This collection of seven darkly funny and mysterious plays includes the long one act Pirandello, in which the great Italian playwright, writing alone on the stage of his theatre late at night, is interrupted by the Italian dictator Mussolini, who wants him to write the authorized biographical play of the dictator's life, Pirandello's jealous wife, who believes Pirandello is sleeping with every woman in sight, including his daughter, and an increasingly disturbing group of characters who may or may not be real, leading Pirandello to question the relationship between his theories about the malleable nature of reality to the rise of Fascism and Fascist propaganda; The Recollection Of Green Rain, which tells the mostly true story of two green children found wandering near an English village, who spoke an unknown language and insisted they were from a mysterious green underground kingdom; Pinocchio, in which Gloria's blind date turns out to be an angry puppet with a rather unsettling story to tell; Rusalka, in which a police officer investigating the disappearance of a young girl tries to make sense out of the increasingly odd stories her best friend tells about her; Humpty Dumpty, in which an enormous egg with very bad hair sits on top of a wall and talks about making Wonderland great again; Brimstone Run, in which a family legacy of betrayal and tragedy is played out at the town dump; and Nictzin Dyalhis, in which a legendary, reclusive writer of weird tales is haunted by a sea goddess he may or may not have invented. In each of these plays, in one way or another, compelling characters find themselves lost in a labyrinthine twilight zone of dream variations which combine the Gothic, the surreal and the absurd. Don Nigro is among the most frequently published and widely produced playwrights in the world and has continued to build a deeply interrelated and diverse body of dramatic literature, employing a wide variety of dramatic conventions and styles of presentation. He has written monologues and epics, spare realistic dramas and surreal homicidal puppet farces, plays with music and verse plays. He continues to build the long cycle of Pendragon County plays, which traces the history of America through the lives of several related east Ohio families from the eighteenth century to the present, and features many characters whose lives are traced from youth through middle age to old age in a number of plays that may be presented in a variety of combinations.

Drama / Casting: 1m, 1f / Scenery: Interior

This fine work in the Pendragon cycle of plays enjoyed a sold out, critically acclaimed production at the world famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose. This is an offbeat, wonderful love story. Note: The play contains a wealth of excellent monologue and scene material.

In this moving and powerful ensemble piece, a police detective investigates the mysterious death of a young Mexican actress in a bathtub. She has been making a film about a girl who dies in a bathtub, directed by a beautiful and charismatic but troubled Russian woman who seems to have cast a spell on the others involved: a cynical, womanizing British screenwriter who wants desperately to sleep with her, a frustrated Irish actress, and a sardonic Italian assistant director. Was it an accident,

During the German bombardment of Leningrad, earlier and now St. Petersburg, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, struck on the head by a falling brick, stumbles into a basement for shelter and finds herself unexpectedly back at the long abandoned site of the Stray Dog Caf , where in the second decade of the twentieth century the most famous Russian poets, artists, actors, and dancers gathered to drink, sing, argue, and make love, and gradually the Stray Dog comes to life again, when

This collection contains a harrowing tale of the later lives of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, two girls obsessed by a movie contemplating homicide, a couple doomed to rehearse their tragedy on the stage of a theatre for eternity, a dark little play about the relationship of leprechauns to cannibalism, the tale of Peter Rabbit told from the point of view of the very disturbed Mr McGregor, a third rate horror movie villain lamenting his life on a zombie island, the end of the observable univers

Eleven short animal plays which may be done individually or in combination with any of the others.

Don Nigro

Comedy

Characters: 4 male, 5 female

Single Set

Rosey Snow is trapped in a fairy tale world that is by turns funny and a little frightening, with her stepsisters Goneril and Regan, her demented stepmother, her lecherous father, a bewildered Prince, a fairy godmother who sings salty old sailor songs, a troll and a possibly homicidal village idiot. This play investigates the archetypal origins of the world's most popular fairy tale, contrasting the familiar and charming Perrault version with the darker, more ancient and disturbing tale recorded by the brothers Grimm. Grotesque farce and romantic fantasy blend in a fairy tale for adults.

