Bedtime Stories features works by some of the most clever playwrights in American theater with an important twist: everything will be performed with nothing but a bed on the stage. No sets, the barest minimum of props...this concept will focus all the attention on the themes, stories and characters presented in the plays. With this concept and the short-play format, in one evening we can explore comedy, drama and a range of human experience.

Beds are central locations in our lives. We sleep, dream, and have sex in them. We may spend hours tossing and turning in them, wrestling with the problems faced during the day. We may be conceived in them, be born in them, and die in them. John Lennon and Yoko Ono made a bold political statement in one. We eat crackers and annoy our partners in them. We laugh in them; we cry in them. We crawl into them for comfort when we are sick or unhappy. When we are kids (or letting our inner child run wild) we use them as trampolines. Monsters live under them next to the dust bunnies. They are found in our homes, but also in hotels, hospitals, prisons, disaster shelters ... even on boats and in RVs. Beds are focal points, they can trigger powerful emotions and memories, and in the hands of a gifted writer and talented performers they are powerful symbols.

The Plays

The plays to be presented in Bedtime Stories are:

Pillow Talk by Peter Tolan
Aaron and Doug, on a cross-country road trip, spend the night in the cramped bedroom of Aaron's grandmother's mobile home. Hampered by Doug's fear of physical intimacy, they are forced to examine their feelings about friendship and each other. As the battle lines are drawn, they get little sleep and a night full of surprises.

Home Free! by Lanford Wilson
A brother and sister share an apartment. She is pregnant; he is a shut in. In this drama, Lanford Wilson portrays the relationship between the siblings with great sensitivity and complexity and suprises the audience with an unexpected ending.

The Lifeboat Is Sinking by Shel Silverstein
Silverstein is best known for his children's books, but he has also written two volumes of short plays for grownups. In Lifeboat, a husband and wife are in bed when the wife decides they should roleplay being in a sinking lifeboat in the midst of a tempest at sea. She forces him to choose who to throw overboard to save their lives: their daughter or his mother.

The Undefeated Rhumba Champ by Charles Leipart
An amputee recovering in a VA hospital attempts to put the moves on his nurse. His nurse tries to keep things professional, but whenever there is music she is compelled to dance. A mix of physical comedy and emotional undercurrents play out as their relationship goes through dance steps of its own.

Flyboy by Yvonne Adrian
A young boy inexplicably stops speaking. In vignettes told from his silent perspective, his parents try to figure out why he has stopped speaking and what to do about it. The writing style is reminiscent of poetry or modern jazz, a departure from the more typical dialogue of the other works we will be presenting. Are we in his imagination? Are we in the pages of one of his books? Are we his memories? The modern style lets the audience decide.