Plays by Jim Shankman
Alien Child
Charlie is a sixteen year old autistic girl who lives with her well-to-do family
in Greenwich Village. Overwhelmed and exhausted by their commitment to care
for her, Charlie’s parents are at the end of their psychic rope. All they
have left is an angry blowout sex life in which they can release their pent-up
frustrations. The strange new therapist they hired has some very odd notions
about how to break into Charlie’s world to get her attention. Charlie
also has a fraternal twin Jonah, a brilliant sensitive teenager. Lonely, neglected,
deeply affected by his sister’s illness and desperately in need of love,
Jonah is Charlie’s lifeline to reality. When he meets a girl from school
who returns his interest Jonah begins a dangerous solitary journey to find himself
and let go of Charlie
Teardown
(presented as a workshop reading
at the Michael Howard Studio December 2005.)
Ben and Jenny are older than they can remember, and they’ve begun to sense
it’s time to let go of things. But their memories are going, and it’s
hard enough to get a good grip on things, let alone let go of them. Maybe that’s
why Jenny gets so upset when she sees a perfectly beautiful house in the neighborhood
being torn down right in front of her eyes. When Ben discovers they are broke,
he makes a deal with a local contractor to sell their house as a teardown. But
Ben and Jenny find they can’t bring themselves to leave.
As the house is torn down around them, pieces of their past come back to them in unexpected ways. There’s so much they’ve forgotten, who they really are in fact. First the front door goes, then the porch, then the walls. Old memories and secrets come back to haunt them. The children they haven’t seen in years and years return looking for a safe place to call home. But now the house is just a skeleton. Ben and his son Davey have a lot of disappointments to work through,. So do Jenny and her daughter Emily.
In the end even the yard is gone and there’s nothing left except the subfloor and the foundation floating in the void. But Ben and Jenny have discovered the story of their life in the ruins of the house. Now they’ve got to let go of it all, even the kids who are just as much a mess as they always were. They stand on the edge of the void with a red wagon containing their remaining possessions as they ponder their next step.
Teardown is a play about making sense of life amid the difficulties of old age and in the face of death.
White Lighning In My Heart
(presented as a staged reading
at the Michael Howard Studios on June 22nd, 2007 )
Based (in the loosest, most exploitative sense of that term) on an honest-to-god,
true-to-life, ripped-from-the-headlines story, White Lightning In My Heart
is a black comedy about Scott Louis Beausoleil, a delusional scizophrenic defending
his life in a Texas county courthouse for a crime he cannot understand.
White Lighting In My Heart is a play about self-delusion, love, sex and electricity.
Sleep With Me (a play with music)
(presented as a workshop
reading at the Michael Howard Studio in January, 2007)
Sleep With Me is a black comedy with music set in Hollywood in 1938,
the story of a teen age girl’s sexual awakening in the predatory world
of 1930’s Hollywood, with songs ripped out of Shirley Temple’s movies
and surgically crafted into the corrupt adult environment of the movies.
In the depths of the Depression, Louis B. Mayer, at the height of his powers
as the studio chief of MGM, desperately wants Shirley Temple for the role of
Dorothy in the Wizard Of Oz. But Mayer has not counted on Melody Mudd, a sixteen
year old girl on the cusp of womanhood, Beulah Mudd, her wily and determined
stage mother and Billy Bone, Beulah’s boyfriend, a charming hillybilly
and eccentric dancer.
Listen to the music from Sleep With Me:
(Musical Direction and Accompaniment Steven
Silverstein. Sound Recording Bryan Westcott Smith)
Early Bird - Melody (Jenny
Neale)
Right
Somebody To Love - Beulah's Lullaby (Maura Malloy)
Early Bird
Duet - Billy and Melody (Brian McFadden and Jenny Neale)
Oh
My Goodness! - Melody and Billy (Jenny Neale and Brian McFadden)
Old Straw
Hat sung by Melody (Jenny Neale)
Old Straw
Hat sung by Louis Mayer (Steve Friedman)
Right
Somebody To Love - Beulah's Reprise (Maura Malloy)
Magic Dad and the Dreams I Don't Remember
(presented as a staged reading
at the Michael Howard Studio in May, 2005)
a magic realist account of a mythically powerful father and the son who lives
in his shadow. Simon is a mercurial and charismatic man who has a need
to challenge and conquer everthing that confronts him, including a huge sea
creature he does battle with from the shore of a great lake. The play's story
concerns the conflict between Simon and his son Donny son who struggles to understand
him break free of his spell.
Magic Dad and the Dreams I Don’t Remember is a play about the violence of love, the mystery of happiness in a hostile world and the power of death to make us most alive.
Electric
Light
received a workshop production
at the Michael Howard Studios in June, 2003
and a staged reading at The New Group
on June 30, 2004
Fortress of Solitude
was presented as a staged reading
at the Michael Howard Studios in October, 2001
and as a staged reading at The Playwrights Kitchen Ensemble
in February, 2002
Parables From the Gentile
Bible
received a workshop production
at the Michael Howard Studios
on May 7, 2004.