| PROFILE | PLAYS | LINKS |
Jennifer Fell Hayes I began creating little plays and performances when I was about seven or eight, coaxing my unwilling little brother into various roles. A year or two later I was constructing "wings" for a stage with our taken-apart ping pong table and some sheets. It was when I began teaching, however, that I discovered there weren't plays with casts big enough to accommodate all my talented and enthusiastic students, and so I began creating plays for and with them, and eventually began writing them.
I am currently director of the drama program at Friends Seminary, in Manhattan, New York. A production of The Pirates of Penzance that I directed at Friends is the subject of a documentary, Kids of Penzance, by independent film-maker Draper Shreeve. Photographs of the productions can be seen at http://www.geocities.com/kidsofpenzance/main.html. I'm a member of the Dramatists Guild, and am published by News Plays, Incorporated, and Samuel French.
My new play, Endurance, one of three winners in the 2004 TRU Voices New Plays Reading Series in Manhattan, received an Equity contract staged reading at the Greenwich Street Theatre, New York, and has another coming up by Algonquin Productions.
I'm also founder/partner of DramaMuse, consultants on drama in musem education, and my book, Pioneer Journeys: Drama in Museum Education, co-authored with Dorothy Napp Schindel, won the American Alliance for Theatre and Education Distinguished Book Award in 1995. I've written plays for the Mount Vernon Hotel Museum, Manhattan, the American Indian Museum, Smithsonian Institution, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the Liberty Science Center, and the Jay Heritage Center, and am currently working with the Arrowhead Museum, Massachusetts, and the South Street Seaport Museum.
I live in Manhattan with my husband, and have a daughter in college.
| KNIGHT'S CASTLE #8 Available from playwright, $8. Middle school audiences; 2 acts, very expandable cast; minimal staging. KNIGHT'S CASTLE, #8 is based on the children's book by Edward Eager. Roger and Ann spend the summer in Baltimore with their cousins, Jack and Eliza. Their aunt gives them a toy castle and a doll's house. The castle comes to life, the children grow small and have adventures with Ivanhoe, Rebecca, the wicked Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Rowena, Robin Hood and his Merry Men. The next time the magic happens the knights and ladies have become up-to-date with hilarious effects. |
| SEVEN AGES OF ANNE New Plays, Inc., $5.95. Junior high/high school/college audiences; 2 acts, 12-15 women, video recorder, minimal staging. Seven Ages of Anne follows the tough challenges and joys of a woman’s life in the first half of the 20th century, from adolescence to old age, in a nontraditional style. Anne is played by seven actresses, and the second act has four simultaneous scenes between three pairs of Annes and Anne at 87 talking to her inner self on video. |
| ENDURANCE (Winner of the
6th Annual Theatre Resources Unlimited Play Reading Series in New York,
2004.) Available from playwright $8.00 High school audiences. 2 acts, but runs without intermission. Length 1 hour. Minimal set: white background, possibly some slide projections, a few chairs. 9m, 2 w (7 actors with doubling) Teenage Fithian has to undergo a painful, lengthy medical procedure twice a week to keep his older brother, Ray, alive. To survive this, he spends time going in his mind to the South Pole with Sir Ernest Shackleton, his hero. He feels trapped and resentful, and hostilities develop between the very different brothers: one, slight, artistic, and possibly gay; the other tall, athletic and heterosexual. Finally the treatment stops working, and Ray becomes sick. The brothers recognize their love for each other as Ray dies. Fithian is able to see Ray's courage and acceptance of death, and understand his brother is now part of him. |
| TIME AND TIDE New Plays, Inc., $6.95, includes study guide. High school audiences; 2 acts, 8w, 7m, chorus, minimal staging. Time and Tide juxtaposes two colorful worlds: a Yorkshire fishing village of a hundred years ago, and the struggle of life against the sea; and a traveling British music hall show. Tom and Polly’s bittersweet romance is punctuated by lively music hall songs, the high jinks of the theatre troupe, and the roar of the sea, represented by a “chorus.” The sea permeates the play and reflects its themes of survival and the cyclical nature of life. Photo credit: Friends Seminary |
| WAY'S END New Plays, Inc., $5.95. Middle school/junior high audiences; 2 acts, cast of 30-60, minimal staging. Way's End is a large-cast play about 13-year-old Lexi, in trouble at home and school, when she is catapulted into an imaginary journey that becomes the perfect metaphor for the journey to adolescence. Scenes in “The Lost and Found,” the zany “Opposite Land,” the disturbing “Land of Herself,” or the playful “Land of Childhood Past” include springboards for an individual director’s own creativity, and great opportunities to include everyone who tries out! Photo credit: Collegiate School, Richmond, VA |
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