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Brad Chequer

BRAD CHEQUER  

 Nationality:    USA
email:    Click here to contact     Website:    n/a

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Brad Chequer's play Ghost Trio had its premier at the Bay area One acts Festival in San Francisco, and was also performed by Teatro del Navile in Bologna, Italy, in an Italian translation. Shoshannah was performed by Stolen Fire in Grover Beach, California. Melos was short-listed for performance by Sandis in London. Lighthouse received a staged reading as part of the Risk is This project in December, 2007, in San Francisco. His plays Words for a Play without Words and Le Jeune Peintre have also received staged readings in San Francisco. In addition to the staged reading, Words for a Play without Words was published in American Writing. The Interview has been published on-line by The Evergreen Review. (http://www.evergreenreview.com/114/contents.php). He served as dramaturge with Rob Melrose in Mr. Melrose's direction of Samuel Beckett's Endgame in San Francisco in 2008. He was educated at U.C. Berkeley, Santa Clara University and San Francisco State University. He has two works concurrently in progress, Panoptikon (a series of short plays related to the attempt to see that which is obscure) and at Christmas Time, in which the desires and predilections of the characters attending a Christmas party reveal them selves despite, and sometimes because of, the efforts of those characters to keep them under control. He has also written two screenplays, and So the Summer Ended and In the Dark. In addition to writing plays, he has worked as a janitor, gardener, truck driver, shipping-receiving clerk, lawyer, schoolteacher, and musician.

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below is a list of Brad Chequer's plays - click on a Play Title for more information

 Alba         Fugen         Ghost Trio         Interview, The         Le Jeune Peintre         Lighthouse         Shoshannah

Alba

Synopsis:
Oedipus and his mom have a nice chat in hell: Oedipus (called "Will" in the play) and his mother (Mrs. Wong), having turned modern and Cantonese to allow for a few cross lingual puns ("wong" is "king" in Cantonese), have a nice little chat in hell. Will's father, her husband, appears as a janitor. His sister, her daughter, is given the name "Namazu" ("catfish" in Japanese), to allow for a few more double meanings. (Earthquakes were one result of Oedipus's marriage to Jocasta, and in Japanese mythology catfish are said to cause earthquakes.) Will wants to leave; his mother, Mrs. Wong, wants him to stay. Since Oedipus in one version of the myth was a master of horses, and since "horse" in Greek is "hippos," and St. augustine was bishop of Hippos, horses, hippos, and the work of St. augustine figure in the play. The play is divided into 49 fragments. also, Will calls Mrs. Wong "Ma," which in Cantonese means "horse." Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, which features a character named Oedipa Maas, does not figure in the play, though it probably should. Near the end, Namazu tells the tale of a famous hippo fart.

Notes:
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To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

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Genre:
Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  2            Female:  2            Other:  2 silent male

Further Reference:
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Fugen

Synopsis:
Fugen is built around a Noh play entitled Eguchi, probably written by Zeami in 1424. a wandering monk arrives at a brothel seeking shelter for the night. He receives from the whore of Eguchi a lecture on his place as a monk and the fleeting nature of beauty; during the lecture, he realizes that she is in fact Fugen, an incarnation of the bodhisattva of compassion. In my version, a not very reliable author introduces the action, which occurs on a BaRT train, as a man (John) makes not very successful moves on a woman (Isabel), he takes to be a hooker on her way to meet her john, while an old hag, Fugen, observes and comments on the action. There's a little also of the Wife of Bath's tale here, in which the tale is told of a rapist who will be saved from execution if he can answer the question: "What does woman want?" a hag offers him the answer on condition that he marry her; he accepts, and after she tells him the answer, the hag is transformed into a beauty.

