Charlene A. Donaghy LLC
"With plays that are intoxicating and mysterious, Donaghy has a gift for finding the truth that lurks below our eccentricities"
Doug Wright, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award Winning Playwright
Doug Wright, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award Winning Playwright
You are invited to join some of my 4 a.m. Friends and me for
4 a.m. Friends
Truro Playwright Collective
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Marlene Dietrich is quoted as saying, “It’s the friends you can call at 4 a.m. that matter.”
We all have those friends: the ones who understand you when you tell them your secret desires, who gently break your heart about love because you know they speak truth, the ones who pick leopard bras when all you want is a pink bow, who surprise you with an alligator in a garden to propel you forward, who might talk you into a misdemeanor or two when necessary. Becca, Tammy, and Kim are those kinds of 4 a.m. Friends with humor and heart the ties that bind. A myriad of iconic moments, people, and fashion from the 1970s to present day propel these friends through six short plays as they fight, argue, support, and love through some of life’s most challenging hurdles, growing from their teens to their sixties.
You know, just like you might do with your 4 a.m. Friends.
Truro Library
7 Standish Way
North Truro, MA
4 a.m. Friends
Truro Playwright Collective
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Marlene Dietrich is quoted as saying, “It’s the friends you can call at 4 a.m. that matter.”
We all have those friends: the ones who understand you when you tell them your secret desires, who gently break your heart about love because you know they speak truth, the ones who pick leopard bras when all you want is a pink bow, who surprise you with an alligator in a garden to propel you forward, who might talk you into a misdemeanor or two when necessary. Becca, Tammy, and Kim are those kinds of 4 a.m. Friends with humor and heart the ties that bind. A myriad of iconic moments, people, and fashion from the 1970s to present day propel these friends through six short plays as they fight, argue, support, and love through some of life’s most challenging hurdles, growing from their teens to their sixties.
You know, just like you might do with your 4 a.m. Friends.
Truro Library
7 Standish Way
North Truro, MA
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Recent PodcastThank You Five
Strawdog Theatre Company Chicago, IL Bringing Theatre Artists from around the globe into a conversation about live theatre and digital storytelling with a spirit of gratitude and innovation. CLICK HERE FOR PODCAST |
Recent PublicationThe Quadroon
and the Dove Clarice's "Destiny" Monologue She Persisted One Hundred Monologues by Women over Forty Edited by Lawrence Harbison Published by The Applause Acting Series From plays by members of Honor Roll!, an advocacy group of women over forty. "These women are in their forties and fifties and sixties, and they have been writing a long time, and they are at the height of their craft. These are tight, complex, nuanced pieces of writing, which no one has seen because for too long they weren't looking. These are important writers, and important plays." —Theresa Rebeck, from the introduction |
Bones of Home and Other Plays*
Hansen Publishing Group I explore characters submerged in challenges ranging from a bad economy, to crime, loss of loved ones, and displacement. Miriam, the protagonist of the title piece, Bones of Home,has lost her long-time partner. As she contemplates a bottle of wine and sleeping pills, onto her dilapidated porch sneaks Dillon, hoping to steal away back to New Orleans to “…at least be close so I can talk to [my parents] and they hear me in the oaks and along the river and in a drafty old Treme cottage where maybe I can hide out as long as I need to feel them.” Across age and race, where the fear of loneliness is deeper than the fear of death, Dillon pushes Miriam with “You live, you keep this house alive, keep Jessie alive.” As she hears Dillon drive away in her 1969 truck, the audience is left to ponder Miriam’s choice as the lights fade on her and her decision. |
The Quadroon and the Dove*
Charlene A. Donaghy New Orleans, 1841. As a January cold snap settles over New Orleans, Clarice, a free woman of color Quadroon placée to Lucien Boudet, a wealthy white Native Creole industrialist, prepares to attend the upcoming and extravagant Quadroon Ball. 15 years have passed since Clarice was presented to Lucien at such an event and she has since led a life of status and privilege. Only in silence, Clarice contemplates if the price she has paid for such a life is yet another form of slavery. As the Quadroon Ball rapidly approaches, secrets and lies fuel betrayals and threaten the delicate balance of this provincial world poised on the precipice of change. As Lucien’s lustful desires for another collide with a looming enslaved persons' uprising, Clarice fights to maintain the life she has so carefully forged while striving to protect her young, teenaged niece Juliette, known as Dove…and to maintain her very sanity. Riveting and fast-moving, The Quadroon and the Dove is a powerful, poetic story that resonates with prevailing struggles we continue to confront in society today. Strong themes of race, gender and power are presented by a cast of six characters that you will stay with long after you leave the theatre. |
*Please click on image to visit websites
HEADER: Photographs courtesy of Josh Andrus Photography and Planet Photo. Production photos (l to r): Gift of an Orange with Dayenne C. Byron Walters & Richard Caines; Permanent Ink with Swann Gruen; Another August with Jason Walsh, Qiana Watsun, Foster Daniels, Jr; Who You Got to Believe with Sheilagh Weymouth & L.B. Williams. Photos with Director/Producer/Actor Jackie Davis as well as Dramatists Gary Garrison and Mary Conroy.