Barbara Sperber
Saint Paul, MN
poet and playwright; plays performed in Baltimore, Kansas City, New York
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Biography

PLAY PERFORMANCES AND PLAYWRITING PRIZES:

 

Why Are We Here? (formerly Is This The Party?) (Semi-Finalist, The Eugene O’Neill    

            Theater Center’s 2017 National Playwrights Conference)

Is This The Party? (Semi-Finalist, 2017 Bay Area Playwrights Festival)

Is This The Party? (Playwrights Center, Member Stage Reading, January 19, 2017)

The Russian Room (The Perchance To Dream Theatre’s Festival of One Acts, New York             City, 2013)

Two Pens Elijah, (Finalist: 2012 Telluride Playwrights Festival)

Two Pens Elijah (Staged Reading, Strand Theater, Friends and Neighbors Festival 2011,

             Baltimore)

Two Pens Elijah (Finalist: 2011 Wordsmyth Theater Company Reading Series, Houston)

Half-Way Down (Staged Reading, Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre, 2010 Kansas City)

Two Pens Elijah (Playwrights’ Center, Round Table Reading Series 2010, Minneapolis)

Harry And The D.A.’s Wife: (Version of Two Pens Elijah, Playwrights’ Center,

Round Table Reading Series 2005, Minneapolis)

The Martyrdom of Winston MacBride (Playwrights’ Center, Round Table Reading Series

            2008, Minneapolis)

Caesar and Deborah (Gene Frankel’s Theatre Workshop, N.Y.C., 1971)

The Messalina Poems (Eldred Theatre, Cleveland 1969)

 

PLAYWRITING DEVELOPMENT:

Stuart Spencer’s Playwriting Intensive, Metropolitan Theatre Ensemble;

Dramaturgy for Two Pens Elijah and/or The Martyrdom of Winston MacBride: Meredith McDonough; Dominic Taylor; Amy Mueller, Wendy Weckworth, Caridad Svich, Gary Graves, and Stuart Spencer;  Cory Hinkle’s, Victoria Stewart’s, John Olive’s, and Mark Rosenwinkel’s playwriting classes (Playwriting Center, Minneapolis); Christopher Shinn’s Ten Week Master Class (Advanced Playwriting, N.Y.U.); Saturday Writer’s Circle (Philadelphia Dramatist Center, Philadelphia); Gene Frankel’s Theatre Workshop (N.Y.C.)

 

WORKING POET FOR 30 YEARS:

In The Garden Of Our Own Making, A Collection of Poems, (Papier-Mache Press,          

Watsonville, CA, 1995)

Academy of American Poets Prize at the University of Minnesota, 1981

American Association of University Women’s Poetry Prize, 1995

Emily M. Hills Prize (Best Undergraduate Poems) Western Reserve University, 1969   

Academic and Arts Press: Helen Wade Roberts Award (Honorable Mention) 1993

Poems published in A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA),  Poems From The Cleveland Poetry Workshop, International Journal of Applied Poetry, Poets On, Another Chicago Magazine, Milkweed Chronicle, American Weave, Hurricane Alice, Encodings, Matrix, Dico, Great River Review, Fall-Out, and many other literary journals through-out the country

 

MEMBERSHIPS: New Play Exchange, Philadelphia Dramatists Center, Dramatists Guild of America, Theatre Communications Group, Playwrights’ Center (Minneapolis) International Centre for Women Playwrights,  African American Playwrights Exchange, Scriptworks

 

 

           

 

 

 

 

 

Agent Information

SEEKING LITERARY REPRESENTATION

Plays

WHY ARE WE HERE?
by Barbara Sperber

WHY ARE WE HERE? explores how love can survive the traumas in the national security/surveillance state. It also examines the consequences, devastating and redemptive, of engaging in the Resistance.

SYNOPSIS                

Ben and Tony are a gay Jewish couple who’ve been together for 20 years. When they’re thrown into prison, they have no idea why, and they start arguing about who did what. Ben is a film reviewer obsessed with the 1959 movie “General della Rovere,” which tracks a con man’s unexpected transformation into hero in Nazi occupied Italy. Through a stunning twist of fate, this con man (Bardone) has to impersonate the great (partisan) General della Rovere inside a prison in Genoa. And at the last moment of his life, through a similar twist of fate, Ben is forced to make a decision like Bardone’s: whether to inform on Tony, and whether or not to live or die.

