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| Synopses of selected plays by Rosemary Frisino Toohey |
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The A Word A full-length drama Call it the perennial female condition…any country, any season, any century, a woman between fifteen and fifty is either trying to have a baby or trying not to have a baby The A Word looks at the pressures exerted by love, family, career, religion and society on four young women. From a high school senior in a single parent household to the wife of a wealthy businessman in India, from a young black woman struggling to make a name for herself in an all-white office to the happily-married mom who's told her unborn baby has big problems…four women, four takes on a controversial subject.
Agnes's Little War
Do citizens have the right to judge elected leaders on personal morals?
An idealistic voter lost faith in a political candidate after his extra-marital philanderings were revealed. She has waged a battle of letters demanding that he return the contribution she made to his campaign. A gentleman with ties to the unnamed individual appears at her door offering her money if she will stop writing the letters. Will she accept his offer?
Incest is the subject of this highly-charged drama. When her son flunks out of college and decides to follow in his dad’s footsteps, a mother resorts to desperate measures. On a hot night in June, she reveals an ugly secret that shatters all family bonds.
Baltimore’s City Paper said the playwright "...demonstrates a sure feel for the dysfunctional forces lurking beneath the placid surface of this farm family."
The play premiered as part of the 2000 Baltimore Playwrights Festival, winning Third Place. In May 2007, it was produced at Playwrights Forum in Memphis, TN.
Jon is having a dull day at the cash register of a market ringing up fruits and vegetables and then -- she walks in. All she's after is a box of strawberries, but his appetite takes off at warp speed. He smells the nectar of her breath, hears the pounding of the surf, sees verdant hills, plunges down into deep valleys...and then...she puts her $2.59 on the counter and leaves.
Berry Season premiered in the Run of the Mill Theater's Variations on Desire project in 2005.
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Mara is the body washer who prepares her body for burial as part of the Islamic ritual. While she admits here work is difficult, Mara says there's a sense of peace that comes after she has washed the deceased and wrapped the body in a shroud.
Nikki is the National Guard soldier who fired the fatal bullet. The mother of a little girl back in the States, she joined the Guard like so many others - to get money for college. But this? It's certainly not what she signed up for.
Amy is an American reporter recording the daily tally of death and destruction in the war. After a chilling interview with the dead woman's sister, she struggles to make sense of the story.
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Can love between two people survive when one of them is struck with debilitating disease? Fencing was once Laura's passion, but now that she has multiple sclerosis, the only matches she can win are the verbal battles with her husband. The illness leads her to a decision about marriage that might seem strange to someone not in her position.
The Baltimore Sun says, "What's most intriguing about Cornered
is the way it defies preconceptions...Love, like life, can thrust and parry in unexpected directions. And victory isn't always a joyous affair." Cornered won First Prize in the 2005 Baltimore Playwrights Festival. It premiered at Spotlighters Theater and has since been presented in New York, Los Angeles and Silver Spring, MD
G-Man
The G-Man is Larry, a garbageman, and he likes picking up trash just fine. If other people have a problem with his career choice, well, that's their problem. He's smart, he's got a good buddy to share good times with and he's got a way with women...he seldom sleeps alone. He also regularly visits his mom in a nursing home, something his sister can't bring herself to do, though he does lock horns with the home's director. Then, a change in his work shift leads to a dreadful discovery, a night of bad decisions and ends with his arrest. But help comes from an unexpected quarter...prompting changes in his job...and in himself.
Gladys in Wonderland
"You get up one day, eat a donut, read the paper, and some clown in a Good Humor suit says you’re going to die…" That’s Gladys’ dilemma in this bittersweet comedy that pokes fun at a very touchy subject.
First produced in 1999 as part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival, the play has had subsequent productions in Baltimore and in 2003 was done as a fund-raiser by the Baltimore County Department of Aging as part of the agency’s 25th anniversary celebration. It’s also been done in Memphis, TN and in Midland, TX, where the critic for the Midland Reporter-Telegram called it a "laugh-out-loud kind of evening".
