JOHN MOROGIELLO is a Playwright in Residence at the Maryland State Arts Council and Artistic Director of Best Medicine Rep Theater Company. His plays include ENGAGING SHAW and BLAME IT ON BECKETT, both published by Samuel French. Other plays include THE CONSUL, THE TRAMP, AND AMERICA'S SWEETHEART (Oldcastle, Theatre 40), STONEWALL'S BUST (Mountain Playhouse), IRISH AUTHORS HELD HOSTAGE (Greenwich Street), MEN AND PARTS (Actors Theatre of Louisville), GIANNI SCHICCHI (Rep Stage), PLAY DATE (Oldcastle), and THE MATCHMAKER'S GUIDE TO CONTROLLING THE ELEMENTS (2Co’s Cabaret). Other plays that premiered at Best Medicine Rep include IN THE GUTTER, DIE, MR. DARCY, DIE!, ROARING, VARIANT STRAINS, and THE CRATER SISTERS' CHRISTMAS SPECIAL (co-written with Lori Boyd). HAPPY HOUR, a film adaptation of MEN AND PARTS, was named Best Short Comedy at the 2003 New York Independent Film and Video Festival and was distributed in Europe by Britshorts. Awards include: 2015 Dayton Playhouse FutureFest, 2015 Julie Harris Playwright Award, 2015 Boomerang Fund for Artists Grant, Kennedy Center Fellowship of the Americas, Holland New Voices Award, Mountain Playhouse Comedy Award, and Baltimore Magazine’s “Best Up and Coming Playwright.” He is a frequent contributor to Flagpole Radio Cafe. His articles have appeared in Washington Independent Review of Books, American Theatre, Dramatics, and in programs and study guides for Long Wharf, Huntington, Everyman, and Belmont Playhouse. MEN AND PARTS appears in Smith and Kraus' Best 10 Minute Plays 2012. JACK THE TICKET RIPPER is available through One Act Play Depot.
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Plays
He considered himself the superman. She allowed him to believe it. Engaging Shaw is the hilarious true story of Irish playwright Bernard Shaw’s relationship with wealthy heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend. According to her, “no man can resist a woman once she has set her sights upon him, unless thwarted by another woman.” But confirmed bachelor Shaw may prove to be more than she bargained for. Can she romance an unromantic man? Can Shaw reconcile his intellectual theories with emotional reality?
Heidi Bishop is a wide-eyed dramaturgy intern, eager to better American drama. What she encounters instead is an endless stream of bad scripts by desperate playwrights and an office filled with cynicism and turf battles, led by her bitterly hilarious boss Jim Foley. When Heidi's efforts to improve things run into unintended consequences, she is forced to confront idealism with reality to save her career, reputation, and relationships.
It's the parents who are naughty in this hilarious mix of winning and losing friendships, adultery, politics and scheming to get one up on their neighbors while in the midst of their children’s play date. A poignant, quick change farce for two actors.
A Yankee accidentally breaks a priceless statue of Stonewall Jackson at a Confederate Heritage Museum and lies about it, setting in motion an escalating series of lies that nearly cost him his love, his life, and his reputation.
Comic variations on a theme in which famous Irish authors are paired with infamous terrorists with hilarious results.
"Irish Authors brims with an erudite postmodern whimsy that, at its most inspired moments, recalls Tom Stoppard.” --Celia Wren, THE WASHINGTON POST
“Uproarious! Elegant in its simplicity, hilarious in its scholastic rigor, sophomoric as only a writer who was a really nerdy sophomore could make it.” --Bob Mondello, WASHINGTON CITY PAPER
A comic revenge tragedy. A ticket taker seeks revenge after being replaced by an optical scanner on his twenty-fifth anniversary on the job. Think a life in the theater is easy? Then you don't know Jack!
"John Morogiello successfully combines comedic violence with the daily going-ons of a theatre, and produces a hilariously entertaining story of an underappreciated ticket ripper. Quick and dirty, Jack, The Ticket Ripper produces laughs with ease, combining farcical elements of horror films and theatre management. Anyone who’s ever had psychotic thoughts during a shift at a less-than-glamorous job (come on now, that’s everybody), should exorcise his anger by seeing Jack, The Ticket Ripper." --DC Theatre Scene
A tragedy with jokes set on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay in 1868. Two men, eager to make a killing on a railroad venture, try to force a waterman off his property. But the waterman plans to make a killing of his own.
Winner of the 2015 Julie Harris Playwright Award Competition and the 2015 Dayton Playhouse FutureFest. On the eve of World War II, the German consul to Hollywood tries to stop production on Charlie Chaplin's first talkie, The Great Dictator. The result is a comedy based on a true story about the powers of art, politics, commerce, and what it means to be American.
Laura has a long history of being disappointed by men. They’re jerks. They’re cads. They’re liars and slackers, especially Mike, the bad boy who’s always catcalling her on the street. So Laura decides to give up on men entirely because none of them can live up to the standards of Jane Austen’s romantic hero Mr. Darcy.
But Laura’s crisis goes deeper than that. If, as Jane Austen observes, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a great fortune must be in want of a wife,” then what is the universal truth for a thirty year old, single woman with a good job in the 21st Century? For what does she want? Is fulfillment possible while she still clings to the idealistic desires of her college years?
With the help of Jane Austen, Laura realizes that she must rid her life of Mr. Darcy to embrace a more mature version of herself and enjoy life’s fact, rather than its fiction.
Successes
CIVILIZING LUSBY, a tragedy with jokes, has been published by Great Plains Theatre Conference in the 2014 GPTC Reader.
The International Shaw Society reviewed the published version of Engaging Shaw in their latest journal.