Sean’s Plays & Reviews

Teenagers in Love

by Sean O’Connor

“Navigating a Minefield of Love and Loss”

Click here to read an INTERVIEW WITH SEAN

Click here to read Off B’way review

Images From the NYC production of Teenagers in Love

New Truck for Paulie

by Sean O’Connor

“A Gripping Tale of Love, Betrayal, and Family Secrets”

SART’S NEW TRUCK FOR PAULIE by Sean O’Connor
A FIRST-RATE, INTENSE PRODUCTION

Reviewed by Tony Kiss
Entertainment Editor, Asheville Times (North Carolina)

The Vietnam War, and how it destroys an average middle-class family, is the focus of a riveting new drama now getting its world premiere at the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theater in Mars Hill.

New Truck for Paulie, by Sean O’Connor, is first-rate. And it’s intense stuff. The fine cast, directed by William Gregg, gives all. Tony Medlin is tremendous as the boozing, obnoxious father, set in his old-fashioned ways, and completely behind the Vietnam War, no matter what it costs his family.

Randy Noojin gives a powerful performance as the oldest son, just returned from the war with a deep, dark secret–and now protesting that awful mess.

There’s nice support all the way around, especially from Pem Price-Medlin as the newly liberated mother and wife and Lynn Nihart as the younger son, desperately trying to compete with his brother.

The time and place: late fall 1969 in suburban New Jersey. The Parcells family has been knocked for a loop–the oldest son Paulie (Noojin) has vanished while fighting in Vietnam.

Suddenly, paulie returns, with vague explanations, and obviously hiding some secret. But this family has plenty of other problems.

Father Gus (Medlin) can’t tolerate his son’s opposition to the war, ignores younger son Nicky (Nihart), and tangles with wife Jeannie (Price-Medlin), who’s yearning to be more than his personal servant.

The brothers are in conflict, too. Both are in love with Julie (Julie Royal), who was Paulie’s girlfriend first, but has been seeing Nicky while the older brother was away.

The situation gets hotter and hotter, with yelling, screaming, slapping and harsh language, finally leading to a horrible betrayal in act two, as the family self-destruicts. The play finally concludes on somewhat of an upbeat note. Happy ending, though, it is not. But one gets the feeling this worthy, archetypal family will survive.

O’Connor’s play completely zooms in on this moment of history and the family trapped within. It’s an exhilarating yet devastating experience. He spares no punches. This one is certainly not for the weak of heart.

New Truck for Paulie: A Gripping Tale of Love, Betrayal, and Family Secrets

click here to read review

Unveiling the Emotional Masterpiece: “New Truck For Paulie” Starring Josh Dalton

click here to read review

World of Sinatras

by Sean O’Connor

“Sean O’Connor has Written a Chronicle of American History
Alongside the Captivating Story of a Family in Disarray”

CLICK HERE TO READ AN INTERVIEW WITH SEAN

Click here to read reviews

nytheatre now: World of Sinatras

Indie Artists on New Plays World of Sinatras

by Wendy Coyle · July 18, 2014

The theater landscape of American dysfunctional family ranges in location from Eugene O’Neill’s seaside Connecticut to Sam Shepard’s Illinois to Tracy Lett’s Pahuska, Oklahoma so why not make room for Sean O’Connor’s suburban New Jersey? World of Sinatras gives us WWII soldier Jack Murdoch (played by an excellent Dennis Ostermaier) who meets and marries an artistic French war bride then uses the GI bill to become a psychiatrist. Jack, Marie, and their only child, Sam move to a well-to-do New Jersey suburb. Jack is successful, drinks heavily, cheats on his wife and pushes his son to be tough and unfeeling, to play sports and be an athletic like DiMaggio. The father is homophobic and constantly warns Sam not to be weak and emotional, forbidding him to pursue music or the arts.

As their American dream unravels, as Jack continues to physically and mentally abuse Marie (portrayed brilliantly by Danielle Delgado). 30 years will pass with Sam’s stunning narration moving us along, including scenes of Marie’s impotence and destruction that will enmesh her son even as she tries to save him by encouraging artistic expression. I found myself deeply compelled: cringing and hurting with Marie and Sam, drawn in by the raw dialogue and action, hating Jack but hating Marie, too, for her docility in that era of the suburban housewife. Jeff Rubino as Sam, the son caught in the middle, is poignant and powerful as he struggles to come of age in that household.