Contents:

Tales from the Red Rose Inn

Childe Rowland to the Dark Tower Came

Lucy and the Mystery of the Vine-Encrusted Mansion

Darkness Like a Dream

Joan of Arc in the Autumn

Warburton's Cook

Higgs Field

Things that Go Bump in the Night

Uncle Clete's Toad

Malefactor's Bloody Register

Capone

Characters: 4 male, 6 female

Interior

Inspector Ruffing, the troubled hero of Nigro's Ravenscroft, Demonology, Creatures Lurking In The Churchyard, The Rooky Wood and Mephisto returns in this baffling mystery that was an audience favorite at the First International Mystery Festival in 2007. In a peaceful house near the Welsh border, an entire family has vanished suddenly without a trace one evening with supper on the table and no apparent violence. Ruffing's attempt to understand what's happened to a couple and their two daughters leads him deep into his own dark soul. The only clue is a piece of paper left on a desk with the word 'Widdershins' written on it. Beautiful women, dark secrets, the Impressionists and the Druids all figure in this unusual and thought provoking play.

Plays included in this collection: The Daughters of Edward D. Boit The Green Man Hieronymus Bosch Specter The Woodman and the Goblins

Dramatic Comedy

CharacterS: 2 male, 3 female

Unit set.

In the first years of the twentieth century, Evelyn Nesbit, the beautiful, teen-age pin up and chorus girl, was the entrancing center of an explosive and deadly love triangle involving Stanford White, her married lover and the architect of many of the most famous buildings in New York, who liked to push her naked on a red velvet swing, and Harry K. Thaw, the wealthy, manic and demented roller-skating Pittsburgh playboy who married her, beat her with a horse whip, and eventually shot White through the eye socket during a musical performance at the rooftop theatre at White's Madison Square Garden. This wickedly funny play chronicles the grotesque events leading up to and after this notorious murder and Evelyn's wild, strange journey through her American tabloid nightmare as she is hounded by carnivorous reporters, threatened, used, betrayed, bribed, stalked and nearly destroyed by the rich, the corrupt, the violent and the insane. Part of Nigro's ongoing dramatic saga of America in the 20th century that continues with Jules Verne Eats a Rhinoceros, City of Dreadful Night and Traitors, Originally produced at the Open Stage Theatre in Pittsburgh and Off Broadway by the Hypothetical Theatre Company.

"Literate but quirky ... non-realistic theatricality ... smartly ironic ..." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

"There was a bit of everything: wealth, fame, insanity, genius, and, in the middle of it all, a beautiful chorus girl ... The sensational story has been adapted for screen and stage ... but the latest play, Don Nigro's "My Sweetheart's The Man In The Moon," might be its most faithful version. It demonstrates admirable nuance and an impressive amount of research ..." NY Times.

"People who think Evelyn Nesbit is only a fictional character from Ragtime may find some surprises in Don Nigro's play, which chronicles the tawdry, twisted love triangle that "the girl in the red velvet swing" shared with master architect (and seducer) Stanford White and millionaire psychopath Harry K. Thaw." Village Voice.

Drama

Characters: 2 male, 1 female

Unit Set

Peter Quint is sent by his lifelong employer, the Master of Bly, to be the servant in charge of a remote English country house where Miss Jessel has just arrived to be governess to the orphaned children of the master's brother. The ultimately deadly love triangle that results forms a darkly funny and erotic Gothic love story. These are the lovers who haunt Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Quint is brilliant, sardonic and angry, a man of great abilities trapped by birth into a subservient role he hates. Miss Jessel is beautiful, headstrong, troubled, and deeply infatuated with the master. As Quint and Miss Jessel's affair develops, the rivalry between servant and master builds to a frightening and haunting climax.

