The Plays

“All the world’s a stage” and I’ve wanted to play on it since I could walk. I made my entrance at 10, when I teamed up with my sister Charna to create Penny’s Parties.

Charna led the kids in games and fostered goodness and I followed with simple magic and Disney hand puppets. I would ask the adults to step out of the room while I performed and that kept our little business going for quite a few years.

Flash forward through Girl Scout plays, high school skits, college productions, playwriting classes, and theater workshops in New York and Chicago. For nearly 20 years I reviewed theater, TV and films for the Chicago Tribune.

As soon as I stopped working as a critic, I started writing plays. I co-wrote the first two with Cheryl Lavin, creator and writer of the nationally syndicated column “Tales From the Front” and my dear friend since 5th grade. The collaboration was pure joy. Until we got our first reviews…

“I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.”
 —Oscar Wilde

The world premiere of “Celebrity Beat” was produced on Broadway—Broadway and Belmont in Chicago. It’s based on our own experiences as pop culture queens at the Chicago Tribune.

Years later, “Celebrity Beat,” still holds up as a wicked and prescient look at celebrity journalism in the earliest days of People magazine. Four interviews in four hotel rooms over 10 years, with Molly the reporter going from feature writer to world famous celebrity journalist. A gay President and hidden sex scandal figure in.

It was directed by David Zaks and I loved every aspect of it: casting, rehearsals, rewrites, watching a live audience listen and laugh. “Celebrity Beat” was smart, political, and ahead of its time. Who cares about critics anyway?

Our next play, “Solomons’ Choice” was also a wonderful experience. “Solomons’ Choice” is a family comedy about love, marriage and the religious ties that can strangle our best intentions. Mick Leavitt directed. “Solomons’ Choice” got bigger laughs, a longer run, and a second production a few years later in Santa Fe, NM, directed by Eron Block. It’s wise and funny and if you’re interested in producing it, send me an email.

“Blue Sky is a romantic comedy about a hate crime. . .it couldn’t be more timely.”

Blue Sky

I like to call my newest play, “Blue Sky,” a comedy about a hate crime. It’s romantic and tragic and it couldn’t be more timely. Eve, a new doctor, goes to work as a family practitioner in a small Wyoming mountain town and there’s a violent death and a funny love story that involves a Buddhist sheriff and that’s all I want to say about that.

“Blue Sky” had a staged reading at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago and has come close to production too many times.

If you’re a director, producer or head of a theater and interested in reading the script, you can contact me directly or email my agent Tonda Marton at tonda@martonagency.com

My next play is in the works and I’m pretty sure it’s a comedy about death and dying.