Shualee Cook
St. Louis, MO
Biography

Shualee Cook is a Californian writer currently in self-imposed exile in the Midwest. Shualee’s play “An Invitation Out” will be receiving its world premiere at Mustard Seed Theatre in April, 2015. “The Geography of Nowhere’ won the Mustard Seed Theatre New Play Contest, and received a staged reading in April, 2012. A 45 minute workshop production of “Osgood Rex”, an original musical, premiered at the 2012 Saint Louis Fringe Festival, where it was voted Audience Favorite. Her short play “The Music of the Goddess” was produced as part of First Run Theatre’s Spectrum 2010 Festival of Short Plays. She has also been a finalist for Inkwell Theatre’s 2014 play development program and Endstation Theatre’s 2014 Summer Residency.

Plays

by Shualee Cook

In 1895 New York, trans man Ambrose Carlton has a plan to beat the restrictive system around him and live as himself as much as possible - to find a bride at Roland "Laureline" Reeves' infamous Cercle Hermaphroditos, a social club for "androgynes" (aka, trans women). Ambrose hopes to find a lady at the club he can legally marry, then live the life expected of them in public while pursuing the life they want in private. But finding the proper match becomes more difficult than he expected, especially after the club is raided by police and the fragile safe place Laureline has created threatens to break apart for good.

Cast:
8; 4 trans f, 1 trans m, 3 cis m
by Shualee Cook

Candles Out is a decade-old punk rock break up song seeking closure with five people whose lives she's entwined with in very different ways - Sasha and Jory, the band members who wrote her; Trevor, the guy they wrote her about; Elise, Trevor's sister; and Kess, a music journalist who sets them all on a collision course with the past they've tried to ignore.

Cast:
6 to 7; 4-5 f, 1 trans f, 1 m
by Shualee Cook

Things are coming to a close inside Leah Connors’ house in Tucson, Arizona. Her marriage to Aaron is on a downhill slide, her ailing grandmother Anna waits for the end in in the guest room, and her younger sister Becky arrives home from years spent in church ministry in the midst of a major crisis of faith. As the sisters keep vigil during Anna’s final days, Becky starts to have strange dreams where she interviews the Native American kachina spirits that have painted the Tucson sunset every evening since the dawn of time – and these ancient beings seem to have different ideas of just what is coming to an end in the lives of these three women, and what those endings might mean.

Cast:
6 - 4 f, 2 m
by Shualee Cook

At age 10, Alice Liddell inspired Lewis Carroll to write his seminal book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But at age 21, she finds herself trapped between the fantasy world created for her, and the restrictive Victorian world of Oxford, England – each with a very specific role she is expected to play. Then a chance meeting with Carroll, whom she hasn’t spoken to in years, leads her down the rabbit hole again. Retreating into fantasy, she ends up once more at the Mad Tea Party, where a seemingly casual suggestion by Carroll that she read Shakespeare’s The Tempest turns into a philosophical treasure hunt. With help from the Mad Hatter, March Hare, Dormouse and Cheshire Cat, Alice proceeds to act out the classic play in hope that it holds the key to her crisis of identity and offers a way of dealing with her magical but complicated past.

Cast:
6 - 3 f, 3 m
by Shualee Cook

Inspired by real events from the early days of American animation, Osgood Rex is a traditional Greek Tragedy from a cartoon's eye view. Eckhart Unger, creator of the popular "Osgood The Scrappy Squirrel" cartoons, finds he must leave behind his prize creation and start from scratch when an unscrupulous producer steals the rights to the character out from under him. Meanwhile, in the cartoon world, Osgood discovers that his Creator has abandoned him into the hands of lesser gods, and struggles to figure out what he did to deserve such a fate, and how he might reverse it.

Cast:
12-20; 3 f, 4-6 m, 3-10 gender neutral
by Shualee Cook

Wildean drawing room comedy collides with cyberpunk sci-fi in the new play, An Invitation Out. Like most successful young men in the somewhat distant future, Wridget has lived his entire life completely online, designing high-end custom avatars and throwing lavish parties in a Neo-Victorian world of his own devising. But when a mysterious Outdweller logs on to one of his virtual soirees, Wridget finds himself pulled between two realities, each with their own unique perils and promises.

Cast:
9; 5 f, 4 m