Full Length, Comedy

Characters: 2 male, 2 female

Unit Set

This contemporary Southern romance set in the topsy-turvy world of art. Celebrity artist Susann is determined to reclaim her lost love, Blaise, now married to a sedate New Orleans socialite. Convinced that she cannot live without him, Susann arranges an exhibition of her works to be held in his new house. Susann's readiness to sacrifice her career, his new wife, and her Mama's boy manager leave Blaise both angry and aroused. Theatrical excitement abounds in this comedy of love vs. duty.

Also available in A Louisiana Gentleman and other New Orleans Comedies.

Charaters: 3 male, 6 female One Interior/Exterior Set A historical drama that explores Edgar Degas' scandalous visit to New Orleans in 1872. Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist painter, is torn between helping his relatives in America and pursuing a career as a painter. Fame and family obligations come to a head when he discovers he is still in love with his sister-in-law, who is now pregnant and blind. As Edgar struggles with his own ethical conundrum, he discovers that his aggressively charming brother has gone through all the family money in an attempt to save his uncle's sugar business.

Full Length, Southern Comedy

Characters: 1 male, 3 female

Unit Set

Blaine Ashton, a medical student in his mid-twenties from a prominent New Orleans family, has fallen in love with a middle-aged actress and is getting married, much to the chagrin of his mentally disturbed sister and his eccentric, alcoholic old Aunt. His Aunt forces him to take care of his sister after he's married and all the southern belles in the household are almost too much to bear. The histrionics never stop as the women compete for Malter's love and attention. Ultimately, an uneasy truce is called once a baby is born and Christmas rolls around, but continued craziness is undoubtedly in their future. Especially powerful roles for women.

Also available in A Louisiana Gentleman and other New Orleans Comedies

Full Length, Comedy

Characters: 5 male, 4 female

One integrated int/ext set.

John Singer Sargent, an up-and-coming American artist, is eager to collaborate on a portrait that would catapult him and Madame X, the most beautiful woman in Paris, to the pinnacle of society. With its revelations about Madame X's identity and an eyebrow-raising cast of characters, including Richard Wagner, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Sarah Bernhardt, and Dr. Samuel Pozzi (Madame X's notorious gynecologist/lover), this romantic comedy exposes the tale of beauty, infatuation, obsession, and betrayal that lies behind Sargent and Madame X's masterpiece.

Also available in Ghosts of New Orleans

Full Length, Southern Comedy

Characters: 3 male, 2 female

Interior

The Mississippi Gulf Coast estate of Irene Dubbonet is an unforgetable place to visit, but who would want to live there? All of her relatives, who hope to inherit it! This is a play about manipulation and what happens to family members' dreams when the odds are stacked against them. A cloud of doom hangs over Serenity Manor, until at last, virtue triumphs. Irene's son, the artist, Rooster, deeply anxious to prove himself, connives a scheme to help his "down and out" brother-in-law seize the estate. Funny situations sparked by witty lines bring the audience into an intriguing overview of topsy-turvy privileged life today.

Also available in A Louisiana Gentleman and other New Orleans Comedies.

Full Length, Southern Comedy

CharacterS: 2 male, 4 female

Unit Set

Blackjack follows an eccentric Southern family as it is squeezed into the close quarters of a Mississippi cruise ship for the New Year's holiday. Kaitlyn is convinced that she is channeling the poet Baudelaire, and certain that her husband is having an affair with a larger-than-life ship entertainer. Irene, the matriarch of the family, suspects a rift in her daughter's marriage. Her sexy maid sets her sights on the grandson, a successful Southern rock star. Everyone dons costumes for New Year's Eve, casting off their old identities and trying on new loves.

Also available in A Louisiana Gentleman and other New Orleans Comedies

Full Length, Historical Comedy

Characters: 3 male, 4 female

Interior

Uncle Victor is a historical comedy inspired by the classic Russian play, Uncle Vanya, by Anton Chekhov. In this version O'Neill takes the structure of Uncle Vanya and some characters and places them on Waverly Plantation in 1899 Louisiana. While the dialogue and characters are typically Southern, the Louisiana story perfectly parallels the situation of turn-of-the century Russia, where a new urban economy was destroying the country's agrarian base. While Russians were suffering from typhoid and peasants were going hungry, Southerners were dying from yellow fever and displaced farmers were starving. In Uncle Victor, the Mallory family, running Waverly Sugar Plantation, confronts a totally changed Louisiana.

Also available in Ghosts of New Orleans.

Full Length, Southern Comedy

Characters: 2 male, 3 female

Unit set

Property is a contemporary romantic comedy set in a Garden District mansion in New Orleans. Rooster Dubonnet, a young artist suffering from a terminal disease, is dazzled by love. Raised by an imperious society-driven mother, he has fallen in love with a New-Age nurse. Set during Mardi Gras--when a whole tradition of fun, revelry, and prestige seizes the city-- Rooster is caught between his dedication to his family's past (and "property") and his own very different future.

