Plays written by Michael Laurence
HAMLET IN BED
KRAPP 39
CINCINNATUS
Synopses:
Hamlet in Bed – (1M 1W) Michael is a failed actor who spends his days obsessing about the great role he will probably never get to play- Hamlet! He is also an orphan and is haunted by the idea of reuniting with the mother who relinquished him at birth. Countless internet searches finally lead him to a random clue, and he becomes convinced (or deluded?) that the former actress Anna May Miller is his natural birth-mother. At first he stalks her from a distance, but then, taking a cue from Hamlet, he conceives a “mousetrap” to lure her into his orbit: an experimental production of Hamlet in which he will play the title role himself opposite Anna in the role of his mother, Queen Gertrude.
Krapp, 39 – (1M) In Samuel Beckett’s “vaudeville pantomime” Krapp’s Last Tape, a 69-year-old man dictates his thoughts into a tape recorder, as he does every year on his birthday. But first, he listens to an older, autobiographical tape (labeled “Farewell to Love”) that he recorded when he was 39 years old. Reeling on his own 39th birthday, Michael Laurence conducts a multi-media reflection on his identification with Beckett’s character: his fears, his failures, and his search for (and forfeiture of) love, all in preparation to record a version of the 39-year-old Krapp’s soliloquy to be used in an imagined production of Krapp’s Last Tape in the year 2038, thirty years from now. The journey spans Michael’s readings and research, recorded telephone conversations, letters, and personal journal entries. Krapp, 39 is a deeply personal window on one man’s last moment of youth.
Cincinnatus – (4W, 3M) A coming-of-age story, a family dramedy, and an homage to the joy and daring of performance. When PARKER, a young and outré performance artist living in NYC, returns to her childhood home in Cincinnati in the wake of her adoptive mother’s death, she is literally at the end of her rope; you see, she and PAN, her alcoholic performance-partner (and erstwhile boyfriend), are several months into an “endurance performance” in which they are bound together by an eight- foot rope, and can neither detach nor have any direct physical contact for one year.
Over a fraught weekend, PARKER must thread her way through a minefield of old family secrets and conflicts with her toxic step-father and his loopy new girlfriend, her flinty, gun-toting “aunt,” her haunted, obsessive ex, and the ghost of her dead, artist mother. (Not to mention PAN, who is losing his marbles on the end of that rope.)
CINCINNATUS is a twisty, darkly comedic interrogation of families of origins vs families of choice, performance and identity, and, as one character puts it the “Poetics and Politics of Personal Space.”
BIO:
Michael Laurence is the author of Cincinnatus, Hamlet in Bed, and the playwright/performer of Krapp, 39, which had an acclaimed six-month run Off-Broadway at the Soho Playhouse and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award. It subsequently played the Tristan Bates Theatre in London, the axis Ballymun Theatre in Dublin, and the Pleasance Theatre in Edinburgh. He also wrote the monologues The Shakespearean on the Porch and The Twilight Shopper, and the ensemble plays The Escape Artist, and Virgil’s Cauldron. He wrote and directed the indie feature film Escape Artists. As an actor, he has appeared on Broadway and at The Public Theater, Signature Theatre, Primary Stages, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, New York Theatre Workshop, La MaMa,
Atlantic II, and many others. Also, regionally & internationally at Théâtre national de Paris/La Colline, Hartford Stage, Arena Stage, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Shakespeare Theatre, O’Neill Playwrights Conference, McCarter Theatre Center, Sundance Theatre Lab, The Huntington Theatre, and others.
TV & film credits include: Shades of Blue, Blacklist, Dexter: New Blood, Evil, Prodigal Son, Hit & Run, Damages, Heartshe Holler, The Good Wife, L&O:SVU, Elementary, Person of Interest, Can You Ever Forgive Me, Man On A Ledge, One For the Money, Country of Hotels, The Last Thing Mary Saw.
Website: www.michaellaurence.net
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