New Plays by Spence Porter

            Hi! My name is Spence Porter , and I write plays that are mostly somewhere on the outskirts of conventional theater--I love using puppets and masks and dancers and onstage musicians, and basically I have a lot of fun doing all the things that people keep trying to tell me not to do. I've had sixteen productions of my plays (and there are more in the works!) and have won a few awards along the way. There's also been some modest academic attention to my work in places as diverse as Singapore and Virginia. I think these plays are pretty neat and I love seeing them put on by people who really care about and understand what I'm doing.

            My plays (and there are also some screenplays) are all very different from each other (at least until you know me well enough to understand how much they all have in common), and, while they're all unconventional, they're unconventional in very different ways. In no particular order:

• HIPPOLYTUS----Loosely based on the Greek play--Greeks and jazz and masks and modern dress. Flamboyantly theatrical. (more)

• SICK MINDS: An Evening of Appallingly Bad Taste, Featuring Warped Desires and Milton Eckendorf, Jr., Infant Detective----Exactly what it sounds like it is (except much more so). 150 characters played by two men, three women, and a piano player. The Long Wharf Theater recently turned it down, writing, "I think most of our audience would faint from some of these scenes." Sounds fine to me! (I was flabbergasted to discover recently that there's a teenage fan club for this play!)

• FRANCESCA----A doomed love story set in the Middle Ages. Very Big and Romantic. Visually spectacular. Fantastic role for a beautiful, intelligent, passionate young actress. When Francesca was done in Leiden, the Leidsch Dagblad wrote "The Theater was vibrating with passion last night."

• THE MOUSE PRINCE----A large-scale epic fantasy for adults, full of elves and mice and blood and magic. A complex mix of puppets and live actors. Funny and passionate and beautiful and wild.

• ARGUMENTS WITH MYSELF----A suite of six short plays, all of them very different from each other (and even more different from anything that anyone else is doing)--dance and puppets and vaudeville. All sorts of strange stuff! (One of the plays that make up this show, The Invincible Chastity of Arnie Bielowski, has been produced several times in Holland and will be done in Israel.) (more)

• THE WOMAN FROM THE SEA----The HCNY Bulletin describes "this new off-off-Broadway hit", saying "Spence Porter's new play, The Woman from the Sea (based on a play by Ibsen) is the passionate and gripping story of a woman haunted by her past." My first "normal" play, it recently premiered in New York City, staged by the renowned acting teacher and Broadway director Terry Schreiber (more)

             If you'd like to read any of these plays, feel free to get in touch with me!



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