Drama / Characters: 4 male, 4 female Scenery: Unit set A finalist for the National Play Award, this funny drama takes place in Vienna, 1900. A beautiful and brilliant young girl enters the office of Sigmund Freud to begin the most famous and controversial encounter in psychoanalysis. Dora is funny, suspicious, sarcastic and elusive. Freud becomes obsessed by her and he moves like a detective through the mystery of her mind, finding a lecherous father, an obsessed mother, an irritating brother, a sinister admirer with a seductive wife, and a lost little governess. Nightmares, fantasies, hallucinations and memories materialize on stage in a kaleidoscopic tapestry as Freud moves closer and closer to the truth about Dora's murky past. Is Dora sick or is the corrupt patriarchal society in which she and Freud are trapped the source of a complex group neurosis that binds the characters together in a web of desperate erotic relationships? The play becomes a war between Dora and Freud over the nature of truth and the uneasy truce between men and women. This tragic love story is laced with haunting Strauss waltzes.

Mystery / 1m, 5f / Simple unit set

This psychological drama is a thinking person's Gothic thriller, a dark comedy that is both funny and frightening. On a snowy night, Inspector Ruffing is called to a remote house to investigate the headlong plunge of Patrick Roarke down the main staircase. He becomes involved in the lives of five alluring and dangerous women: Marcy, the beautiful Viennese governess with a past; Mrs. Ravenscroft, the flirtatious lady of the manor; Gillian, her charming but possibly demented daughter; Mrs. French, the formidable and passionate cook, and Dolly, a terrified maid. They lead him through a bewildering labyrinth of contradictory versions of Patrick's demise and that of the late Mr. Ravenscroft. There are ghosts on the staircase, skeletons in the closet, and much more than the Inspector bargained for. His investigation leads into own tortured soul and the nature of truth itself. You will not guess the ending, but you will be teased, seduced, bewildered, amused, frightened and led to a dark encounter with truth or something even stranger.

Contents: Dutch Interiors French Gold Rat Wives Rhiannon The Rooky Wood

A new collection of shorts from Don Nigro, including: GORGONS (2f ) Ruth and her rival Mildred are aging movie stars in the 1960s. They have in their time been goddesses of the screen, but now both are on the skids and desperate for work. Mildred is doing obscure theatre under spartan conditions when Ruth comes to her with a film script. It's a horror movie called Gorgons, about two insane and homicidal sisters. Both long to be famous again, so they agree to do the movie, with comical results. This ice-pick-sharp, dark-as-a-tomb riotous struggle between two titans of the screen is a playground for two mature actresses who can play every note on the emotional keyboard and really go all out. SYCORAX (1f) Sycorax, the witch mother of Caliban on Prospero's Island, tries to explain the world to him and help him defend himself against Prospero and Miranda before she is herself consumed by her demonic God and lover Setebos. A powerful acting piece for a mature actress. THE GHOST FRAGMENTS (1f) Naomi, a young woman who finds herself convinced that the old house she lives in is haunted, tries to solve the mystery of the house and of her own dark past. THE LAST OF THE DUTCH HOTEL (1m,1f) Lady de Grey, patroness of the Royal Italian Opera, and Harry Cust, a newspaper editor who may be her lover, linger at the shore, full of suppressed regrets and dread, endure the ministrations of a sinister waiter and observe some unspeakable, ambiguous and possibly horrifying events transpiring near the edge of the sea. PANTHER (1m) It's 1988, and John Rose, who has willed himself to live to be a hundred years old because he promised his beloved sister Jessie he would do so, sits on a fallen tree in the woods by the old Pendragon house where he was born and waits for the panther his sister always warned him about to come and get him. MULBERRY STREET (1m) Ben, a man of 52, remembers his Italian immigrant grandfather's terrifying and haunting encounters one night outside his village in Italy and again, years later, in a dark stairway on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, New York, in the year 1903.

Comedy

Characters: 14 male, 8 female (more if desired.)

Unit set.

In a land where the rich get richer and the poor are starving, Prince John wants to cut down Sherwood Forest to put up an arms manufactory, a slaughterhouse and a tennis court for the well to do. This bawdy epic unites elements of wild farce and ancient mythologies with an environmentalist assault on the arrogance of wealth and power in the face of poverty and hunger using feeble and insane jesters, a demonic snake oil salesman, a corrupt and lascivious court, a singer of eerie ballads, a gluttonous lusty friar and a world of other grotesque characters out of a Brueghel painting. Maid Marian loses her clothes and her illusions among the poor and Robin tries to avoid murder and elude the Dark Monk of the Wood who is Death and perhaps something more.