In AGATHOCLES the two sons of the King of Syracuse (Agathocles) strive for the hand of the same girl, and the elder is killed by the younger. The ruler can only avenge his loss by sacrificing his remaining son–but doing so would mean the end of his dynasty. ...
Based on the Victor Hugo novel of the same name (penned when the author was only twenty-one), this macabre play begins in a morgue. The fearsome outlaw, Hans of Iceland, whose face has been seen by no one, determines to kill a regiment of Musketeers that he blames for the death of his son. His revenge intersects in a bloody way with the more conventional romantic plot of a young nobleman who loves the daughter of a political prisoner that the fo ...
In 1828 a young man in rags appeared in the German city of Nurnberg, saying that he'd been kept isolated in a dungeon all of his life. Was he the bastard offshoot of some noble or royal family, secreted away to preserve the honor of the house? Within a few months he was dead under mysterious circumstances, his mystery still unsolved. CASPER HAUSER uses the uproar caused by Hauser's emergence to focus the white heat of the authors' ...
Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) wrote a number of comic plays during his life. His drama featured broadly-based, coarse humor, and is filled with crude-but-vibrant characters drawn from the streets of Restoration London, individuals such as sharpers, whores, and eccentrics. His work is essentially plotless, but reeks with the odor of real people. Frank J. Morlock has created a composite drama (with plot!) from Shadwell's many works, but particu ...
In 1844-45, while Alexandre Dumas was working on his two classic novels, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, he found time to write a play called Sylvandire. A young provincial, Roger Tancred d'Anguilem, arrives in Paris to fight a legal battle for a huge inheritance. His opponent is an Indian called Afghano, who has bribed the judges. The case appears lost until Roger's approached by a sleazy lawyer who promises him su ...
This play distills the essence of Congreve into one stageworthy play. William Congreve wrote four comedies: The Way of the World is his acknowledged masterpiece; Love for Love is less brilliant but easier to perform; The Old Bachelor and The Double Dealer, his early dramas, contain very good material but are rarely read let alone performed. Frank Morlock builds his own adaptation of Congreve's dramas on the general plot of Love for Love, an ...
Based on the bestselling novel by James Branch Cabell, Jurgen is a philosophical fantasy in the manner of Candide, which strings together the hero's sexual adventures into an ironic and satirical commentary on life and sex. During his travels through space and time, Jurgen encounters a number of different characters from history, and always manages to escape his follies, relying on his natural attractive charm to rescue him when nothing els ...
While French writer Alexandre Dumas is best-known for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, many critics consider his Marie-Antoinette novels to be his greatest achievement. Indeed, he was working on a dramatization of The Queen's Necklace at the time of his death in 1870. This was never published, but French playwright Pierre Decourcelle then produced his own version of this work. A successful dramatist, Decourcelle did a bri ...
Charles Desnoyer (1806-1858) and Leon Beauvallet (1828-1885) were French playwrights of the mid-nineteenth century. THE KING OF ROME focuses on the Emperor Napoleon's only son, the Duke of Reichstadt, who was held a captive by his maternal grandfather, the Emperor of Austria. Fearing that he would emulate his father or be used by a Napoleonic conspiracy to capture the French throne, the Duke was kept in ignorance of his father's identi ...
