The late Charles Wilbert was a resident playwright and Professor Emeritus at Southern NH University in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he taught playwriting, literature, and creative writing for 51 years. Each year, he directed an annual stage reading of one of his plays at SNHU. Charles had a deep admiration for Henry David Thoreau and a wrote three stage plays and one mini-series about this important figure in American history. One of his Thoreau plays was performed on the Second Stage Lincoln Center, NYC. Charles studied playwriting at the Roger Simon Studio and at the HB Studio in NYC. He was a long- term member of the Dramatists Guild of America. Charles wrote over thirty stage plays, some of which have won national playwriting competitions. He had over thirty years’ experience as a director. Three of his plays were published. His one-woman play about Gertrude Stein toured New England and New York State.
Plays Written by Charles Wilbert
HISTORICAL PRODUCTIONS
Dancer on the Floor of Heaven (90 pp.)
In a pre-dawn raid of a tenement house on the corner of a red-light district in Chicago, poet and novelist Maxwell Bodenheim seeks to rescue Peggy Grace, a young actor and ballet dancer, from her homicidal landlady.
Ice Dreamers (122 pp.)
While under the pressures of organizing his second expedition to Antarctica, highly self-disciplined Captain Robert Falcon Scott meets and falls in love with flirtatious, bohemian sculptor Kathleen Bruce, then finds himself competing with another male suitor who is equally determined to win Kathleen’s affections.
Two Suits in One Act (40 pp.)
During her famous 1934-35 lecture tour of America, expatriate author Gertrude Stein makes an unscheduled stop at a fledgling business college in Manchester, NH, gives an off-the-cuff talk, and reveals far more than she ever intended.
Realometers (28 pp.)
To the jibes and jubilation of a quartet of hecklers gathered at the Concord, MA, depot, Henry David Thoreau stacks his wheelbarrow with hundreds of unsold copies of his first book with the intention of trundling them to Walden Pond for burial. But the author soon checks his act of desperation when stonemason George Dodd, “a man of certain New England probity and worth,” crosses his path and confesses his own unfolding tragedy.
The Only Remedy for Love (111 pp.)
Henry David Thoreau and his older brother John frantically compete for the hand of seventeen-year-old Ellen Sewall in July 1839.
The Irish Situation (66 pp.)
Henry David Thoreau sides with the Irish when Lorin Moody, a member of the Know- Nothing Party, arrives in Concord, MA, to persecute the dirt-poor Riordan family, recent immigrants from famine-stricken Ireland.
In the Eyes of Wilder’s Sister (44 pp.)
This play takes place on the stage of Broadway’s Morosco Theatre in September 1938. As dramatist Thornton Wilder rehearses his greeting to friends he expects later for a matinee performance of his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Our Town,” his estranged sister Charlotte storms into the theatre and accuses him of ruining her childhood.
COMEDIES AND DRAMAS
Fitzgerald at Your Service (44 pp.)
A New Hampshire playwright arrives at the Commodore Bar in St. Paul, MN, for the dress rehearsal of his one-person play about Judy Jones, a character in the the celebrated short story “Winter Dreams” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The playwright quickly discovers he must contend with a fiery Equity actress who claims to be Judy Jones to her core – and with a disturbingly literate bartender in the background who insists he is evolving into F. Scott Fitzgerald himself. Given the collision of these personalities, is a dress rehearsal even possible?
Two in Spain (90 pp.)
A drama dealing with the audacious attempt of a cancer specialist to kill one of his patients, a self-proclaimed Juan Peron the Second, before the latter assumes dictatorial control of Argentina.
King of the West (63 pp.)
A bittersweet comedy about the American singles scene. Romantic idolatry, infatuations, escapades, shattered dreams, and aching hearts are illumined under pink and lavender lights as Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” plays on.
Removal (119 pp.)
A drama about a spirited eighty-six-year-old welfare recipient, grinding bureaucracy, and the rights of individuals to live and die where they choose.
The Tri-colored Roof (90 pp.)
A comedy about two young brothers “stuck on a bare roof of a garage” after their hot-tempered carpenter father leaves them with orders to finish the roofing job by high noon “or else!” What to do when they discover the local lumber company has delivered a crazy-quilt variety of colored shingles instead of the requested all-black?