The Ice-Cream King
The hero in this full-length comedy is Lenny, the original nice guy. He runs an ice-cream shop in an old downtown neighborhood and, in the eyes of some people, his biggest accomplishment, at the age of 33, is concocting butterscotch sundaes.
His sister thinks its time he got a "real" job, his best friend wants him to be more of a "player" with women, his mom thinks he ought to move in with her and his grandmother, and the pizzeria owner next door says he's got to persuade the landlord not to tear down the buildings and put up condos. Lenny is struggling to respond to this list of demands when tearful young woman enters the store. Over a shared tunafish sandwich, a bond is formed, a transformation occurs, and we learn that nice guys don't always finish last
In the Tank
In the Tank, an award-winning one-act comedy, focuses on two lobsters: Stu and Harry. Harry, a clever lobster in the tank of a seafood restaurant, is pretending to be dead to avoid becoming someone's dinner entree. Stu, a new arrival in the tank, takes a more philosophical approach to their dilemma. The two move from confrontation to understanding as they share observations about life, death, and the humans who wield dominion over all.
In the Tank has been a coast-to-coast comedy success, having been staged off-off-broadway in New York City, as well as in Los Angeles. It has also been produced in Slver Spring, MD and in Baltimore.
It premiered in Baltimore in 2001 where it was one of four one act plays produced under the title Seafood Buffet as part of the annual Baltimore Playwright's Festival. Seafood Buffet won second place honors for Best Play and second place for Best Production in the Festival that year. As a stand-alone production, In the Tank was chosen by Silver Spring Stage as that theater's entry in the 2005 Maryland Community Theater Festival. School Shooter
The Baltimore Sun called School Shooter "carefully crafted and elegantly written." The playwright received a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council for this drama which has eight actors playing 35 characters
It is a rainy Monday morning in a noisy high school hallway. Four teenagers are venting about classes, parents, friends and the opposite sex when a gunman opens fire - and we move from adolescent angst to tragedy. Teachers scurry to crisis stations and the scene shifts as a hospital nurse struggles to answer frantic parents facing their worst nightmare.
When the shooter pleads guilty but mentally ill to murder charges, the families of the slain students sue not only him, but his parents, his teachers, the principal, his friends and the entertainment companies that produced the movies he watched and the games that he played. Ultimately the case against all the defendants except the shooter is thrown out.
The parents of the dead kids are left with the realization that no one truly understands what they lost that rainy morning in a high school hallway.
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The inside story of a clothes dryer. Left behind by careless owners, three socks and a leg warmer debate the existential realities. At least they’ve got a leg up on humans: socks know how to pair up. The British publisher Lazy Bee Scripts, Southampton, has chosen the one-act comedy Socks for international publication and distribution.
Tilapia
Deserted by two younger couples who had been their dinner guests, an aristocratic older couple savors a meal. We hear of broken chairs, a smashed piano, a nasty fall into the baked alaska…there seemed to be some sort of….row among the young people. And then, the "he" of one couple went off with the "she" of the other. What did it all mean?
Premiering in Baltimore in 2001 as one of four one-act plays under the title Seafood Buffet, Tilapia took second place honors in the Baltimore Playwrights Festival.
Woman on the Edge
Even before Woman on the Edge premiered in the 2004 Baltimore Playwrights Festival, the play won the prestigious National Towngate Theatre Playwriting Contest at the Oglebay Institute. Awarding the 2004 prize, the theater called the play "a riotously funny play about a woman’s searching for a raison d’etre."
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A young Iraqi woman has been killed at a checkpoint and her death is seen through three sets of eyes.
Why would sane, sensible, 64-year-old Nettie wrap explosives around her bathrobe and fire a gun at a police officer? Is it because her husband is driving cross-country with his late brother’s ashes, showing his deceased sibling the sights? Could it be because her niece insisted on holding the family reunion at Nettie’s house? Perhaps it’s because Nettie’s older sister keeps telling everybody where to get off?