The large canvas of history spanning the 1960’s through the 1990’s orients the audience; the events include the Kennedy assassinations, MLK, Kent State, Vietnam, and Nixon. But the safe suburb that gives the Murdoch’s the “good life” insulates Sam from a worldview larger than the three family members and their legacy of the Irish relatives.

Of course, Sam is engaged in his contemporary world of sports, pot-smoking, discovering sex and Gloria, (a sweet Sarah Elmaleh) and hanging with his childhood friend Rooster (a funny and delightful Justin Cimino) who energizes the play whenever he appears. But even Rooster’s free spirit cannot fly beyond bored youthful thievery, drug use and delusion—he never leaves town either. Sam’s earnest adolescent monologues accompany the trials of the three friends and the family.

As one would expect from the title, music plays a role and Sinatra’s greatest hits and mellifluous voice that accompany Jack’s generation, float in and out of the story. We also hear Dylan, Morrison, a brief Springsteen and other groups who punctuate the passing of time and action.

Baseball and its heroes also figure importantly in the plot. The Yankees are the foundation upon which Sam and his father connect and bond. Even the large phallic weapon Sam uses to save his mother in a classic oedipal vanquishing of the father, is an oversized baseball bat. I trust the significance was not lost on the psychiatrist Jack. Sam has finally become the brute his father wants him to be.

Costumes, lighting and sound assist the story as it moves through the decades and under the tight direction of Sydnie Grosberg Ronda reaches a cryptic conclusion. The set design does not change throughout the two acts reflecting the unchanging nature of the relationships.

At the end, raw and powerful, with hints that Sam’s adult life will both mirror, and diverge from his father’s, I was left wondering if suburbia, too, with its isolation from a larger life , its narrow monotony, is as much a villain in the tragedy of the Murdochs as its flawed patriarch.

Review By: Times Square Chronicles:

Project Rushmore Theatre Company is launching its second summer season with two plays that have a theme of the American Spirit. World Of Sinatras, written by Sean O’Connor and directed by Sydnie Grosberg Ronga, had its opening night at The ArcLight Theatre last Wednesday. Set from 1944 to1993 in a New Jersey suburb, this play chronicles the life of the Murdoch family as they develop alongside the turmoil of American history. As America undergoes the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the assassination of the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King Jr., and the take off of pop culture with sex, drugs and rock n’ roll, the Murdoch’s undergo their own brewing instability.

Sam Murdoch, played by the strikingly talented Jeff Rubino, tells the story of his family from start to finish. Rubino evolves from a cape-wearing 4-year-old into a hardened teenager, and it is like watching somebody grow up at light speed in two hours. Meanwhile Dennis Ostermaier and Danielle Delgado are strikingly captivating as Jack and Marie Murdoch; it is rare to see two characters so deep and complex come alive on stage. Ostermaier should be commended for his performance as Jack; his spiraling decline with his rages that morph into domestic abuse is breathtaking and scarily believable. Not to mention that Delgado has the audience’s hearts throbbing for Marie and her struggles as she tries to deal with a husband who is out of control. The acting at the forefront of this play is without a doubt, top-notch. However, as great as the acting and historical context is in World Of Sinatras, what’s important here is that Project Rushmore Theatre Company has a goal of “Exploring the American Spirit” with its plays; World of Sinatras could not be any more American. A fantastic trip through 50 years of momentous American history, this play runs the gamut with social undertones and domestic issues that pack a punch…Sean O’Connor has written a chronicle of American history along side the captivating story of a family.

Project Rushmore Theatre Company’s summer season runs until August 3rd at the ArcLight Theatre at 152 West 71st Street.

StageBuddy Review: WORLD OF SINATRAS

At the Arclight Theatre through August 3.

The Project Rushmore Theatre Company presents plays that “offer inspiration and insight into American culture”, and their latest production, World of Sinatras by Sean O’Connor, certainly lives up to the company’s goal. O’Connor’s play, a slice of dysfunctional suburban middle-class America during the fifties and sixties, centers around the character of Sam Murdoch, telling the story of his childhood and adolescence against a backdrop of American politics and pop culture. The play (directed by Sydnie Grosberg Ronga) explores the traditional themes of coming of age in the USA — first love, drugs, search for identity, typical suburban angst stuff. In the case of Sam Murdoch, his experience is also shaped by an environment of substance-abuse and violence.

