MANIFESTO
I create stories that center queer characters and aim to not only tell queer stories but to queer the play itself, to queer the theatrical experience. To me, this means experimenting with what it means to create and present a play and what it means to gather as an audience and participate in watching a play.
I believe:
The page is my canvas.
Stage directions are as theatrical and meaningful as the spoken text.
In embracing ritual, much like the Radical Faeries.
Lists are theatrical; the same goes for scientific thoughts.
Collage is powerful; juxtaposition can be electric.
Plays are living pieces of visual art.
In monologues — let those characters grapple with existential and interpersonal conflicts in big blocks of text!
Text can be looped, repeated, and rearranged.
It all goes outward; worlds are mercurial.
Above all else, be playful.
I strive to:
Push myself to expand past realism, lean into dream logic, and build imaginative playscapes with looser laws of physics.
Expand upon the traditions of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, and in doing so, create things so ridiculous they double back and become serious.
Uphold Poor Theatre values.
Uphold Bread & Puppet's Cheap Art Manifesto.
Current challenge:
I am seeking to rid my writing of cynicism. It can be alluring, but it is stealthily destructive and stagnating. I am challenging myself to replace cynicism with expansiveness, with delight and wonder where appropriate, with possibility.
PLAYS
Moss & Kay's Fabulous Adventure
Or: Objects Becoming More Distant From One Another at Ever-Increasing Speeds
A big, queer, meta-theatrical adventure about entering middle age, embracing change, and making art.
Moss & Kay meet in the audience of a play. Kay is there to support a friend, and Moss is there because their ex wrote it — about them. As the play begins, the story Moss was expecting is not the story being told; Kay has some ideas about how to fix that, so the two of them take matters into their own hands. What follows is an adventure about memory and relationships, about making art and working in restaurants, about letting go and meeting the next day.
8 actors
and the green grass grows all around, all around
and the green grass grows all around
Eddie & Kaveh and their two young adult children are a family of do-gooders living in an unraveling city; the neighborhoods have privatized and with some violent clashes erupting, their peaceful, hippie enclave has become a paranoid, fenced off place. A new neighborhood director of stick-togetherness, Ashes, has made it their mission to get the family to stop their do-gooding and focus on the neighborhood. Role-playing exercises spiral out of control, Ashes creates a weekly serial drama based on them, and the family wrestles with if they should pack it up and leave, or stay.
10 - 12 actors
On the Formidable Ambiguity
Of the Foreseeable Future
We Rise
Declan's identity was stolen so the government deleted it, his boss gave him a new one but it feels kinda wonky. Audra just found out that her mom has been paying people to be friends with her since high school, she's 37. In the midst of all this, they get sucked into the popular self-help movement, HOPE'S SPRING ETERNAL, as it starts to take control of the nation. Soon enough they're in too deep and the only way to stop the insanity is to stop Hope. Fortunately, the laws of attraction brought her right to them.
6 - 8 actors
From Skull To Ghost
Set in a rapidly sinking Brooklyn, From Skull To Ghost is a lamentation on loss and time passed in a vanishing world. A massive sea-wall is being built up Fourth Avenue to keep the rising tides at bay and a chosen family has gathered in their bar to mourn the loss of one of their own. As the toast what they have lost, this group of friends, all whom live on the other side of this wall, must decide what to do and where to go while the water laps at their ankles. Some leave, others get trapped in that final night when they were together. And who keeps knocking at the door?
6 actors.
MUTANT WATER BABIES
or The Reservoir
A radical faerie-inspired, ritualistic retelling of The Bakkhai by Euripides.
The walled City-State of New York City was one of the only places with clean drinking water until a mysterious parasite infected the upstate reservoir. Was it all the mega-fracking? Ms. Pipes denies that connection, but she's also an aggressive mouth piece for the administration. THEN! The parasites starts turning all the city residents into mutants! This annoys the Mayor because she works hard to keep her militarized City-State running smoothly. After listening to a self-help tape, a long forgotten deity returns and teams up with a pair of teenage mutants to save everyone (But also maybe punish them? It's hard to say).
