A Louisiana Gentleman and other New Orleans Comedies

About the Book

Both anthologies are about New Orleans: the past and the present. This author has grown up in this city, and there is certain timelessness about it - the past definitely influences the present. All the plays are permeated with the sensuousness, decadence and bewilderment of brave and driven people living in chaos, confusion, extreme pleasure and delight. I hope you get a taste of this rich jambalaya of life as you experience these plays.

Volume One contains modern plays set in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the City that Care Forgot. After I founded Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, we initiated a new play festival to develop new voices and a friend challenged me to write. My play, Wishing Aces, won me a Senior Fulbright Research Specialist grant to Paris. From then on, I stopped writing textbooks and wrote plays primarily about New Orleans.

When shaping a play, I take a question that disturbs me that I can't figure out, such as: why can't this professor and this student communicate in a profound way? Why can't this mother set boundaries for her out-of-control son? What would it take for that to happen? I then look at voice and structure, using the names of people from my life (I may change these later) to get the right phrasing and tone. I put these ghosts in my play, pick the most haunting place in New Orleans, and use cards to come up with an outline of scenes. Place inspires that sense of mystery that is so important to the theatre: an abandoned train station in the Louisiana swamps, a Baroness Pontalba apartment in the Quarter, a Garden District mansion. Place, weather, time, sounds inspire designers who are critical to creating the images the story requires. I try to fill my plays with details from New Orleans; the heat, the rain, the light through the oaks, the phantom gallery of a plantation house at dusk so that you too can experience what it's like to live here.

About the Author

I was born and raised in New Orleans, living between my parents' house and my grandmother's mansion on the streetcar line. Because New Orleans is somewhat isolated and European, her people are very exotic like rare birds and different; they love to party, to put on airs, and to act unique. Everyone has a story. Everyone is related, and everyone could be and wants to be a character in a Tennessee Williams' play. The exotic, bizarre, sensual flavor of that Mississippi River city made me want to write. My playwriting did not take off until I had worked as an actress and director in California and New York, become a university professor, written two books on theater, The Actors Checklist, and The Director as Artist: Play Direction Today, and founded a theatre, Southern Repertory Theatre. We initiated a new play festival to develop new voices and a friend challenged me to write. My play, Wishing Aces won me a Senior Fulbright Research Specialist grant to Paris. From then on, I stopped writing textbooks and wrote plays primarily about New Orleans. When I first wrote plays, I was fascinated by how bizarre my family and friends seemed, after having lived away for fifteen years in California and New York. All my work focuses on Louisiana and interconnections of complex personalities in New York, Paris and New Orleans. I also write novels about Louisiana and the South, and my work Tropical Depression was twice a finalist in the William Faulkner - William Wisdom Novel Competition. In addition I also won five fellowships with Ernest Gaines (author of The Lesson Before Dying) in Lafayette, LA.