The story begins with Sammy’s parents — she an upper-class French woman, he an ambitious American psychiatrist — meeting in France during World War II, and at once we get a rather mechanical glimpse of how Officer Murdoch’s temper will destroy his family and ultimately himself. As little Sammy, an only child, grows up, he has to deal with his alcoholic father’s temper as well as his prejudices and machismo (“you don’t want to play the piano! The piano is for faggots! You’re a born scientist!”). His mother, a frustrated artist and oppressed housewife, pulls him in a completely different direction (“You’re a born artist! Your poems are magnificent! Be a painter!”). As Sammy grows older, he develops a close friendship with a drug dealer, Rooster (a weirdo who thinks he’s the Messiah), and becomes a third generation substance abuser.

The central character is beautifully performed by Jeff Rubino. Dr. Murdoch is wonderfully portrayed by Dennis Ostermeier. And the mother, played by the wonderful Danielle Delgado, is the most believable of the characters and the most sympathetic personality in the play — even more so than the father who’s had much to overcome in life and is so representative of the Irish American experience in post war America. World of Sinatras…a wonderful cast of professional players…will be performed in rep with Exquisite Potential through August 3 at the Arclight Theatre. For more information, check out Project Rushmore’s website.

Review from “Offbway”

Project Rushmore Theatre Company Presents WORLD OF SINATRAS

By SEAN O’CONNOR

Starring: JEFF RUBINO, DENNIS OSTERMAIER, DANIELLE DELGADO, SARAH ELMALEH, and JUSTIN CIMINO

Director: SYDNIE GROSBERG RONGA

Project Rushmore Theatre Company is committed to exploring the American Spirit and takes their inspiration from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930’s with a mission to create jobs in the performing arts. The two plays performing in repertory at the ArcLight Theatre from July 15 to August 3 are about families and relationships.

Sean O’Connor’s WORLD OF SINATRAS is narrated by Sam (Jeff Rubino), the product of Jack (Dennis Ostermaier) and Marie (Danielle Delgado) Murdoch. Theirs is a love story, marinated in alcohol and abuse, slowly going bad. Through music (the kind of music that had words and meaning), Sam relates the tug of war under which he develops, with Jack insisting that feelings are for sissies while Marie attempts “to slip a song into his soul.” This is an ambitious piece of work that chronicles 30 years of the life of a conflicted child who takes on the attributes of his parents as he ages…the performances by the entire cast are exquisite and the musical background enhances the powerful story (amazing how a song can immediately break into your memory bank)…the reality is alcohol and abuse are destructive and dangerous no matter what.

View images of World of Sinatras (NYC’S PROJECT RUSHMORE THEATRE PRODUCTION)

Who Collects the Pain

by Sean O’Connor

“It has the force of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing … The play builds so intensely that every scene is a small explosion leading to a huge explosion at the end”

CLICK HERE TO READ REVIEWS

Showbiz magazine
by Claude Solnik

“Recently, with television cameras and reporters in tow, Mayor Dinkins crossed a picket line to go into a Korean deli. At last, he had crossed that line. Sean O’Connor’s Who Collects the Pain is also about crossing racial, social and economic lines. The story of a relationship (although not exactly a romance) between a white student at Columbia and a black woman, it’s written with gritty, fast dialogue and acted convincingly enough to make it seem as if the stage, like the subject matter, really does extend to the streets and beyond. It is a rare creature in the American theatre, a play that has something important to say and articulates it dramatically. And, while many plays stretch one-acters out to fill an evening, this fills an evening by evoking an entire world. At times, it has the force of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, but it’s presented on stage instead of out of reach on a screen.

Technically, the play’s set in 1993, 25 years after Martin Luther King’s shooting. We’re in a world between Bensonhurst and Howard Beach. Pain is the common denominator that links people. A black kid walks into a store and he’s accused of taking a Twinkie. It’s racism on the day-to-day level, in both small and large incidents. And here, there are no economic cushions to soften the blow. In this world, people are hardly getting by. Kids are too poor to buy bubble gum. It’s a world too far down for trickle-down, a world with a certain inevitability that fits the plot. People are crushed by social forces more than uplifted by them.