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To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
play One act

Parts:
Male:  2            Female:  2            Other:  -

Further Reference:
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Ghost Trio

Synopsis:
Scene One: Early morning. a man and a woman are in a bathroom. She is in the shower; he sits on the toilet, barefoot, but otherwise fully dressed, reading. She asks him about his past, and, receiving no clear information from him, tells him about her dream from the night before, which she tries to interpret for him. She notices that the shower drain is clogged, and insists that he call the landlord to have it fixed. He agrees to do this. She asks if he will apply for a job, gets no clear answer, and goes off to work. He stays behind, reading. Scene Two: The landlord arrives; while the largo of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Trio, opus 70, (The Ghost) plays in the background, the landlord, who may be a bit crazy, teaches the man how to unclog the drain with a snake. The landlord shares with the man his thoughts about the difficulties of marriage. Scene Three: The landlord has left. The music continues. The man, following the landlord's instructions, cleans out the drain, meditating on what he thinks is the landlord's madness. He succeeds in clearing out the drain, and goes back to reading his book. Scene Four: Some time has passed. The woman returns from her work. at the woman's insistence the man explains how he has fixed the clogged drain, and since the music is still playing, he tells her, vaguely, what it is. She tells him that she wants him to move, and he, thinking that she wants he to move out of their apartment, is frightened, briefly, by this, but she only wants him off the toilet so she can pee. She is upset, briefly, that, having dumped the slop he had cleared out of the drain into the toilet, he has forgotten to flush the toilet. The play then ends with her statement that she is, for the moment, still in the relationship.

Notes:
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1st Produced:
Eureka Theatre, San Francisco    Feb 2005

Organisations:
Three Wise Monkeys; Bay area One acts Festival.

1st Published:
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Music:
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To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
play One act

Parts:
Male:  2            Female:  1            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Interview, The

Synopsis:
a man (whose name turns out to be "Federico") comes home from what seems to have been a job interview; he has been gone however for quite some time, perhaps all night; a woman (a wife or girlfriend, whose name turns out to "Madelena") has been waiting for him. The interviewers have asked the man to perform some unspecified service for them; he has not quite accepted; she notices that he is in pain, and he reveals that the interviewers have issued unspecified threats that he doesn't want to talk about. She fears for his, and her own safety. It is revealed that she too has endured a similar interview, and that he fears as much for her safety as she does for his. Each reassures the other that they are safe, if only for now.

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1st Published:
Evergreen Review, http://www.evergreenreview.com/114/contents.php, 2008   -

Music:
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To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
play One act

Parts:
Male:  1            Female:  1            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Le Jeune Peintre

Synopsis:
a slightly comic, and not at all autobiographical one-act about a writer who is stuck and unable to write; he is visited by his alter-ego; with extreme delicacy this alter-ego alludes to but does not explicitly name Beckett and Picasso as examples, thereby inspiring the writer to face once again blank paper and pen.

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Organisations:
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1st Published:
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Music:
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To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
play One act

Parts:
Male:  3            Female:  -            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Lighthouse

Synopsis:
Three women, Kat, Soo, and Tet ("tet" is the Egyptian hieroglyph for the os sacrum, the bone at the base of the spine, which looks like a lighthouse), connected to each other through an absent man, sit at a table and talk about this man, their connections to him, and their memories; sometimes they trade insults, sometimes consolation. Meanwhile, a man on stage directs modulations in their conversation and offers the women tea, but they're not thirsty. From time to time the man calls them by name and they answer. Over time each woman departs and returns. at the end, when all three women are present, man calls each of them a last time, but he receives no answer.

Notes:
a staged reading As part of Cuttingball's Risk is This Festival, San Francisco, directed by Paige Rodgers.

1st Produced:
Exit Theatre San Francisco, USA    Dec 2007

Organisations:
Cuttingball

1st Published:
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Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
play One act

Parts:
Male:  1            Female:  3            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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Shoshannah

Synopsis:
a married woman falls in love with another man.

Notes:
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1st Produced:
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Organisations:
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1st Published:
-   -

Music:
-

To Buy This Play:
If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click from the Publisher, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand, signed & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

Booksellers:

Genre:
Play/Drama

Parts:
Male:  -            Female:  -            Other:  -

Further Reference:
-

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