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! 

It's here! Tonight at 7:30pm is the second and final night of the fourth annual Chicago One-Minute Play Festival presented by Victory Gardens at the Biograph Theater. Featuring sixty count 'em SIXTY playwrights including Ike Holter, Randall Colburn, Pat McLean, Tanise Robnett, Edgar Sanchez, Dani Bryant and YOURS TRULY, and great performers such as Kate Black-Spence, Wardell Clark, Rashaad Hall, Emily Casey and so many, many more...my own plays have been lovingly and hilariously directed by Chicago theatre greats Jo Cattell and Hutch Pimental, and please come out to see their wonderful work.  Helping curate this awesome, thought-provoking and frequently gut-busting night of theatre is the marvelous Dan Dvorkin, and to see what he and the One-Minute Play Festival organizers have put together, come out to Victory Gardens tonight and play! See you there!

http://victorygardens.org/also-playing/one-minute-play-festival/

This week's CHICAGO READER has a nice write-up on all the pieces in City Lit Theatre's upcoming Art of Adaptation Festival, and illustrating the piece is a picture taken of the MISS MOORE cast of Ellen Chambers, Tori Ayres Oman, Erin O'Shea and Zack Shornick by photographer Sam Parry.  Check out the article here, and be sure to get your tickets to the Festival here: we run on Friday and Sunday, and I have to say this has been one of the most fun shows I've ever worked on. Come see a great cast run the gamut of teenage awkwardness, young love, empathy, frustrated idealism, The Monkey, morbid poetry and national tragedy in MISS MOORE'S SENIOR DRAMA CLASS PRESENTS...only this weekend at City Lit Theatre!

Happy to report that my play adapted from Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry collection Second April and the November 22 1963 issue of LIFE magazine will be a part of City Lit Theatre's Art of Adaptation Festival!  The cast, seen above, features Tori Ayres Oman, Ellen Chambers, Zack Shornick and Erin O'Shea, and we're in rehearsals now, with myself directing and choreographing the early-1960s dance sensation "The Monkey" so we're lucky the actors are much better dancers than I am!  Come see a story about young love and dreams deferred in a 1963 Ohio high school, commemorating both one of America's greatest poets and the fiftieth anniversary of a national tragedy: only at City Lit Theatre, July 19th and 21st! We'll keep you posted...

Rest for the Weary Spirit was born as a passion project for myself and talented actor/director Ellen Chambers in the late summer of 2009, inspired by life in small-town Illinois, the death of Michael Jackson, the revolution in Iran, the music of Sam Cooke and Camille Saint-Saens, and most importantly the desperate people in trapped relationships, those friendships, romances, affairs and even marriages that persist not out of love or even lust but because of a shared past and a fear of being alone. Those relationships are the core of my favorite genre, that of film noir, but there are no guns, cigarettes or fedoras in Rest for the Weary Spirit: just two tattered motel rooms in which some very hurt people are searching for something that  may be bigger than themselves, but may also lead to a disappointment to which they've become accustomed.

Last year, Rest received its world premiere in a production by The Smiley Face and the Frown Entertainment Group in Los Angeles, California, thanks to company member (and my best friend from high school) Matt Dodge and director J.P. Rapozo, and next month selections from that play will be part of the new piece Vivaldi's Winter at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, starring J.P. and Ashley Victoria Robinson.  If you're looking for a little bit of Midwestern tragedy tinged with the flavor and humor of real life, give it a look. Best to J.P., Ashley, Matt and the whole Smiley Face team, and thanks again for bringing it on home.

For anyone reading, Walter Briggs is one of the best people I know in or out of Chicago theatre: he's always there to help out, as he did  by stepping in and playing a part for a week in Hurrah for the Next Who Dies rehearsals during a cast member's emergency trip so many years ago, and then some time later, after the founding of now-famed artistic syndicate The Inconvenience, he co-directed and assistant-directed the two short plays of mine that The Inconvenience produced in their Festivals, some of the best theatre experiences I've ever had, due in no small way to Walter's skill, talent, and humor. He later commissioned me to write a play about the 1919 Chicago race riots, a subject that has long fascinated both of us,  and directed a staged reading of that piece, titled Riot Call, for the Inconvenience's Fresh Meat Reading Series.  There are few people that I trust and admire as much as Walter Briggs, and he's one of the most acclaimed actors in Chicago, for reasons that will be evident to anyone who's ever seen him onstage, in plays ranging from The Glass Menagerie and Sophocles: Seven Sicknesses to The Earl, Hit the Wall  and the current Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.

Walter's newborn son Elliot died this past Sunday. Please visit this memorial page and consider donating, to help this great man and great friend cover some of the accrued costs.


Thank you.

-Mark Mason

Hey, this is Mark Mason here, and I'm going to try to update this as much as I can with various thoughts, reviews of old movies and ideas. Forgive me some of my technical inexperience in all things online, and I'll be back soon. Thanks!