It's almost here! City Lit Theatre's Art of Adaptation Festival is going on TONIGHT, featuring my play FROZEN FIRE directed by Amy C. Buckler and Laura Nessler's play PACHELBEL, directed by me! There's still time to get your tickets here...see you there!

Nightclub singer Doris Brack (Teresa Veramendi) prepares to demonstrate her cosmetic talents on police stenographer Marion (Rebecca Flores) in my film noir-styled FROZEN FIRE, coming THIS WEEKEND to the City Lit Theatre Art of Adaptation Festival! Friday the 13th at 7:30pm and Sunday the 15th at 2:00pm are the two only performances, at City Lit Theatre, 1020 West Bryn Mawr Avenue in Chicago. Tickets are available here, but be warned, they're going fast: see the electrifying work of director Amy C. Buckler and a phenomenal cast giving their all in this story of sin, sex and murder in 1940s Chicago.  What's that, you say you're not in the mood for darkness, seduction and scandal? Well, you're in luck, for I'm directing the heartfelt and hilarious Pachelbel by the lovely playwright Laura Nessler, a piece about a doomed but inspired romance in a string quartet starring Ellen Chambers and featuring Miss Nessler herself on cello: fortunately for you Chicago theatre lovers, Pachelbel is running the same nights as Frozen Fire, and only at City Lit Theatre! See you there!

I'm proud to announce my next play, FROZEN FIRE, will be performed at City Lit Theater Company's annual Art of Adaptation Festival on June 13th and 15th!

FROZEN FIRE: it's 1948 in a dank room on the North Side of Chicago, where a beautiful nightclub singer under the watchful eyes of a young stenographer casts aside a magazine and picks up a dusty poetry volume...but before she can get more than a few stanzas out, the questions begin. Questions about flames, torture, crime and Hell: she would do anything to die rather than talk, but the man asking is going to make her answer for her guilty past and possibly deadly future. Inspired by Amy Lowell's haunting, elegiac poem "A Fairy Tale," the music of Duke Ellington, the film noir classics of the 1940s and the real-life murder of Chicago showgirl Estelle Carey, FROZEN FIRE is about a christening amidst the darkness, nightmares of being alone, and what we're capable of when we lose our innocence.

Starring (from left to right) Rebecca Flores, Benjamin Johnson, Teresa Veramendi and directed by 20% Theatre Company's Development Manager Amy C. Buckler and written by me, FROZEN FIRE will go up Friday June 13th and 15th, times and prices to be announced soon...tickets can be reserved by calling 773-293-3682, and we'll see you there!