Stuart Spencer (author of The Playwrights ’Guidebook) said the following: “…the play is a bravura work of theatricality with multiple levels of reality, devious ambiguities, narratives-within-narratives, and a wildly mordant sense of comedy.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cast:
There are basically four main actors (*SEE NOTES BELOW ON CHARACTER DOUBLING) BEN ABRAMOVICH, A moderately successful film critic with an anxiety disorder, around 40 TONY SAPERSTEIN, A high school history teacher and ex-radical; BEN’s partner for almost twenty years; early 60’s CLARISSA La RUE, A low level official in the prison, manipulative and wildly ambitious to get ahead; in her early 30’s GERHARD, A neo-Nazi (aggressive) guard in the prison with a slight stutter, in his late 20’s GERHARD 2, Also a guard in the prison: GERHARD’s twin and an intellectual who has empathetic leanings; in his late 20’s LOUDSPEAKER/ Dr. BEASLEY (CEO of the PRISON): We hear his voice but We never see him PRISONERS from surrounding cells shout things out periodically--We only hear their voices 9 (Non-speaking) PRISONERS walk across the STAGE briefly in 2 different scenes--once dressed in WW2 prison garb and once in contemporary prison garb S.S. LIEUTENANT, Obedient and punctilious, in his late 20’s (We only see him once at the end of the play) VITTORIO EMANUELE BARDONE, The protagonist in Rosselini’s 1959 movie, “General della Rovere”, in his mid to late forties SS COLONEL MULLER (There’s an umlaut over the “ u”), The antagonist in Rosselini’ 1959 movie, “General della Rovere,” in his mid to late 40’s DOUBLING: *The same Actor that plays BEN plays BARDONE; The same ACTOR that plays COLONEL MUELLER plays CLARISSA; the same Actor that plays GERHARD plays GERHARD 2 GERHARD sometimes speaks with a slight stutter; GERHARD 2 speaks without a stutter; GERHARD has tattoos, earrings, and a wife-beater tee shirt; GERHARD 2 has granny glasses, a button down shirt, a suede jacket, and fashionable slacks
THE RUSSIAN ROOM
by Barbara Sperber

 

This play deconstructs a pivotal moment in the relationship between a mother and daughter. Winston MacBride is an addiction counselor. Her 16 year old daughter Sasha is obsessed with meeting Yuri, her Russian birth father, at the same time she’s experiencing a sexual awakening.  When Winston leaves to pursue her own ambitions (after Yuri has refused to meet Sasha), the lines between life and death, lover and father, begin to blur for Sasha--precipitating a crisis that changes their relationship for good.

Cast:
WINSTON MacBRIDE: An ex-addict and an addiction counselor— In her early forties ISAAC MARGOLIN : Director of the Counseling Program at St. Ann’s Institute—a divorcee in his late fifties SASHA MacBRIDE: WINSTON’s 16 year-old daughter YURI NAHOROSHOV: a brilliant, moody painter—in his late 40’s ANATOLY ROSHEVSKY: A struggling painter in his mid forties NOTE: The same actor that plays Yuri also plays Anatoly. They both have Russian accents.
TWO PENS ELIJAH
by Barbara Sperber

ELIJAH (African Ameican) takes MARIN (a white woman) captive to remedy an injustice that’s been done to him by her husband. Though they both are very frightened and mistrustful of each other, they nevertheless start to bond though their common love of poetry. When things begin to get especially tense, however, and the stakes are raised, their arguments about what constitutes a victim and what a victimizer begin to get personal. ELIJAH challenges MARIN to a “poetry striptease”—i.e., If she can recite Langston Hughes’ poem “As I Grew Older,” he promises to un-tie her. As the crisis ensues, each of them is required to make a life and death decision that involves not only their own life, but also that of the other person.

Cast:
ELIJAH KING: A black, charismatic (brilliant) ex-con; approaching forty. He mixes “street” rhythms and “street” intonations with his vast, intellectual knowledge and myriad poetic references. MARIN APPLEGATE: An affluent, white, “literary do-gooder;” early fifties. She’s a non-fiction travel writer and both highly anxious and agoraphobic.