. But the neighbors keep coming over looking to James for the very thing they need in order for them to have a baby. Will the sperm fly? And will the stress of sperm gathering cause a conflagration? A loving transsexual named Claudia and a bright-eyed, narcissistic dancer round out the cast in this thoughtful drama with plenty of comedy about who gets to inherit the earth. The Fat of the Land was workshopped at The West Coast Ensemble in Los Angeles followed by its World Premiere at The Theatre District, produced by The New Theatre--Autumn, 2006, featuring Robert Gantzos, Larisa Miller, Mary McBride, Guy Wilson, Dan Alemshah and John Bader. Dan Alemshah received the LA Ovation Award for Best Featured Actor for his portrayal of Claudia Vestibule. The Fat of the Land also had a full staged reading in Octoberfest at Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York City, directed by Billy Hopkins. The New York cast included Ean Sheehy, Jodie Markell, Leslie Lyles, Mark Elliot Wilson, Dan Alemshah and Henry Gummer. The Fat of the Land was one of fifteen finalists for the Kaufman & Hart Prize for New American Comedy at Arkansas Repertory Theatre. Has the world gone mad? Are bullets the only thing anyone pays attention to any longer? What is the television doing taking over our everyday thoughts? And who is that handsome young reporter in the virtual reality helmet chasing everyone around the house for a good news story? Three siblings, Loyalty (who cares about no one), Discipline (who does anything he feels like doing) and Patience (who thinks through nothing) are lathered into a ruse on Independence Day at their father's house to expose the newspaperman rapist who sired Patience's baby- a baby who is surprisingly born at intermission. Stories get crossed. Discipline, who is naturally bisexual and shouts in French love jests, chases after the young reporter. Loyalty decides to leave her brutish husband for an ineffectual statistician (brilliantly originated by Tim Maculan). Patience decides to shoot her father because she thinks he is in on covering up her rape. An Armenian detective snoops, who is, by the way, not really an Armenian detective at all. She serves as the heart of this play and also possesses the necessary linguistics to pull off this ruse in English and silly French. When asked how she, as an Armenian, knows so many languages, she replies, "Forgotten as a race, we immerse ourselves in Berlitz." Patience is ultimately avenged with the help of her family, realizes her father is not evil after all and everyone decides to start a new life together, raising a baby in the optimistic state of New Hampshire. "A more traditional farce, the plot pivots on what appears to be a shooting across the street. That only partly explains the presence of an Armenian detective and sets the stage for a comedic retinue of family dysfunctions, as well as a cartoon of our violence-drenched culture, and the idiotic media that ostensibly report it." - LA WEEKLY Eleven characters collide in this highly acclaimed airborne one-man show about moving on in a world obsessed, literally, with moving on. "Maps are killing us!" A Brooklyn momma's boys, an anorexic dancer named Collette, a clever, vituperative rich guy and a French stewardess push the limits of their psyches among some wanna-be's, shoulda-beens and a killer who works in a fast food restaurant. All these beasts try to pull their lives together as they face the flaws in their scary personalities. Of course what they want and what they get have as little to do with each other as jet fuel and breakfast cereal. When Collette's mother sings about her fantasy of the afterlife, "All those bran flakes, where did it get me!" one gets the sense that life is futile indeed, but always funny and worth thinking about. American Air has been performed at Soho Repertory Theatre and Ensemble Studio theatre in New York and at Two Roads Theatre, Theatre/Theater, Powerhouse Theatre and HBO Workspace in Los Angeles. "With his self-knowing, slightly peevish attitude, Cummings is the theatrical equivalent of folk singer Loudon Wainwright III, whose wit turns on a kind of self-pitying nihilism emanating from the ennui of Westchester County privilege. Air travel clearly unifies the evening's kaleidoscope of scenes. As a writer, Cummings has the temperment of a curmudgeonly professor who, before beginning his lecture, bolts the door to bar latecomers. But being locked inside Cummings' classroom, leaning forward so as not to miss some linkage, is a privilege and a revelation. He writes about people on the edge, and his inverted storytelling style lures his audience to the same precarious position. Cummings' vision comes from the fraying embroidery of relationships. American Air fills the theater with lyrical, disjointed phrases and dissonant voices. The resultant discord is the stuff of poetry." - LA WEEKLY Piss Play Is About Minorities So It's Really Important The Arts Council must pick one lucky recipient to win the big funding prize! Who will it be? This farce of urinary proportions sends up the ridiculous nature of arts funding and who actually gets the cash. Run by two self-involved nuts that put three applicants through the paces for the booty, only one hopeful has the courage to steel his nerve and give what is greatly desired: The streaming shame of what it means to be "less than" in society. This nasty farce, with its heart in its kidneys, is sure to tickle even the most politically correct. Piss Play Is About Minorities, So It’s Really Important had its world premiere at West Coast Ensemble in Los Angeles, Autumn, 2007 and was presented at the Summer, 2009 Cringe Festival in New