Also available in Ghosts of New Orleans.

Character: 1 female

In this play, Marilyn confronts voices in her head to validate her life as an actress. She finds in the afterlife that she must audition and interview to get into heaven and that her judges are her enemies and aborted children. Along the way she is confused and intrigued by the signs she must follow to climb her way into heaven. The play explores the multi-levels of complexity of cult goddess Marilyn Monroe--her vulnerability, anger, and loneliness and the ways that American culture and the worship of beauty and fame shaped, aborted and forwarded her rise to stardom. In the afterlife she relives three painful scenes from her life and a life review and strains to justify her choices to male unsympathetic judges as well as shocking people from her past.

Wings of Madness: Short Play, Southern Drama

Characters: 1 female

Interior Set

Set in a tacky funeral parlor on a highway outside New Orleans, a murdered beauty taunts the audience, exposing her bare unshrouded back, and explaining why she was murdered. Other imaginary characters--her husband and daughter--add an eerie quality to her already surreal tale.Turtle Soup: Short Play, Southern Comedy

Characters: 1 male, 1 female

Interior Set

A young woman fights for her inheritance. Her "dying" uncle mocks her life, as well as that of her actor husband. A tirade occurs over Turtle Soup that culminates in its spillage and her Uncle's guffaws over his prank. He reminds her that it's April first --All Fools Day--and he is playing a joke on her.

Short Play, Drama

Characters: 1 male

One exterior set or bare stage

A young writer faces love, death, and the challenges of creating a joyful life. Setting: Rocky coast of Ireland in the 1930's.

"As playgoers hear the voices in Marilyn Monroe's head and encounter seven visitors to James Dean, they must rethink their relationships with cultural icons. As they ride through a Louisiana swamp in the middle of a hurricane, they must rethink their own lives and losses. O'Neill can somehow enable her audiences to laugh uproariously while re-examining the lies they have been telling themselves.
"Katherine H. Adams,
HUTCHINSON PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH,
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY NEW ORLEANS"

Rosary O'Neill's third volume of plays certainly provides ample evidence of the playwright's versatility and artistic fertility. As our resident dramatist, our 112 year-old institution is so proud we have this gifted artist at this period of world history that has never needed more the power of theatre to confront, alert, and awaken.
"O. Aldon James
PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ARTS CLUB,
NEW YORK, NY"

Rosary's work has scope: From her Southern Gothic roots, her epic collection of plays about a dysfunctional Louisiana family, to that Boulevard of broken dreams, Hollywood. Finally on to her great insights into the worlds of other great artists of the past, Rosary leaves no stone unturned.
"Peter Bloch
DIRECTOR, NEW YORK, NY"

Both anthologies are about New Orleans: the past and the present. This author has grown up in this city, and there is a certain timelessness about it - the past definitely influences the present. All the plays are permeated with the sensuousness, decadence and bewilderment of brave and driven people living in chaos, confusion, extreme pleasure and delight. I hope you get a taste of this rich jambalaya of life as you experience these plays.
Volume Two contains historical plays, mostly Victorian, with characters driven by stratified society and tradition. Knowledge of New Orleans history made me want to adapt Uncle Vanya. I loved the play but felt its details were too Russian. I took the bones of Vanya and put it on a plantation called Waverly, the last sugarcane plantation in Louisiana, and called my play Uncle Victor. That play won a number of awards and hooked me on historical drama. I also researched Edgar Degas' visit to New Orleans in 1872 and wrote a nine-cast show, so struck was I by all Degas' relatives who had lived with him in 1872. Degas had tried to save his Uncle's failing cotton business and create new roots in the city of his mother. He fell prey to scandal and decadence.
My plays are historically accurate. Obviously, you take a scenario and expand the story but the main facts: the births, deaths, relationships are all to the best of my knowledge correct.
I spent days visiting Kate Chopin's house in Cloutierville, La. and interviewed descendents of Chopin's lover Albert Sanpitie and town members about the scandals of her life. I researched in French and English all the books on Degas. I did similar research in New York and Paris for Beckett at Greystones Bayand John Singer Sargent and Madame X, which are loosely tied to New Orleans. A major theme in my work is the struggle of an artist, the sacrifices made to maintain sanity.
We are glad Degas did go back to Paris and paint and didn't succumb to the temptations of New Orleans. We are pleased Sargent refused to change his scorned portrait of Madame X and that Kate Chopin forged a way to raise her six children and still write.

Sex, money and decadence among the upper classes in contemporary New Orleans.