INDEX:

1)        Blues for Miss Buttercup

2)        Ruthie Willabaum's Angel Baby

3)       shivver

4)        Shame the Strong

5)        The Mighty Marvel Milkdud Avengers

6)        Your Basic American Monday

7)        Ernie Pyle:  Hoosier Witness to the World

8)        That Band from Indiana!

9)        Buddy Lee Perriman Reflects on the Persian Gulf Crisis, Day 15

10)      73 Men Sailed Off

11)      Ain't Really My Birthday, But I Need a Party Awful Bad

12)      Divinity Street
 
 
 

Blues for Miss Buttercup

•  A Two-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 1995

Synopsis:   A feverish love triangle in the African-American quarter of 1930s’ Indianapolis turns deadly when a refined schoolmistress and a vixenish speakeasy owner vie for the body and soul of popular boogie-woogie pianist Sonny Boy Dupree, poisoned on the eve of a major tour.

Based on events surrounding the mysterious 1935 death of legendary blues artist Leroy Carr and featuring a period score of vintage blues and jazz, Blues for Miss Buttercup is by turns a tender love story, riveting murder mystery and rousing evocation of one of the most vibrant and creative periods in African-American musical history.

•  Winner of 1995 Energing Playwright Award from Urban Stages, Inc. for New York Premiere
•  Nominated for 3 Bistro Awards, 1995
•  Excellent for Black History Month, American Music History

Cast:  7 actors — 4 male, 3 female

Original & Period Music:  15 songs (4 singing parts & live piano & guitar by 3 actors)

Unit Set

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Ruthie Willabaum’s Angel Baby

•  A Two-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 2000

Synopsis:  On the surface, Ruthie Willabaum’s Angel Baby is a simple drama of a suburban American housewife fighting to save her infant son from an undefined malaise that none of her family or friends either acknowledge or desire to cure.

As the story progresses, and the moral flaws of the other characters and surrounding society emerge, the baby becomes sicker — wasting away until his only chance of being “saved” is to be declared an “Angel Baby” and then ritually killed in a televised public ceremony at the local church. . . for a special one-time home-shopping network coupon rebate!

Surreal Fantasy? Savage Satire? Read your local newspapers, watch your local TV news. . . it’s already happening. . . on a street where you live. . .

Cast:  6 actors — 2 male, 4 female

Original Music:  6 songs (6 singing parts to tracks)

Unit Set

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shivver

• A Two-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
  ©  L.E. McCullough 1999

Synopsis:  A condo outside Las Vegas. . . Raymond (a sleazy music agent) hustles Patti (his formerly-famous now-alcoholic pop-diva ex-wife) into tutoring his newest “package” — a mysterious street waif he’s stage-named shivver, whose exotic vocal talent is surpassed by her startling clairvoyant prowess. . .

Can shivver truly resurrect Raymond and Patti’s dead daughter? Twenty-four hours before a global TV concert, shivver lies in a coma. . . if she wakes, Patti’s link with her daughter may be lost . . . if she doesn’t, Raymond is ruined. . .

With so much life in the balance, no wonder somebody’s going to end up dead. . .

Cast:  5 actors — 2 male, 3 female

Original Music:  11 songs (4 singing parts to tracks or live band)

Unit Set

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Shame the Strong

•  A Two-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 1999

Synopsis:  Ripped from the headlines of today, Shame the Strong puts a personal cast on the debate between fanaticism vs. dedication — what’s the difference, who decides. . . and who pays the ultimate price?

Curtain rises on a remote mountain cabin where a young man and woman are held at shotgun-point by the “lady of the house”, who declares they are thieves. . . the woman maintains she is an FBI agent attempting to apprehend the man, a fugitive wanted for bombing abortion clinics. . . the man swears the woman is a crazed ex-girlfriend stalking him and begs the lady to let him go. The door flies open and the lady’s retarded son rushes in with shocking news. . .

For the next twelve hours, these four folks are going to learn way more about each other than they needed or wanted to know. . . and what they don’t know will hurt them.