York City, produced by NY Artists, Unlimited with David Youse, Carla Barnett and Flip Laffoon where it received the GOLDEN PINEAPPLE (First Prize) for Best Play and a Jack Lemon Award for David Youse’s portrayal of John of the Arts Council. In the short one act play, Feed the Children, two past-their-prime dancers and a mute dressed like Nijinsky duke it out for a solo spot on the teacup stage at the North Hollywood fundraiser, FEED THE CHILDREN! Fighting like cats, not ready for prime time, they are replaced by Libby, the one flipper seal. With dancing, sparring and suicide, there is something for everyone. Feed the Children was presented at The Productions Company’s Summer Sizzle 2008 festival. If every drop of oil in the world eventually landed into the hands of two very greedy people and they made sure that all that oil was burned for maximum profit with no regard to how that affects the earth, well, you would find yourself in the set-up of this dark one-act play. The burning of all that oil has used up all the earth's oxygen and there is only one canister of breathable air left. The two very greedy people, who are husband and wife, but no matter, and their maid, who serves them dutifully until her end, must each cagily try to become the last surviving person on earth. And the key to that survival is one little canister of air. Do they ever deny their actions destroyed the earth? Every minute. Do they care that everyone else on earth has died except for them with their enormous bags of money? Never. Are they still duking it out to see who gets to be the last survivor on the planet while holding all the world's wealth? Absolutely. That¹s the play. May the most clever person win. The Winner was staged at the West Coast Ensemble as part of the one act play series, Forks in the Road to horrified audiences. & More
Oh, The Horror! is a romping, urbane Zombie movie. Justin, who wants to open a club one day, his supportive girlfriend, Lyanne, his best gay friend, Patty, and their tough gal pal Tania Slitty peel out of their hometown of Barstow in an old Duster and head off the hundred miles to LA. First stop: The Troubador in West Hollywood for a concert. But what the f***? Zombies are taking over. And because they’ve started their smorgasbord of flesh in West Hollywood, the world perceives it as a homo epidemic. A classic horror/escape from LA saga, with zombies, many of them truly gay, running around eating the terrified flesh of mankind, Oh, The Horror! makes fun of one and all, often with a martini in its hand and a wink in its oozing eyeball. The final blow-out scene ends at The Grove, the latest outdoor shopping mall “lifestyle center”. Justin, with Patty, Susan Jackson (the strong black woman they’ve collected) and an army of broom-wielding fags save Lyanne and Tania from eternal Zombie-ruin as they cling to existence, holding tight onto the faux stonework of the “American Girl Place” mega-doll store. The Coda: Six months later: after the slathering mess is abated, LA has become a city that has integrated its Zombies. Justin, too, has turned into one of the living dead...and that’s just one of the reasons why his new club that he opens is so successful. Written with Bradford Brillowski, three-time Emmy Award winning producer of Ellen, Oh, The Horror! awaits production. Money is an original one hour television pilot inquiring deep into the personal finances of one family in the New York metropolitan area. With as much dignity as they can muster, the Argents face the fiscal crumbling of the American middle class in the twenty-first century. Carl Argent provided well for his family as an insurance agent and real estate man. His three grown children, Susan, the poor harpist, Steven, the overextended accountant who just lost his McMansion and Frank, the youngest, a rich surgical center king, unite around their father and his bank accounts as he faces his mortality due to a touch of cancer. His grabby second wife, naturally, believes the kids should be able to take care of themselves now that they are all approaching middle age. But how can they in a culture that is all about MONEY and nothing else? Aunt Terry, the loving but poor matriarch, narrates. Everyone wants money. Everyone needs money. As the cash pie shrinks, the greedy spatulas get bigger. Could it be any other way? Open Trench is the memoir that inspired the blog. The outcast youth with verve and wit manages to escape mediocrity to...another level of mediocrity? What is this thing that’s living in this body bag? As death approaches with nowhere else to turn, our protagonist straps on his inner gay warrior, accepts his lover, his sofa, his pooch and a whole lot more. Selections from the book include: Little Miss America, Whatever Happened to Cousin Mickey?, Oops, I Went Crazy, I Never Had an Abortion, Which Way to the Free Market?, Miss Teen USA, The Beta Male, The Literary Whore--a Commercial Construct, Hollywood is a Great Place for Drugs, Oh Hair, Over Acting or Run to the Light Carol Anne, Mexicrap, Love Makes the World Get Round or My Life en Croute, June and Fourth, I Hate You & Open Trench. Selections have been read at Comedy Central’s Sit ‘N Spin in Hollywood and A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood. Soon to be published by ____________? |
 Don Cummings at home Open TrenchSoon to be published, a collection of short stories and essays from the bent thoughts and spontaneous shenanigans of Don Cummings. Funny, irreverent and at times shamelessly entering the world of Hollywood gossip, Don Cummings wants you to read his book. Not to be missed.
www.opentrench.blogspot.com
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