Books by Don Nigro

This collection of 9 monologue plays five for women and four for men takes us on a journey back and forth in time from as long ago as 1392 (Gringonneur in which a painter is slowly driven mad by an enchanted deck of tarot cards) through 1903 (Portal in which the landscape architect who designed Central Park reveals a conspiracy to conceal the gateway to a vast hidden labyrinth and another dimension lurking under Manhattan island) to 1940 (Mermaid in which Inspector John Ruffing returns no

This collection of seven shorter plays and monologues includes Mata Hari about the last night of the beautiful and mysterious exotic dancer before her execution as a spy; Marina a monologue play about the great Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva; Queens about a young woman obsessed with the complex and tragic sex lives of the face cards in her deck of playing cards; The Wood Where Things Have No Names in which a young woman tries to deal with what she now understands as the betrayal inherent in

This collection of nine monologue plays by Don Nigro introduces us to a lost pregnant cat trying to survive in the woods an old woman left at the altar who saves her moldy wedding cake and vows revenge the private sorrows of the Bogey Man a girl on a remote Himalayan mountain being stalked by a terrifying monster a cynical science teacher forced by his school board to teach Creationism the wife of a hydraulic fracking shill who realizes too late that her husband has sold his soul to murder

FOREWORDby Lawrence HarbisonLisa Soland, teacher, actress and a fine playwright herself, has here assembled a wonderful collection of short plays. Some are comic (laughs), some are dramatic (no laughs), some are somewhere in between. A few of the playwrights whose work is represented here are ones whose work I have published in the anthologies I have edited for Smith and Kraus and Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, such as Don Nigro, Debbie Lamedman, Stephanie Hutchinson, Gary Garrison and Craig Pospisil and Ms. Soland herself, but most are new to me. It never ceases to amaze me when I contemplate the huge number of really fine playwrights. I don't think there has ever been such a wealth of writing for the theatre.If you're a passionate actor, a teacher or a director looking for a play to do, you won't find a better place to start looking than this book.

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 Café, 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

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

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

Contents:Tales from the Red Rose InnChilde Rowland to the Dark Tower CameLucy and the Mystery of the Vine-Encrusted MansionDarkness Like a DreamJoan of Arc in the Autumn Warburton's CookHiggs FieldThings that Go Bump in the NightUncle Clete's ToadMalefactor's Bloody RegisterCapone

Characters: 4 male, 6 femaleInteriorInspector 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 atte

DramaCharacters: 2 male, 1 femaleUnit SetPeter 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.

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

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.

Contents:Dutch InteriorsFrench GoldRat WivesRhiannonThe Rooky Wood

Drama / Characters: 4 male, 4 femaleScenery: Unit setA 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 brothe

Mystery / 1m, 5f / Simple unit setThis 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 po

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 be

Don Nigro ComedyCharacters: 4 male, 5 female Single SetRosey 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 famili