Don Nigro

Gorgons and Other Plays Don Nigro Samuel French a edition

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.