RUTH MARGRAFF
| Nationality: | American |
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Plays by Ruth Margraff
Cafe Antarsia |
| 1st Produced: | Act I was presented by the Here's 2005 Culturemart Winter Festival | January 2005 (partial draft) | ||
| Company: | Commissioned by a Fulbright Foundation new opera award to Greece, developed by a Slovenian Exchange with Wax Factory/PreGlej in Ljubljana and a Harp residency at Here Arts Center | |||
| 1st Published: | Published by the Slovenian Cultural Council in English and Slovenian | 2006 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | world folk opera | Opera | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | 2-4 singer/musicians (conceived to be performed live by the CAFÉ ANTARSIA ENSEMBLE | |||
Notes: In 1889, two Empires collide in the hands of two blood brothers. One as ancient as the idea of Empire itself, had spawned Byzantium, the "west", and the rebels of America and Europe before shutting its eyes under the scourge of occupation for almost two thousand years. The other rose up overnight from the Ottoman nomads of Asia Minor to conquer Greece, the Balkans, parts of what is now Iraq, Egpyt, etc., casting its shadow over Europe. www.myspace.com/CafeAntarsiaEnsemble | ||||
Synopsis: Near the end of the Ottoman Empire, two blood brothers take to the taverns of Crete. One has become the Ottoman pasha. The other is fated to rise and fall like his Greek fathers' heads still hanging on the lemon tree. In the swell of nationalism, freedom, modernity, antiquity, west and east that wrestle still like devils throughout the next millennium, the tavern rouses to a brutal crucible for enmity and brotherhood. Night falls as the dervishes spin ominously in the scorching cucumber wind of endless lamentation and the henna girls refuse to dance. This is a modern ILIAD for Greece, told with the ancient, operatic passion of Greek blues and Cretan rebel songs of the table. Set in the coveted passageway between the Balkans, Asia Minor and the Mediterranean Basin. | ||||
Cry Pitch Carrolls, The |
| 1st Produced: | Salvage Vanguard Theater | 1999 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | NuMuse Anthology: Brown University, Salvage Vanguard Press | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Nativity operetta, Christmas pagaent | - | Parts: | Male | 1 | Female | 4 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: - | ||||
Deadly She-Wolf Assassin At Armageddon |
| 1st Produced: | Japan Society/commissioned by the New York State Council for the Arts "Individual Artist" award | 2004 | ||
| Company: | Japan Society/Big Red Media, Inc./Peregrine Arts | |||
| 1st Published: | Performing Arts Journal 86 Vol. XXIX, No. 2 May 2007 | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Manga theater/martial arts theater | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 7 (may be double cast with 3) | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | Was conceived to be performed with up to 12 martial artists but can be done as theater also. | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: Raised as a weapon by a brutal conspirator, a young female assassin discovers that her target has spun the empire of Japan into crisis and ruin--and--is none other than her father. The Shogun, in a rage, has fired her master and hired three superwarriors from the West to eliminate this Last Wolf of Japan who defies his legacy. Torn between loyalty to her mission, her nation and her soul, she must face the unimaginable at the twilight of an imperial epoch. | ||||
Elektra Fugues, The |
| 1st Produced: | 1996 | |||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | DIVINE FIRE: Eight Contemporary Playwrights Inspired by the Greeks from Backstage/Watson-Guptill Publications | 2005 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | an operatic black box recording of classic disaster | - | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 3 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: - | ||||
Harlequin |
| 1st Produced: | Playwrights' Center, 1st draft reading | - | ||
| Company: | Playwrights' Center/McKnight Foundation national commission/residency | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com | |||
| Genre: | Political / Romance | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 1 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: Set in 1994 Rhode Island, a poetry graduate student meets an Iraqi refugee in a bookstore cafe. Their conversation sweeps them across many landscapes, imprints of history, urgent pressings of immediacy, and the masquerades of foreboding. | ||||
Over The Garden Wall |
| 1st Produced: | Tribecca Performing Arts Center (NYC) and the Ontological- Hysteric Experimental Text Festival | 2007 | ||