The plot is solid. Strong. Subplots and good dialogue flesh out the story. Atmosphere seeps into every line of dialogue like alcohol in the air of a blues bar. The central story, though, is a Romeo and Juliet told along racial lines. It’s simple enough, but it avoids being simplistic or melodramatic, thanks to a script that’s very real in many ways, and thanks to acting that’s animated and good enough to grab anyone in the audience by the collar and draw them into the play.

Mickey (Michael Santoro), a white Columbia student who reads Maya Angelou and whose father worked for years with the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), meets Lorraine (Brent Trish Whitney), a black woman whose been seeing a black boyfriend for quite a while. Mickey helps her get a job and the two start seeing one another. The two then find themeselves up against barriers and walls as high as any that the Capulets and Montagues ever built.

Things come to a head one night when Mickey shows up at Lorraine’s apartment. Her boyfriend, Danny (Federico Edwards), says that Mickey has just crossed a line. He better head back to Columbia, where politics is reduced to the posters you choose for your walls. The conflict is personal, but it’s also poisoned by “prejudice” (probably on both sides) although the word for it today is “bias.” Later, when Danny needs money for a coke deal that goes sour, he breaks into Mickey’s place. Mickey is sleeping with Lorraine and Danny slinks out. There’s a final confrontation later. A gun goes off. With all this anger, angst and tension, it’s at least an end, in a strange way, that becomes a release and a relief. And that relief, really, is one of the saddest things in the story. Who collects the pain? No one. It just falls like rain or like dialogue “screamed into the blue black sky,” as Lorraine says.

Sean O’Connor’s dialogue is raw, with words as precise as the sounds coming from a fast jazz piano. We hear about what can happen when “your ideas run into a bullet.” O’Connor’s ear is right on. And the structure of the play builds so intensely that every scene is a small explosion leading to a larger explosion at the end.

Joe Paradise’s direction is hands on, physical, tactile, and constantly on the move. Something is always happening on stage. Actors chase, hide, face the audience, face away, run in, out and around.

The actors play their roles with the passion of actors not simply playing their roles but creating them. Michael Santoro’s Mickey is tentative, quiet, trying to find himself. As Lorraine, Brent Trish Whitney is passionate and intent, right from the start, and straight on through the end. Her smile beams across the stage. So much for this couple in search of a cupid.

As Lorraine’s brother, Mercy, Frank Guy is conciliatory at one moment and enraged the next, and believable all the way through. Even when he’s angry he feels trapped and likeable. Santo Fazio takes Rafael, a drug dealer, and gives a coked up performance so strong he gets a standing ovation when he leaves the stage. Federico Edwards struts and threatens as Danny, a collection of gestures and emotions, more bravado than bravery, always ready to explode. He’s exciting to watch, a study of living and acting on the edge. On stage, he seems more spontaneous than most people on the streets.

As always, in life and in art, the most political issues are also the most personal. If Dinkins crossed a very real geographical line, Who Collects the Pain crosses lines that are at once more invisible and more grounded than any picket line in front of any deli anywhere. See it.”

There is an Angel in Las Vegas

By Sean O’Connor

“A marvelously eloquent, deeply emotional and very funny evening … Sean O’Connor’s words burst like fireworks over the Las Vegas landscape”

A Play By Sean O’Connor with NYC’s Playwrights Preview Productions (Urban Stages)

When good Americans die, Oscar Wilde said, they go to Paris. For those less patient, you might add, they can try to reach paradise earlier by trying a trip to Las Vegas. Sean O’Connor’s There is an Angel in Las Vegas is about one such soul. The play is about a tug of war for a son and about a reunion between father and son in the wilds of Vegas (you lose the “Las” pretty quickly.) It is a marvelously eloquent, deeply emotional and very funny evening. A slew of monolgues fill out the show but they never slow down the plot. This play is not a rhinestone, by any means. It’s a diamond, full and polished up, that O’Connor and Playwrights Preview Productions are now offering the audience.

