John Freed
DG Playwright
THE PLAYS
Love me, Fuseli: A Play about Mary Wollstonecraft and her Circle of Friends
"Nearly all revolutions begin on a stage," is a line from “Love me, FUSELI,” and this play demonstrates how that is especially so with regard to sexual ones.
Its other main objective is to humanize the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft -- to let her speak for herself without any "ism" attachments and dramatize how her undaunted passion in pursuit of happiness and justice transformed her into our pathfinder as well.
Set in 1791 the play is fact-based and explores the inter-influencing of Mary with William Blake, and his wife Cate, Henry Fuseli, and his wife Sophia, Thomas Paine and Joseph Johnson, their least known though most important mutual benefactor-publisher.
It more fundamentally explores the gender expanding themes of the competing love triangles between Wollstonecraft, Fuseli and his current wife, Sophia, and Wollstonecraft, Fuseli and his once and future lover-companion, Joseph. Fuseli's most famous painting, “The Nightmare,” had been hanging on Johnson's apartment wall for more than ten years.
There are interludes drawn from actual trial transcripts from the Old Bailey circa 1790's which contextualize the political nature of this secret meeting of pro-republicans conferring with Thomas Paine before his departure to join the revolution in France.
Spies abound, people are arrested and liberated, Jack finds his Jack again and Jill is launched to help create the world that we now inhabit.
This play has been nominated for a 2016 Oregon Book Award.
Figaro's Follies or the Night of Misrule:
A new and improved adaptation
The audiences for “Figaro's Follies” who know Mozart's opera will find that they are in very familiar territory here and might well agree with Napoleon who said of the original “Le Mariage de Figaro” – “It is the revolution already in action.”
My primary goal in re-rendering Beaumarchais' societal paradigm-shifting 1784 play is to preserve it by turning it into a much more watchable “well-made” one while retaining its main, late 18th century motifs, characters and very laughable, farcical plot elements in the David Ives' tradition.
My other goal in this adaptation is to follow the advice transported across the galaxy by aliens and given to Woody Allen in Stardust Memories – "You want to make the world a better place? Tell funnier jokes.”
Lexi Diamond, a Brown University / Trinity Repertory Company literary manager, commented: “On a personal note, I want to tell you how much I enjoyed reading FIGARO'S FOLLIES. I thought it was a fabulous adaptation, and that it both honored and enhanced its source material. Its cleverness and vitality made it a joy to read.”
The Merchant of Pittsburgh:
A Comedy
by John Freed
“The Merchant of Pittsburgh: A Comedy” is set in an Equity-based theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the early nineties and concerns a fed-up Jewish board member who takes over as acting artistic director in order to stage a Shylock-friendly production of “The Merchant of Venice” while being forced to confront his own set of racial and ethnic prejudices.
Ned Camuso, a critic from the New School for Social Research, describes it, “This play is a brilliant mash-up of Shakespeare and August Wilson, mixing Shakespeare's exploration of human desires and foibles in 'Merchant of Venice' with the complex social narratives of our own times. Think Canada's 'Slings and Arrows' meets Chicago's 'Clybourne Park.'”
Portia and the Merchant of Venice:
All for Love or Money
This entertaining and accessible version of “The Merchant of Venice” highlights the play's main conflict – the tug of love between a young-middle-aged Portia and Antonio with the studly Bassanio as the prize. For modern audiences this story line often gets over-shadowed by the anti-Semitic slaps directed at the multi-dimensional Shylock.
I firmly believe that historically Shylock was intended by Shakespeare to be far less a representative of Judaism than a camouflaged stand-in for the Puritan bankers who were taking over the English middle-class. Antonio's severest critiques of Shylock's business practices target this “money should beget more money” prime directive of these emerging capitalists and its un-Christian potentialities.
Shakespeare's original for me marks the Western cultural paradigm shift from the pursuit of common-wealth [Antonio's goods trading practices] to the pursuit of personal wealth [Shylock's money-lending ones] and the transformation of people into commodities alternating between Portia or Bassanio as the objective of the enterprise.
This version opens with Portia in Belmont so that the audience better understands why Antonio is sad that his boy-friend is heading off to seek his “fortune” and why Antonio will do practically anything in the progression of the plot to keep Bassanio bound to him.
As additional bonuses I reduced the running time by more than thirty minutes while retaining Shakespeare's complex inter-play of themes and providing more parts for women and diverse race actors.
Castle Happy: Love and Tomfoolery in Hearst's San Simeon
(music by Jeff Dunn -- book by John Freed)
Debuted at the Altarena Playhouse in the SF Bay area July 20 - 30, 2017.
Arthur Lake, a bit-part actor and accident-prone goofball, is lucky enough to be invited to Hearst Castle for a Halloween party in 1938. He arrives "Lost in the Fog."
The hosts’ 17-year-old “niece,” Patricia Van Cleve, craves the egomaniacal heartthrob Errol Flynn, who has been invited along with Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin, and Bette Davis.
Party mavens Marion Davies and William Randolf Hearst are enraged when they find Van Cleve and Flynn together in bed. But Van Cleve rebelliously insists she can do whatever she wants, and longs to run away with Flynn.
Later that evening, while invited actors dance and squabble, W.R. and Marion concoct "It's a Four-Step Plan" to prevent scandal by persuading Patricia to marry a stranger, Arthur Lake. Understandably, Patricia is very reluctant—even when she is told she is their daughter, not their niece. Only Arthur's sincere love for animals and Patricia’s realization that she rather enjoys manipulating men allow her to succumb to the plan. Arthur becomes Dagwood Bumstead this very day.
The party climaxes when Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” broadcast incites panic. Ever the song-and-dance genius, Chaplin exposes the hoax. Now the guests playfully grab lampshades and furnishings to dress up for the "March of the Martians."
Patricia and Arthur recognize how their lives have changed as they, W.R. and Marion realize they all can "choose to be happy" regardless of their circumstances.