| Company: | America-in-Play | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com | |||
| Genre: | Farce/comedy, 15 minute | One Act | Parts: | Male | 2 | Female | 2 |
| Parts Other: | Director reading stage directions | |||
Notes: At first I was interested in what happened to our American parlors which have turned into kitchens, living rooms and tv dens, with no space left for pretension after dinner over the piano. As if reality programs were never pretentious!! So why don't we still recite operatic things we scavenged from the British? And why does most experimental theater smack of the Victorian?? Why has it gone extinct except for smug ironic strivings to be AS anti-theatrical as mainstream theater scoffers? When did the realist become the last Jester to the king? What are we the bastards of? Or should I just calm down and try to write a play that is produceable anywhere sprung from the text/imagination alone? Or give in to the old-fashioned heavy-handed text - that comfortable bludgeon&So I worked with American JONATHAN * plays from the early 1800s, (most of which included minstrel characters in possibly the earliest experimental blindspot of the American theater), so that Fopling tries to stomp out his regime in the cagey way we tried to disinherit, and the other three try to transform or wriggle out of it at every turn - make themselves up, pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and mistake their own identities. That we used to suspend our disbelief in these question marks--seems theatrical. That we could turn and return to our own blindspots as bastards in some whole other way--seems like pure American fool's gold!! --Ruth Margraff | ||||
Synopsis: Guaranteed performable by anyone anywhere , inspired by American "Jonathan" plays from the 1800s*, bird malady novellas, pocket beauty books, minstrel shows, and parlor play burlesques. No rehearsal necessary.Bring back the dilettantes!! Drawing-Room Theatrical Version with the whole of the stage business built right in OR high art for amateurs. | ||||
Red Frogs |
| 1st Produced: | 2002 | |||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | American Theatre Magazine, NY - November | 2002 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Melodrama/Burlesque | Melodrama | Parts: | Male | - | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | 6 W or 5 W and 1 M (20s-30s) any race | |||
Notes: Commissioned by P.S.122 through the Jerome Foundation and NYSCA/Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. An excerpt of this play was workshopped by Bottom's Dream Theater at the 2000 Common Ground Festival by Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theater Projects, directed by I | ||||
Synopsis: Edgy, confrontational&a seething chambermaid probes the resentments and psychosexual fantasies in the rituals of domination and submission that bind her to an unseen mistress. When an abrupt reversal of power, worthy of Jean Genet, puts her in charge, she mutates into an equally oppressive monster before contemplating the final leveler of human experience. - Los Angeles Times | ||||
Stadium Devildare |
| 1st Produced: | Rude Mechanicals, (Austin, Texas) | 2004 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | published in the textbook Performing The Here And Now: An Introduction To Contemporary Theater And Performance ISBN: 0-7575-2085-5 | 2005 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Reality program for the intimate American arena | - | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 2 |
| Parts Other: | Voice of Texie, an actual child who never appears onstage | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: - | ||||
Wellspring |
| 1st Produced: | 2007 | |||
| Company: | The Hourglass Group | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com | |||
| Genre: | - | Musical | Parts: | Male | - | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: book and lyrics by Ruth Margraff; music by Nikos Brisco | ||||
Synopsis: This is a workshop production of a new world folk opera punk poet/lyricist Ruth Margraff. This description is from the press release: "Wellspring is set in 1999 war-torn Sarajevo. It follows an American woman searching for her husband, a troubled United Nations peacekeeper, who has disappeared in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Inspired in part by Verdis Il Trovatore, the story is structured as an escalating series of East/West serenades; as she journeys deeper into the former Yugoslavia, Thaissa is troubadored by two brothers with war criminal poetry and Maxfield Parrish lutes. Wellsprings music is influenced by Greek blues and the Romani/Gypsy music of the Balkan marketplace." - ny theatre.com | ||||