literary history
Barbara L Carlisle Artistic Works
2004 One Thousand Boxes of Chalk, video documentary of Lake Worth Street Painting Festivals.
2001 Newport, hour long video about my Appalachian community,
1997 The Newport Play, community centered play with music, written for local cast. Newport, VA. Subsequently developed unto video described above..
1994 Abigail, the life of an elementary school, long one-act. Click here to download script Abigail.doc
1993 Such Stuff, story theatre work, compiled, edited with Ann Kilkelly
1992 Bite the String Snake, editor of collaborative work with the Road Company, Johnson City, Tenn and Virginia Tech,
1992 M Words .
click here to down load script
This is a connected series of monologues
and dialogues about mothers and
daughters. A work for twenty women, it has
had many performances on various
scales around the country
1998 The Crane Wife,
anthologized i n Theatre for
Young Audiences,
20 Great Plays for Children,
St. Martin's Press
Selected and Edited by
Coleman A. Jennings
Originally published by Anchorage Press, 1997 First produced and conceived at Virginia Tech based on an idea by designer Randy Ward.
2004 Aladdin, Unpublished script for young audiences. An adaptation of l9th C. sources. To down load script click here:
1988 Contemporary musical adaptation of She Stoops to Conquer, co-authored with Worth Gardner of the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park
“Inheritance” and “Motherhood,” in So To Speak, Spring, 1999, George Mason University
1996 Hi Concept - Lo Tech: Theatre for Anyone in Any Place, with Don Drapeau, Heinemann
1990 The Making of a Grass Blade, a study of twelve arts projects in Michigan Schools, The W. K. Kellogg Foundation,
.
Literary History Continued
But there is an important turning point. Jim Cash, co-screenwriter for Top Gun and Legal Eagles, lived in East Lansing where I was running BoarsHead Theater. His partner, Jim Epps did the Hollywood end. A loyal alumnus of Michigan State, Cash offered a class in screenwriting that I took. He had many valuable tools and practical insights that were easy to scoop up. No formulas, just ways of thinking about characters, dialogue, getting started, developing a whole out of parts, keeping things going, avoiding clichés, giving characters little quirks, doing set ups and payoffs. Jim was a great teacher, and thanks to that class I finished both a full length script about my grandfather’s funeral—or what might have been my grandfather’s funeral==and a full length screenplay set in Alpena, Michigan.
I never did anything with these, but that whole experience led by Jim Cash is what made my first successful play, I Don’t want to Die in China, successful.
However, I wasn’t starting making theatre at zero. I had been directing for fifteen years or more. I was trained as a dancer and I have choreographed a long list of musicals in college, community and professional theatre.
I studied violin and piano growing up, so music is a world I know at an amateur level. And somehow I inherited my father’s genes for drawing and painting, which, for me, is part of directing and choreography and visualizing action on stage.
In college I had the good fortune to apprentice myself to a genius of a director at Ohio State, Roy Bowen. It might be more honest to say I pestered him to let me be his assistant director any time I could, and one summer At OSU’s Stadium Theatre I found myself rewriting some sections of Paint Your Wagon for him when we couldn’t get the scripted segues to work.
Like most theatre struck young people, early on I wanted to perform, and did so from the time I was ten years old. But gradually, during college and after, I realized it wasn’t the repeated performing that I really enjoyed, it was the development of the work—getting it ready to go, seeing all its parts, honing it up.
And so when playwriting subjects began to open themselves to me, and often opportunities to produce and develop my own work, that was the place I wanted to be. I was over 50 years old and I understood what makes compelling theatre. I was out of the generation of young, hot, shocking or startling playwrights who were going after the New York market. I found I had things to say and characters to say them and my own body of work began to flow pretty effortlessly--which is not to say easily, but out of a deep well.
I always believed it was important for me to stay in control of my plays’ destinies at least until I got one production up that did what I intended. After that I could “send them off to college” to wend their ways through whatever systems I could nudge them into. But I was determined not to sit around waiting to be picked by some literary manager out there in the blue. I entered them in competitions and won some honors with four of the Louise plays:
A spot in the Key West Theatre Festival for Paris Quartet. (12 scripts selected out of 1100 submissions)
In top 100 new works in the New Century Writers Competition, for Ten Days in Paradise,
Top three in Virginia New Plays competition for I Don’t Want to Die in China,
First runner up (second prize) in The Jane Chambers National Play Competition, for The Tooth of St. Eliott
But fundamentally I’ve put all sorts of production projects together, or colleagues like the wonderful members of Tri Arts in Chicago, and the faculty and students at Virginia Tech, have developed productions with me. And I’ve even been able to gather something of a little band of regulars, who have been up for the adventure more than once.
This new volume of plays represents the central core of my work, and is directly the result of actress and fellow playwright Cheryl Royce’s urging. She felt the Louise plays should be in print. She had also acted in my versions of the Racine plays. So here they are.
Includes:
I Don’t Want to Die in China
Paris Quartet
Ten Days in Paradise
The Tooth of St. Eliott
Heartbreak Waltz
The list below represents my major work. Included are several down loadable scripts available royalty free for production
