Plays by Greg Owens

Darwin and Jo Smith, and their seventeen year-old son Ronnie, seem to be the typical Middle American conservative family. Darwin works as a systems analyst. Jo teaches community college. Ronnie is a high school baseball standout with big league aspirations.

One night before dinner, they are paid a surprise visit from Commander Abraham Lincoln of Central Security, who claims to have information concerning their daughter Lucy, an American soldier. Lincoln claims that Lucy was captured by the enemy in a foreign war and decapitated. But, thanks to the top-secret Operation Hydra, military doctors have been able to save her life by surgically re-attaching her head.

There are two problems: (1) The Smiths don’t have a daughter. (2) Somebody got the wrong head.

HOME FRONT, from the author of THE LIFE AND TIMES OF TULSA LOVECHILD, is a five-character, one-set contemporary play that explores, through a combination of intense drama and surreal dark comedy, the personal and social consequences of war.

'Like orange means decaf, baby.'

[The Queen of Bakersfield] ‘engages the audience in a discourse that draws from a collective conscience of American places, ideals, and incidents… The stories are at once tragic and humorous.’ –LIVINGSTON WEEKLY

‘Sung and spoken by KellyAnn Corcoran with intensity and immediacy and confidently staged by C. Russell Muth, these often romantic, sometimes ridiculous 'tales of dust and moonlight' contrast a tomboy's John Wayne fantasy with a mother's suicide and the melodramatic death of a demolition-derby veteran with the bittersweet, near-fatal meeting of a California widow and a washed-up pro wrestler. In Owens' unashamedly rhapsodic monologues, 'the road is an asphalt hostess,' Elvis and Evel Knievel are once and future heroes, and, as the often grotesque anecdotes drive home, It's a long way down to love.'
-CHICAGO TRIBUNE

‘The Queen of Bakersfield... offers a welcome return to the American folk tradition of storytelling... the stories themselves and the telling of them in the Queen of Bakersfield make for exciting theater: an evening that looms larger than life.’ -CHICAGO READER

Plays by Greg Owens

Saturday, June 20, 2009

One Acts Published

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

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Home Front

The Queen of Bakersfield & other tales of dust and moonlight

'Like orange means decaf, baby.'

the playwright