The Beautiful Moon Trilogy
(Photo by Richard Hansen.)

The three short plays in The Beautiful Moon Trilogy can be performed separately or together. Adam & Eve is a modern romance  - with biblical overtones.  Little Eva’s Immaculate Conception examines the "preconceived" dilemmas of an in vitro baby. John the Bungee-Jumper looks at the roots of religion from the perspective of an exile named John who teaches Bungee-jumping in a way that's guaranteed to produce a religious experience.

Cast:Adam & Eve, 1 female, one male; Little Eva, 3 females, four males; John, the Bungee-Jumper, four males.

All three plays were performed as The Beautiful Moon Trilogy by the Looking Glass Group Theatre and given a staged reading at the Edward Albee/ Last Frontier Theatre Conference. Little Eva's Immaculate Conception was performed by Pier One Theatre on the Spit, Homer, Alaska. John, the Bungee-Jumper was given a staged reading by the New Works Company as part of the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights Festival of New Plays.

Code Red
(Photo by Eric Engman/Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Used with permission.)

Code Red explores what happens when a sexy computer worm seduces a gullible user into activating her. It is set inside a computer screen.

Cast: One female.

Code Red was given a staged reading at the Edward Albee/ Last Frontier Playwriting Conference where it won a Panelists Choice Award and a Best Actress Award for the Code Red Worm, Betsy Martin.

It was performed by the Atlantis Playmakers, Billerica, MA, where it received the Audience Choice Award.

It has been given staged readings by Once-A-Year Theatre, Anchorage, Alaska, and by the Looking Glass Group Theatre, Fairbanks, AK.

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

Other Plays
(Image copyright Gail Niebrugge.)

The Glenn & Allen Show is loosely based on the life of Lt. Henry T. Allen, the first man to explore much of Interior Alaska. It was performed by the Copper River Economic Development Council Players for two summers in Glenallen, Alaska.

In Mirror/ Mirror, the first woman candidate for President wakes up to find that she not only looks like her mother, but that the mother she sees in her mirror has become a real character in her life. It was given a staged reading at the Edward Albee/Last Frontier Theatre Conference.

Favorite Son is a musical version of a one-man play based on the life of conservationist John Muir. It was performed at the Muir Historical Site, Martinez, CA.

Screenplays:

F-Child, based on my play Ward's Welding, is a critical look at the foster care system as it functions in the lives of one teenager and his foster care parents. It poses the question "How can we love a child who's been rendered unlovable by circumstances beyond his control?" This screenplay has been optioned twice.

Getting to Juba is an action adventure about a cynical pilot and an overzealous aide worker who must team up to get tons of food into Juba, a city in the Southern Sudan, before a cease fire ends and closes their window of opportunity.

The Blue Parka Man, based on the book by H.C. Landru, is the true story of Charles Hendrickson, nicknamed the Blue Parka bandit, who robbed gold miners in the new settlement of Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1905, and of George Dreibelbis, the marshall who had to bring him in out of the extreme cold.

Two Chiefs, based on my play Shotridge, is a blending of the stories of two men forced to live in two worlds. Louis Shotridge, a real historical person, was a Tlingit Indian trained as an anthropologist and hired to collect the last important pieces of his culture in the 1920s. Nathan Wolf, a fictional character, is an modern Tlingit anthropologist hired as a cultural consultant on a movie about Louis Shotridge.