Summaries

Synopsis

"iphigenia in orem"

The play is a monologue addressed to an unseen person in a Las Vegas hotel room. A nameless businessman has just killed his own daughter by suffocating her to death in her parents bed. The man, who unwittingly has become the victim of a practical joke by one of his workmates, sacrifices his daughter for a higher standard of living when he takes at face value his colleague's news that he is going to be dismissed from his job.

"a gaggle of saints"

Two attractive college-age adults, John and Sue, alternately address the audience, never speaking to each other. They relate the superficial details of a fancy party which they attended together in New York City. During the course of the monologue, John describes leaving Sue and the rest of the girls sleeping in the hotel room and coming across two middle-aged gay lovers (whom they had previously encountered earlier in the evening) in Central Park with his friends. The boys proceed to follow one of the men into a public bathroom and where they savagely beat the man seemingly to death before one of John's friends, Tim, offers up a short eulogy to the man. John and his two friends then go back to the hotel to call the girls down for breakfast where John tells the audience that Tim notices he has a noticeable amount of blood on his shirt. In an effort to make up a story for Sue, John has Tim break his nose in order to play off the injury and blood to Sue as his own mistake walking along the edge of a fountain. At breakfast, John presents Sue with a ring that he had stolen from the man they attacked in the Central Park restroom. At the end of the play, John and Sue interact for the first and only time on stage embracing one another and posing for a picture together as the flash of a camera bulb is heard and seen before going fading to black.

"medea redux"

A woman sits alone at an institutional table, chain smoking. She describes a sexual relationship she had, at age 13, with her junior high school arts and sciences teacher. Later as she struggles, young, pregnant and alone, she idealizes and protects her former lover, refusing to judge him. Eventually she takes her young child to meet his father, who is married and has no children. The woman then describes how she murdered her young son, without giving the audience any clear motive for the act, but presumably because she knows that it will cause her former teacher pain even though it is clear from her descriptions that she also dearly loves her child and ended up committed to a mental hospital.