Music by Nicholas Williams
8 - 9 actors.
Click here to access demo tracks of some of the songs.
THE DEEPEST PLAY EVER: THE CATHARSIS OF PATHOS
A rag-tag group of clowns are hiding out in a bunker creating and rehearsing an 800 play cycle ad infinitum; every night they risk it all and raise a flag outside the bunker: SHOW TONIGHT! Lo! An audience appears! The clowns finally have the opportunity to perform and begin with play one, The Deepest Play Ever: The Catharsis of Pathos. The Catharsis of Pathos follows the antiheroine Mother LaMadre and her children as they drag their wagon through the Fifth World War and the post-post-apocalyptic wasteland that is New Europe. Together they must navigate all the pitfalls of the dramatic art of drama to find the few remaining books the art-abolishing Evil Empire have yet to destroy and maybe, just maybe, find a way to replace violence with art. Meanwhile, failed artist Davlavdor Salí sells his souls to become the Zombie King of the Evil Empire and sets out to deconstruct the world into nothingness but he needs all the books to do that. Equal parts satire and homage to epic theatre and the struggle for greatness.
10 actors and (at minimum) 2 musicians.
Music and additional lyrics by Michael Wells.
Premiere: 2006 New York International Fringe Festival, extended into Fringe Encore Series. Awarded FringeNYC Excellence Award for Outstanding Playwriting. Produced by CollaborationTown at the New Ohio Theatre in 2012, directed by Lee Sunday Evans.
"Geo Decas O’Donnell’s mashup of classical theater and literary dystopias might be the funniest, most entertaining show in town." - Oleg Ivanov, METRO NY
AMID PILGRIMS
A landscape play about a civilization’s last gasps. A rapid series of quick glimpses of humanity in the collapse of an empire.
Could work as an audio play, well suited for colleges/universities.
You can access drafts of my plays through my New Play Exchange Page.
WORK FOR ALL AGES
RIDDLE OF THE TRILOBITES
An epic, puppet-filled musical for all ages set 500 million years ago in the Cambrian Ocean during the Age of Invertebrates. The ocean is changing, new creatures are appearing and the Trilobite Elders fear that their reign as the dominant creature is coming to an end. Hope comes on Molting Day when a young trilo named Aphra is revealed to have prophetic markings electing her to solve the riddle of how “the trilobites cannot live but will not die.” Unsure how she could possibly solve a riddle that no Trilobite before has been able to, Aphra and her best friends set off on an epic adventure.
The play tackles themes related to growing up, family, loss, our impact on the environment, and extinction. It explores the reality that geological shifts have life-altering impacts on all creatures, encouraging children to think about how mankind behaves toward the planet now and to learn more about the oceans and their preservation.
Co-written with Jordan Seavey. Music and additional lyrics by Nicholas Williams. Developed with Lee Sunday Evans.
6 actors/puppeteers, lots of characters. 2 -3 musicians.
Developed as part of New Victory Theater's Labworks program. Riddle of the Trilobites received developmental funding from The Henson Foundation, NYSCA and The Dramatist Guild Fund.
PILOTS
TRAGIDRAMEDY
half hour, single camera comedy
Vanessa Whitman has been Artistic Director of The Hudson River Repertory Theatre in Upstate, NY for decades and has grown the organization from humble basement productions to one of the most preeminent theaters in country; along the way a chosen family of misfits has formed with Vanessa as matriarch. Begrudgingly, the time has come for her to select a replacement. Vanessa gathers her surrogate children: the neurotic Associate Artistic Director, the deluded leading lady and the stoner tech director and informs them that the theatre will go to whomever proves that they love it the most through a lengthy series of tests and challenges. A King Lear-esque battle ensues in this comedy about family, inheritance and artists.
MOST SCRIPTS AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
You can access drafts of my plays through my New Play Exchange Page.