Frank J. Morlock — библиография

Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692) wrote a number of comic plays during his life. His drama featured broadly-based, coarse humor, and is filled with crude-but-vibrant characters drawn from the streets of Restoration London, individuals such as sharpers, whores, and eccentrics. His work is essentially plotless, but reeks with the odor of real people. Frank J. Morlock has created a composite drama (with plot!) from Shadwell's many works, but particularly employing pieces of The Woman Captain, The Squire of Alsatia, The Sullen Lovers, and The Virtuoso. The result is an hilarious masterpiece that's as timeless and as entertaining as the best of modern comedy.

To save his father from execution for treason, the Bravo Giovanni agrees to act as an assassin for The Council of Ten, and ruthlessly carries out their orders for targeted killings against real or imagined enemies of the Serene Republic of Venice in Italy. Inevitably, the Council members begin using the Bravo for their own purposes. When the Count de Bellamonte lusts after a helpless orphan girl, he forces Giovanni to eliminate her protector. But the girl's mother, the most sought-after courtesan in Venice, uses all her power and influence to protect her daughter. The play, adapted from a novel by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, is filled with eerie beauty and quiet horror–like Venice itself, a gondola of pretty pearls rocking gently on the murky, putrefying, garbage-laden waves of its many canals.

The nineteenth-century Southern writer (George Washington Cable) who wrote the stories on which this play is based was born in New Orleans, and the racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity of that great city impregnates all his work, and gives him a cast of eccentric and memorable characters worthy of Dickens. Dramatist Frank J. Morlock centers the action of his play around the Caf? des Exil?s in the 1820s, and the square in front of it where all sorts of folks mix together. This setting gives a sort of unity to the actions of Cable's interesting characters–Anglo, French, Spanish, Indian, and Black–who brush against each other and sometimes intersect and interact. The result is a highly entertaining drama of the Old South–with a French accent!

Based on the novel by Russian writer Dmitry Merezhkovsky (1867-1941), Morlock's dramatic adaptation tells the tragic story of Russian Tsar Peter the Great's conflict with his only surviving son and heir, Tsarevitch Alexis. Peter, an autocrat who was determined to modernize Russia at all costs, dealt brutally with any opposition–but found his most stubborn and potent resistance in his own home in the person of Alexis. This was a battle of wills that could end in only one way, given the nature of the Tsar's personality and the enormous power that he wielded. The ultimate tragedy is that Peter loved his son, and Alexis his father–but neither could find a way in which to reconcile their political differences. Shades of the twenty-first century! A riveting psychodrama.

Based on the Marquis de Sade's infamous novel of the same name, this new dramatic version of JUSTINE closely follows the original story, both in spirit and in action. De Sade, with his relentless logic, attempts to prove that «virtue» as practiced by most people actually contradicts nature. The innocent maiden Justine suffers one humiliation and setback after another in her futile quest to preserve her virtue and her virginity. No one–not the nobility, not the Church, not even her sister–will step forward to help her unceasing cries for help. Finally, even the Almighty Himself turns against her, fed up with her incessant whining.

Based on the 1885 novel by Henry James, this play tells the story of Hyacinth Robinson, the bastard son of a French woman and an English lord. Robinson has become a bookbinder in the London working-class slums. He embraces radicalism, and joins a conspiracy of anarchists plotting to assassinate high-ranking members of the establishment. But when he's actually given a terrorist mission to carry out, Hyacinth suddenly finds himself conflicted–he no longer sympathizes with radical politics, but feels duty-bound to carry out his assignment. In the end, he discovers, there's no way out! First-rate drama by a well-known American playwright.

In order to prevent his aged cousin (Old Martin) from leaving his huge fortune to charity, Pecksniff travels from London to America to dissuade the dying man from such a mistake. But Old Martin is far from death's door, and is planning from pure spite to swindle the relatives he loathes out of all their money. To do this he employs Montague Tigg, a honey-tongued confidence man who has, up to this point, had little worldly success, despite his many talents. He pretends to be an English lord, a man of means who's the foundation of the Anglo-American Disinterested Life Insurance Company–which, of course, is nothing but a sham. The laughs pile up as each of the characters tries to outswindle the others–until no one is sure who's who and what's what. An uproarious farce in the grand traditon.