THE STORY: The scene is an all-night diner in a sleepy southwestern town, the time early Sunday morning, when the night attendant, young Stephen (Red) Ryder, is about to turn his duties over to his daytime counterpart, Angel. Her friend Lyle, who r

THE STORY: After three years in the Peace Corps, James, a young speech therapist, joins the faculty of a school for the deaf, where he is to teach lip-reading. He meets Sarah, a school dropout, totally deaf from birth, and estranged both from the w

Ever reliable and responsible, Otis Halstead is a father, a husband (one half of a “well-dressed couple of substance”), and the CEO of Kansas Central Fire and Casualty. He has never done anything out of the ordinary. Until now. The change in Otis starts with the acquisition of an antique toy fire truck, the exact model he had pined for at age ten but never received. Next comes a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun. But Otis’s real coup is the purchase of his one true childhood passion: a red 1952 Cushman Pacemaker motor scooter. For his baffled wife, Sally, this is the final straw. She insists that he see a shrink. But when tragedy strikes uncomfortably close to home, Otis decides he wants out of his sensible, safe life in Eureka, Kansas. And so, a few weeks before his sixtieth birthday, Otis leaves town, heading west on old U.S. 56, a corporate CEO riding a forty-year-old motor scooter with a BB gun strapped to the side. One might say he was in for an adventure. Otis would say he was finally about to experience life.

THE STORY: Leeds, a brainy, tart-tongued graduate student, has bet his super-jock roommate, Ward (a Phys-Ed major), that Ward can seduce Honor, the wife of a young professor (Ron). But Leeds has also wagered that if Ward is successful, Ron will m

THE STORY: In the first act, subtitled THE DIRTY PICTURE MAN, Stephen (Red) Ryder, the reluctant nineteen-year-old hero of the original play, is now a twenty-seven-year-old Vietnam veteran who has lost a hand in the war. Part owner and manager of a