Nicholas Baronski, a professor of American Literature who retires before he becomes too cynical about human nature and love, decides to write his first novel, a novel about his grade school sweetheart, Karen Oldinski. Here the novel becomes a novel within a novel as Nicholas Baronski becomes his character, Victor Sarinski, and his sweetheart, Karen Oldinski, becomes his character, Carol Loczech, in his novel entitled, The Queen of Spades. Baronski's novel consists of a number of funny vignettes involving Victor Sarinski (i.e. Nicholas Baronski) and a wealth of characters, some actual people...

Experientialism: Integrating Mind & Body, Spirit & Matter, the Many & the One is a concise introduction to a new philosophy that continues and transforms the tradition established by phenomenologists and hermeneuticists like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, and Habermas without much of the philosophical abstraction that tends to characterize these areas of philosophy. Experientialism, as a philosophy, maintains that reality is equal to experience when "experience" is defined as a necessary combination of cognition, affect, behavior, sensation, environment and the "I." In this ontology,...

Based on a true story, Head and Hands tells the tale of Flora Miller, a retired opera singer, who is implicated in the gruesome murder of her brother, a retired captain from the Cincinnati fire department. Set in the 30's, this dark comedy thriller brings to life the swing era while unveiling the tragic story of a woman who is either the manipulating mind that orchestrates the brutal death of her brother or the innocent victim of love. Harry Miller, Flora's brother, hires Heber Hicks, a slick-talking felon who has manipulated women and murdered in his past, to serve as his eccentric sister's...

What God Has Joined is edgy comedy that depicts the evolution of three blood-related marriages in a new and unusual manner. In Couple-1 we have a dominant, acid-tongued wife and the submissive, placid-tongued husband whose passive-aggressiveness serves only to trigger the venom from his wife. In Couple-2 we have an anal-retentive husband who controls his wife through condescending and placating over-concern and an ineffectual wife who grows more depressed over her inability to satisfy her needs. In Couple-3 we have a husband, a born-again Christian and salesman, who dominates his wife through...

In his youth Joseph Voke developed severe tension headaches whenever he involved himself with a female. He diagnosed the problem: repressed anger and resentment. And he employed a solution: recognize the anger/resentment when it happens, accept it for what it is, and then let the other people involved know about it. It worked: it cleared up his headaches. So at age 25 he vowed to employ this same method to his shyness toward people for whom he felt affection. Unfortunately for Joseph Voke, this included women. This is the story of struggling college instructor who let himself feel affection...

The 20th Quarter-Annual Horse Contest is a comedy about two thirty-something men (Jim Lucas and Ron Treland) in the 80's who come together periodically to deepen their long-term friendship through the playing of a basketball game called "HORSE." They have developed their own peculiar way of playing the game, where the object of the game is superseded by the creativity of their playing styles and shot selections. It is more of a creative ritual than a competitive game. The game is continuously "interrupted" (sometimes in real time, mostly not) by Ron's parents, Jim and Ron's high school...

Solitary God is a serious comedy about a divorced woman, Eva, in her late twenties living alone in an apartment. The only thing that happens in real time at the beginning of the play is that she walks into her apartment and turns on the light. The only thing that happens in real time at the end of the play is that she cleans up a bit, calls her mother, and leaves her apartment. What transpires between these two points is characters from her past and present coming in and out of her "apartment space" interacting with her and each other, revealing the emotional evolution underlying Eva's growth...

"Were you lying?" "Like there was no tomorrow." Three friends, Leah, Natalie and Sean are having drinks in a bar. Leah wants to know why men lie all the time in their relationships with women. Their discussion is played out through shifting scenes depicting Leah as an emotionally naive woman who has a predilection for sex after the man meets her "one date rule." Natalie is depicted as a woman 'with a past'; she's the realist with a cynical edge who has married James, a man who had strayed from his marriage and who has always had problems with Natalie's mother (an off-stage voice). Sean is as...

A Woman of Means is a tragi-comedy that grapples with the need for self-justification in the face of contradiction between one's expressed values and one's behavior. Hampton, a philanderer, had always wanted to marry a "woman of means," i.e. someone who was not only financially well off but motivated to stay that way. He not only wanted financial independence afforded him by a woman (which he never received), he also wanted his "world" to be free from the "unclean and unholy" (which it never was). Instead of marrying a woman of means, he married a nice but unstable woman, Elizabeth, who works...

Dead Cowboys is a dark comedy about the transformational powers of the American middle-class nuclear family. Maureen Kleckner and her neighbor, Melinda Russell, attempt to poison their husbands when they find out that they have been having sex with young, possibly under-aged cheerleaders. Maureen's husband, Larry, has been out of work for months, but he covers up his unemployed status by pretending to go to work every day and, generally, carrying on like he still has a job. Maureen's daughter, Amy, is in her middle twenties, living at home, and is pregnant by a man who feigns love for her and...