Cast:  4 actors — 2 male, 2 female

Music:  3 short a cappella gospel songs (2 singing parts)

Unit Set

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The Mighty Marvel Milkdud Avengers

•  A Full-Length One-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 1999

Synopsis:  Meet the Mighty Marvel Milkdud Avengers:  a typical neighborhood kids’ club consisting of three 11-year-olds — Benny, Lisa and Gator — friends since pre-school, who meet in the cozy confines of their private clubhouse, an unused tool shed in Lisa’s mother’s backyard. But as summer vacation begins, the Avengers have an un-typical problem:  without a liver transplant, Benny will be dead soon, maybe before school starts again.

Gator and Lisa bicker over how to spend the $79.40 in the club treasury. To their frustration, Benny seems to show no interest in the debate at all; he just plays the harmonica and wishes his friends would be his friends instead of trying to save the world. On the day before school begins and Benny leaves for what is likely his final trip to the clinic, the Mighty Marvel Milkdud Avengers meet one last time for a crucial vote. . .

Blending humor, pathos and dignity, The Mighty Marvel Milkdud Avengers is a children’s play about the very grownup subject of death — and how survivors learn to cope.

Cast:  3 actors — 2 male, 1 female (adults or children)
 (very flexible:  productions have used 1 male, 2 female; 3 male; 3 female)

Unit Set

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Your Basic American Monday

•  A Full-Length One-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 1995

Synopsis:  Ever had “one of those Mondays”? Sure you have. We all have. But for the eight characters hovering around a roadside diner somewhere in America, this particular Monday has become an Eternity — an extended tableaux vivant in which the stories told by each character (Waitress, Hustler, Business Woman, Business Man, Working Guy, Derelict College Girl, Teen Boy) venture further and further along a twisted and unraveling path, intersecting in seemingly coincidental yet inevitable fashion, until the characters’ identities blur and re-emerge in the most startling manner:  an abortion clinic employee dreaming of babies lining the road like icicles. . . a man facing down the spectre of death in a corned beef sandwich. . . a woman pleading for the return of her kidnapped son. . . a street beggar transformed for one shining moment into a hero.

Spanning an emotional gamut from insanity and terror to ecstasy and devotion, Your Basic American Monday offers an instant slice of contemporary Americana through a collection of characters who are by turns confused and confident, bitter and depraved, lovelorn and shy, infinitely hopeful and irremediably hopeless — the world’s winners and losers, the lucky and luckless, the sanctified and the hell-bound.

Cast:  8 actors — 4 male, 4 female

Original  Music:  1 song (1 singing part to track or live guitar)

Unit Set

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Ernie Pyle:  Hoosier Witness to the World

•  A Full-Length One-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
©  L.E. McCullough 1999

Synopsis:  Ernie Pyle:  Hoosier Witness to the World is based on the colorful travel and war dispatches of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernie Pyle (1900-45), a small-town Indiana native who achieved worldwide fame by recording the lives of ordinary Americans in extraordinary circumstances. As a nationally-syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard newspapers, Pyle documented the heroics of everyday life in Depression-era America and the war years, becoming a hero himself to millions worldwide. Ernie Pyle:  Hoosier Witness to the World shows the power of his work during his lifetime and the importance of his legacy to Americans today.

Cast:  5 actors — 2 male, 2 female + 1 onstage pianist

Original & Period Music:  7 songs (4 singing parts & live piano)

Unit Set

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That Band from Indiana!

•  A  Full-Length One-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 2000

Synopsis:   The Roaring Twenties as seen in the rise of the Charlie Davis Orchestra from their 1923 summer dance stint at Indianapolis’ Casino Gardens to their 1930 headlining tour at the Paramount Theatre in New York City, sharing stages with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman and other Jazz Age celebrities.

Indiana in the 1920s was a melting pot for the hot jazz style that would bloom fully into Swing and Big Band during the ’30s. Legendary musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke, Hoagy Carmichael, Frankie Trumbauer, Leroy Carr and future Hollywood film stars Dick Powell, Dorothy Lamour and Ginger Rogers performed at dance halls and speakeasies throughout the state.

The entire nation was undergoing enormous social and political change with the onset of Prohibition, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the evolution of motion pictures and radio and the roller-coaster economic boom that transformed America from Main Street to Wall Street. That Band from Indiana! mixes history and music and offers a scintillating portrait of a vibrant decade in American history.

