Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) wrote a number of comic plays during his life. His drama featured broadly-based, coarse humor, and is filled with crude-but-vibrant characters drawn from the streets of Restoration London, individuals such as sharpers, whores, and eccentrics. His work is essentially plotless, but reeks with the odor of real people. Frank J. Morlock has created a composite drama (with plot!) from Shadwell's many works, but particularly employing pieces of The Woman Captain, The...
The nineteenth-century Southern writer (George Washington Cable) who wrote the stories on which this play is based was born in New Orleans, and the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of that great city impregnates all his work, and gives him a cast of eccentric and memorable characters worthy of Dickens. Dramatist Frank J. Morlock centers the action of his play around the Café des Exilés in the 1820s, and the square in front of it where all sorts of folks mix together. This setting gives a...
Based on the novel by Russian writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1867-1941), Morlock's dramatic adaptation tells the tragic story of Russian Tsar Peter the Great's conflict with his only surviving son and heir, Tsarevitch Alexis. Peter, an autocrat who was determined to modernize Russia at all costs, dealt brutally with any opposition–but found his most stubborn and potent resistance in his own home in the person of Alexis. This was a battle of wills that could end in only one way, given the...
Based on the 1885 novel by Henry James, this play tells the story of Hyacinth Robinson, the bastard son of a French woman and an English lord. Robinson has become a bookbinder in the London working-class slums. He embraces radicalism, and joins a conspiracy of anarchists plotting to assassinate high-ranking members of the establishment. But when he's actually given a terrorist mission to carry out, Hyacinth suddenly finds himself conflicted–he no longer sympathizes with radical politics,...
Based on the Marquis de Sade's infamous novel of the same name, this new dramatic version of JUSTINE closely follows the original story, both in spirit and in action. De Sade, with his relentless logic, attempts to prove that «virtue» as practiced by most people actually contradicts nature. The innocent maiden Justine suffers one humiliation and setback after another in her futile quest to preserve her virtue and her virginity. No one–not the nobility, not the Church, not even her...
In order to prevent his aged cousin (Old Martin) from leaving his huge fortune to charity, Pecksniff travels from London to America to dissuade the dying man from such a mistake. But Old Martin is far from death's door, and is planning from pure spite to swindle the relatives he loathes out of all their money. To do this he employs Montague Tigg, a honey-tongued confidence man who has, up to this point, had little worldly success, despite his many talents. He pretends to be an English lord,...
To save his father from execution for treason, the Bravo Giovanni agrees to act as an assassin for The Council of Ten, and ruthlessly carries out their orders for targeted killings against real or imagined enemies of the Serene Republic of Venice in Italy. Inevitably, the Council members begin using the Bravo for their own purposes. When the Count de Bellamonte lusts after a helpless orphan girl, he forces Giovanni to eliminate her protector. But the girl's mother, the most sought-after...
