Monday Night Specials

The 2011 Monday Night Specials: A Series of New Work

Sponsored in-part by The Liman Foundation

A Most Dangerous Woman

By Cathy Tempelsman
Directed by Richard Maltby, Jr.

Starring Samantha Soule as George Eliot,
CJ Wilson, Scott Barrow, Elizabeth Jasicki, Christopher Kann, Dee Nelson, Peter Stray & Mac Young

“You may try—but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you,
and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.”
~George Eliot

Were the most popular and moral novels of Victorian England written by a woman living in sin with a married man? Marian Evans—the real George Eliot—faces a crisis: should she reveal herself and her unconventional life, risking her career as a writer—or remain silent and deny the truest part of herself?


The Screenwriter’s Daughter

Written & Directed by Larry Mollin

Starring Robert Brustein, Ella Dershowitz and David Gerson

The true and imagined story of Ben & Jenny Hecht

THE SCREENWRITER’S DAUGHTER takes place over the course of one pivotal day and night in 1964. The celebrated, wealthy 71 year old writer and father BEN HECHT struggles with the prospects of his beloved 20 year old, wild child, daughter JENNY running off from her life of comfort and privilege to leave the United States with a one way ticket to Europe as part of the radical theatre group, The Living Theatre; anti-government, anarchist artists advocating world change. The company is committed to challenging the social class structure, senseless laws and the conformity of post World War II America. With time running out Ben, a former human rights advocate and social crusader himself as a young man hopes he can convince his daughter not to go off with the dangerous, underground theatre company.  Despite her independence young Jenny still seeks her adored father’s approval and is caught between the two forces. Can the master scenarist Ben change Jenny’s destiny with words alone?

Evenstar Presents:

Walt & Emily – Between The Rooms

Written by Jonathan Cott
Directed by Jeremy Bloom

Starring Neal Huff & Gretchen Hall

Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson  – A song of themselves

In 1983, the American poet Donald Hall wrote a poem entitled “The Impossible Marriage.”  And in it, he describes Emily Dickinson in her white wedding gown, hiding and making herself scarce in the church cellar and refusing to come up to the altar, while Walt Whitman, who couldn’t care less, is up in the bell tower with the handsome young sexton.
“Never will these poets marry,” Donald Hall tells us.  But against all odds, I nevertheless wanted to make an attempt to convince the poets to give it a try, and so I decided to set up an arranged literary marriage that I call “Walt and Emily – Between the Rooms.”
After all, to me – and I’m sure to many others – Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are our two greatest American poets.  And poetry, as Franz Kafka once beautifully defined it, is “truth clothed in the language of friendship and love.”
Emily herself once said: “We are all friends upon a spar.”  And Walt, for his part, believed that a friend is just another self.
So I thought I’d introduce the poets to each other and let them stay up all night and talk together, in their own words, in the language of Friendship and Love.

- Jonathan Cott


Lotus Feet

Written & Directed by Michael Domitrovich

Starring Peter Stray, Victoria Campbell and Alexandra London-Thompson
Stage Directions read by Christopher Kann

A super contemporary and sharp-witted play about the path to enlightenment.


And Everything Is Going Fine

A Film by Steven Soderbergh

An intimate portrait of master monologist SPALDING GRAY, as described by his most critical, irreverent and insightful biographer: Spalding Gray.
Spalding returns one last time – in this riveting final film monologue – to The Vineyard Playhouse stage where he performed his monologues live for many years.