Cast:  8 actors — 3 male, 2 female + 3 onstage band members (piano, alto sax, trumpet)

Period Music:  14 songs (5 singing parts & live piano, alto sax, trumpet)

Unit Set

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Buddy Lee Perriman Reflects
on the Persian Gulf Crisis, Day 15

•  A Two-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 1995

Synopsis:   Buddy Lee Perriman Reflects on the Persian Gulf Crisis, Day 15 is a “stage novella”, a continuous narrative interweaving of fables, anecdotes, songs, chants, prayers and dreams set in the depressed Stringtown section of Indianapolis and spoken into a cheap cassette recorder by a paraplegic Vietnam Vet who — after years of wandering Ulysses-like seeking amnesia and absolution — returns to his decaying hometown neighborhood to regrow personal roots and take a final stand for basic humanity in a social milieu that deifies Elvis Presley, A.J. Foyt and Charles Manson and shows more interest in fresh recipes for barbecued roadkill than the immortal souls of its living children.

As stage autobiography, Buddy Lee Perriman Reflects on the Persian Gulf Crisis, Day 15 offers a rare inside glimpse of the white urban underclass, a growing and increasingly ominous Silent Majority whose disaffected, volatile worldview is demanding a serious social reckoning.

Cast:  5 actors — 3 male, 2 female (1 boy age 10-13)

Original & Period Music:  2 singing parts and live guitar

Unit Set

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73 Men Sailed Off

•  A Two-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 1997
 

Synopsis:  August, 1970. . . three Midwestern teenagers working in a small-town diner dream of making it big in the world outside as they celebrate a farewell party for the one of their number who is college-bound in the morning.

Twenty-some years later, the trio unexpectedly reunites in the same diner where they must at last come to grips with the genuine cost of “eternal” friendship.

73 Men Sailed Off is a coming-of-age tale set in two acts — Act I in the heart of the turbulent Vietnam War era when an activist generation of American youth approached adulthood believing anything was possible; Act II in the late 1990s when that same generation’s naivete has been tempered with dearly-bought cynicism, and surviving the day has replaced saving the world as life’s primary goal.

Cast:  6 actors — 4 male, 2 female

Unit Set

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Ain’t Really My Birthday,
    but I Need a Party Awful Bad

•  A Two-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 2000
 

Synopsis:  On a sunny spring Sunday, an emotionally distraught 31-year-old single mother loads up four of her children in her car and deliberately drives the wrong way down an interstate, crashing headlong into a family returning from church. Now on trial for 7 counts of vehicular homicide, Bonnie Gibson waits in the interview room of the Dunbar County Jail for her first meeting with Janice McCloud, a court-appointed psychiatrist. During the next two hours, through flashback and testimony from family, friends, ex-husbands, co-workers and witnesses, Bonnie’s life of hopelessness unfolds. . . and we see Janice come to grips with her own past family-crisis episode of — well, the coroner called it suicide, but was it really murder?

Ain’t Really My Birthday, but I Need a Party Awful Bad provides insight into a seldom-discussed tragedy increasingly marking the American domestic landscape: single mothers for whom suicide/murder is perceived as the only logical way out of an economically hopeless, emotionally bankrupt existence.

Cast:  7 actors — 2 male, 5 female

Unit Set

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Divinity Street

•  A Two-Act Play by L.E. McCullough
   ©  L.E. McCullough 2000
 

Synopsis:  In the West Philadelphia working-class home of Martin and Belle Doyle, Friday, November 22, 1963 begins like any other day with an embittered Martin, age 65, listening to the radio in his wheelchair as his wife, Belle, fixes a breakfast of bile and barely-repressed fury. Things get worse:  spinster daughter Peggy announces she’s going to marry a Jew; playboy Marty, Jr. announces he’s quit his chemist job at DuPont to work for a sleazy pop record producer; daughter Kate, a nun in the foreign missions, arrives home and says she’s left the convent to become a CORE organizer. And at 1 p.m. comes the news of the President’s assassination.

The house on Divinity Street has another visitor with an equally disturbing bit of news:  Michael Doyle, the youngest child who was killed serving in Korea, has returned — or at least it seems that way to the rest of the family who suddenly begin to see and talk to the dead Marine as if he were standing right in front of them. If it’s not a ghost, is it a deceased part of themselves that is demanding a reckoning?

Cast:  6 actors — 3 male, 3 female

Unit Set

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That's All for Now. . . More on the Way!