Panache Productions scriptwriting by Anne HanleyAnne Hanley anne@annehanley.com
(907) 479-4671 AST

  
About the Author
Book
Plays
More Plays & Screenplays
Home

Order book

Anchorage Daily News columns

Gates of the Arctic National Park

Alaska State Council on the Arts

   
Plays
For excerpts or more information, click on the play titles below.
 

Photo: Ring Around the Rosie, group on stage with set showing behind, outdoors, a play by Anne Hanley Ring Around The Rosie
(Photo by Arnold C. Tornell.)

In August 1665, William Mompesson considered himself one of the most blessed of creatures. He was 27, newly ordained, deeply in love with his famously beautiful wife and joyously assuming a new appointment as Rector of the Anglican church at Eyam in the English Midlands.

One year later, two-thirds of his congregation, including his beloved wife, were dead from the Plague. Nevertheless Mompesson was able to convince the survivors to voluntarily quarantine themselves to keep the Plague from spreading. This is a story of how a man can prevail with no certainty except his own conscience.

Cast: Eight men and four women playing multiple roles.

Staged reading by Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre, 2004. Directed by Graham Watts.

Photo: The Sunset Clause, nurse with male and female patients, two women standing, a play by Anne Hanley The Sunset Clause
(Photo by Richard Hansen.)

Ailing seniors Lydia Hamilton and Peter Musto want to get married so that they can accomplish the one thing that they’re not allowed to do at Meadowbrook Rehabilitative Center – die. Think Romeo & Juliet in a rest home, but instead of parents keeping the kids apart, it’s the kids – and the administration – trying to keep parents apart.

Cast: Four men; five women.

Produced by the Fairbanks Drama Association, Feb., 2006. Directed by Peggy MacDonald Ferguson.

Staged reading by The Looking Glass Group Theater, 2004.

Photo: two men arm wrestling, three women standing, scene from FU2, a play by Anne Hanley FU2
(Photo by Richard Hansen.)

A bitter old white man’s fondest wish comes true when a young black punk breaks into his house. Instead of scoring an easy hit, the young man finds himself captured in a booby-trapped chamber-of-horrors. When two Mormon missionaries knock, the two former enemies must join forces to keep the Mormons from saving their souls.

Cast: Five males.

Edward Albee/Last Frontier Playwriting Conference Panelists Choice Award

Staged readings by the Looking Glass Group Theatre; and by Juneteenth Legacy Theater, Louisville, KY; and by Cyrano's Theater, Anchorage.

 

Ward's Welding

What do you do when love doesn't work?

When newlyweds Greg and Judy decide to take in a foster child, they get much more than they bargained for when Harley, a 14-year-old veteran of the foster care system, joins their family. The only way Greg can figure out to reach Harley is to call on the unloved boy in his own past.

"The one play of extraordinary merit, managing to mix fun with poignancy, tragedy with survival, was Ward's Welding. In the dozens of playwriting conferences I've attended, I've never encountered remotely as strong a script. . . . Hanley manages to leave you feeling hope in the midst of loss. I agreed with Timothy Mason's assessment that, "It's the finest use of a Narrator I've seen since Thornton Wilder." - Peter Filichia, Theater Week Magazine.

Cast: Five males; one female.

Edward Albee/Last Frontier Playwriting Conference Best New Play Award

Staged readings by the Jungle Theater, Minneapolis, MN; and the Abingdon Theater, New York, New York
 

Photo: from UAA Dept Theatre and Dance production of Shotridge, by Anne Hanley Shotridge
(Photo by UAA Dept. Theatre & Dance. Used with permission.)

Can a man live in two worlds?

This play was suggested by the life of Tlingit Native American Louis Shotridge (born Klukwan, Alaska, around 1886; died Sitka, Alaska, 1937). Shotridge was the son of the last traditional chief of the Whale House Clan. To this day he is a controversial figure among the Tlingit people.

Louis Shotridge, an ambitious, high-caste Tlingit, thinks he can reconcile his traditional Tlingit upbringing and his Western education by becoming an anthropologist.  He tries to collect the last pieces of ceremonial value to his own culture for the University Museum in Philadelphia. He believes he is doing the right thing, but when his wife takes sick, he is forced  to steal powerful sacred objects from his ancestral clan house in order to pay for the best western-style medical care for her. When she dies, he must steal a sacred object from the Museum in order to bury her properly. Like the man in the Tlingit myth who marries a bear, Louis Shotridge learns that when a man tries to live in two worlds, he becomes an outscast in both.

Cast: Nine men; five women

Produced by the University of Alaska Anchorage, 1995. Directed by Michael Hood.

Staged reading by Perseverance Theatre, Juneau, Alaska

 
 
 
This site created at Alaska Writers Homestead

All poetry, excerpts, text and images on this site are copyright Anne Hanley unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.
www.annehanley.com
AlaskaWriter illustrations and site design copyright 2003, 2004
Sonya Senkowsky and AlaskaWriter LLC. All rights reserved.
www.alaskawriters.com