Setting is key here: we’re in Vegas, the Temple of the Temporary. It’s a land of rent-a-cars and bars, a hotel heaven. This place is a myth full of would-be…and now and then real…millionaires. Enter into this land of cactus and casinos one Dean (Michael Santoro), a loser with a tongue as eloquent as a Kerouac typewriter on a good day. The plot starts rolling when his son, Chip, (Scott J. Weir) is dropped off by his ex-wife, Glenda (Tara Dolan). She wants father and son to get to know one another over a few days, a reunion years after Dean has left the family and fled to Vegas. Father and son never quite break through the armor that has grown over the years. But by the time the boy leaves, something strange, beautiful and real has grown between them. And at the end, when Dean stares off into the desert, there’s a sense that now, in addition to his dreams, he’s aware that human beings are also out there. And he’s at least begun to draw closer to some of them.

As Dean, Michael Santoro is more than just a loveable loser. O’Connor has majestically created an archetypal American. This is the bard of Vegas, someone who hears “the silence of possibility that swells in your head just as you’re about to let go a’ the dice.” Santoro pulls off the monologues beautifully. And Sean O’Connor’s words burst like fireworks over the Las Vegas landscape.

F.R. Smith in the role of Eddie (aka Mr. Ed), as Sancho Panza to Santoro’s Don Quixote, is an hilarious blend of cheap briefcases and Hawaiian shirts. His lines have a wonderful redundancy to them with phrases such as “presently now” and “a kind of a sort of” a thing. Jami Martin does a good job as Betty, one of the two women Dean brings home. And her monologue about a man who never met Joe Namath, and what a tragedy he never had the chance to, actually comes out as a very touching, funny and magnificently true moment. Amy Stiller’s Wilma is the embodiment of energy. Scott J. Weir, as the metaphorically named son, Chip, is appropriately awkward and innocent and more and more at home in the Vegas wasteland.

Tara Dolan’s Glenda is fine. And Paul Doherty as her current mate Dale does a fine job bringing life to a character as toothless as the Lascate alligator on his shirt. But he’s more of a witness to this wild, mythic story than part of it. This is a play that succeeds on many levels. Emotional, dramatic, comedic, poetic. And Paul Dervis’ directions makes it a pleasure to see as well as hear.

Kidnapped

by Sean O’Connor

“Filled with wild, rural American poetry … part Sam Shepard, part Mad Magazine … you’ll laugh your head off”

CLICK HERE TO READ REVIEWS

Urban Nights
By Mike Hogan

What do Little Ricky, Greek Mythology, sex abuse, the Ponderosa, and time travel all have in common? They’re all woven together with some strange, effervescent logic in Sean O’Connor’s wonderful new play Kidnapped, now appearing on Theatre Row.

It’s West Virginia. The time is Now. Marylee (Michelle Bouchard) is running from her abusive father, Joe Buchanan (Danny Rose), the hated President of the local coal mining company. Tyrone (Bill Tobes), a young coal miner wh’s been tormented by Buchanan’s anti-union ways for years, is also running from him. They both also, in separate incidents, think they have just killed him. (This man never dies.) They meet in a bar, and within a surreal and strangely beautiful five minutes, they fall wildly in love, and take off across the country to search for a Real America, “the way it used to be.” But they soon find out that Joe is fast on their heels.

It turns out both of them have a child they think they’ve lost forever. It also turns out that Marylee is related to Betsy Ross, and Tyrone to Daniel Boone. They decide to head to Carson City, Nevada (home of the Ponderosa) where Betsy and Daniel were reputed to once have had a tryst. With the crazed Buchanan on their heels, the action gets wilder and wilder as he chases them with helicopters and tanks, and finally catches up with them at Carson City, home to “my good friend, Ben Cartwright.” But through the help of Jed (Sean O’Connor), a strange, lisping, Jack Daniels-guzzling shaman, they hurtle back in time, where they stumble upon their ancestors, who teach them all they have to know, the “huntin’ and fishin’ for food” and the “sewin’ the clothes.” They teach them the “ways of the world.” Buchanan, of course, shows up, there is a battle, they finally forever dispense with him and then they are hurtled some twenty years off into the future, where they find their own children, a young Tyrone and Marylee, about to fall into the same dark fate as their parents. They reveal themselves and teach them, also, the “ways of the world.” And generations continue on.

The language is filled with wild, rural, American poetry. Part Sam Shepard, part Mad Magazine. The acting is fabulous all around. The comedy is insane but deeply human and heartfelt. Clark Middleton’s ever-inventive direction is perfect for the wildness of this piece. It closes this Sunday. See it. No matter how wild it gets, you’ll laugh your head off. And you might even find yourself strangely, surprisingly moved.