The Housewives of Mannheim
by Alan Brody

In 1944 Brooklyn, a beautiful housewife's innocent visit to see a Vermeer painting at the Metropolitan Museum sets off a chain of personal awakenings that forces her to confront hidden desires, challenge social conventions, and choose between the safety of conformity and the dangerous freedom of authentic self-discovery.

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THE HOUSEWIVES OF MANNHEIM is set in a Brooklyn apartment building in 1944, where three women navigate friendship, sexuality, and self-discovery while their husbands fight overseas. The play takes its title from a fictional Vermeer painting that becomes a metaphor for how women are seen and how they see themselves across time.

Act I introduces May Black, a beautiful housewife who lives with her 10-year-old son Bobby while her husband Lenny serves in the war. Her best friend is Billie Friedhoff, a sharp-tongued, sexually liberated woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a dentist. Their neighbor Alice Cohen represents conventional domesticity, obsessed with contests, rationing, and maintaining respectability.

The catalyst arrives when Sophie Birnbaum, an elegant European refugee in her 60s, moves into the building. Sophie is a former concert pianist who fled Nazi-occupied Paris after her non-Jewish husband died. May is immediately drawn to Sophie's sophistication and worldliness.

After hearing about "The Housewives of Mannheim" on the radio, May impulsively visits the Metropolitan Museum - her first independent cultural expedition. This sparks an intellectual awakening. She begins reading art books, applies secretly to Brooklyn College, and finds herself questioning everything about her prescribed role as wife and mother.

Sophie becomes May's mentor, teaching her about art, music, and seeing the world with fresh eyes. Meanwhile, Billie, who has harbored romantic feelings for May for ten years, grows jealous of this new friendship. The act culminates at a bohemian party where Billie finally acts on her feelings, seducing May in a moment of vulnerability and alcohol-fueled intimacy.

Act II deals with the fallout. May is horrified by what happened and retreats into denial and self-loathing. When she discovers that Sophie has also had relationships with women, May feels betrayed and manipulated. In a devastating scene, she accidentally breaks Sophie's rare recordings - the only remaining copies of her pre-war concerts - then watches helplessly as Sophie destroys the rest rather than leave them for someone who will reject both the music and the musician.

May seeks refuge in conventional morality, turning to Alice and rejecting both women. She spreads word about Billie throughout the building, destroying her friend's linen business and social standing. She abandons her college applications and vows to return to being a "normal" housewife when Lenny comes home.

The climax forces all three women to confront the truth about love, friendship, and authenticity. Sophie, drawing on her experience of how hatred spreads when people choose willful ignorance, warns May that denying what she's learned will lead to a life of dangerous silence and eventual persecution of others. Billie demands honesty about their relationship, refusing to let May hide behind the fiction that she was merely a victim.

The play concludes with a moment of tentative reconciliation and growth. May begins to acknowledge the complexity of her feelings and the value of what she's learned from both women. As she prepares coffee for all three friends (Alice included), they freeze in the exact positions of the Vermeer painting - suggesting that women across time have always grappled with similar questions of identity, desire, and the courage to live authentically.

Themes: The play explores sexual awakening and female desire, the tension between conformity and self-discovery, friendship as a catalyst for growth, and the danger of choosing ignorance over difficult truths. It's ultimately about the courage required to live an examined life and the price of both conformity and authenticity.

FIVE SCENES FROM LIFE follows the evolving relationship between Nina Shenton, a 36-year-old white political science professor, and Bobby Jones, a 34-year-old Black inmate, over the course of several months at a maximum security prison.

FIVE SCENES FROM LIFE
by Alan Brody

Act I begins in Nina's government classroom where Bobby, intelligent but manipulative, lingers after class. Their initial sparring reveals Nina's no-nonsense teaching style and Bobby's complex mix of intelligence, charm, and street wisdom. When Bobby invites Nina to Family Day as his "family" since he has no visitors, she cleverly circumvents the inappropriate request by attending as a guest of the entire class.

At Family Day, Nina experiences the bittersweet reality of prison life - families doing "the bump" dance, children in their best clothes getting dirty with barbecue sauce, speeches from the NAACP. She and Bobby share an unexpectedly tender moment learning to dance together, and Bobby asks her to be his correspondent. Their connection deepens beyond the student-teacher relationship.

Four weeks later, Bobby has been in solitary confinement ("keeplock") for three weeks after attacking a guard with a wrench. Nina confronts her own growing feelings and the warnings from Mike, a sympathetic guard who cautions teachers against getting "involved." Bobby confesses his love for Nina, and despite her attempts to maintain professional boundaries, she admits her feelings are reciprocated.

Act II picks up two months later during an independent study session. Their relationship has clearly become romantic, with stolen moments of physical intimacy. Nina faces pressure at the university where colleagues disapprove of her "fixation" and threaten her tenure. Bobby provides emotional support, sharing his philosophy about finding an inner "gyroscope" to survive difficult times.

When Nina pushes for specifics about Bobby's crime, he initially tells her a fabricated story about killing an elderly Jewish liquor store owner - a tale designed to play into racial stereotypes. But Nina discovers Bobby has been lying about multiple things: his crime, his sentence length, and academic dishonesty. The truth emerges: Bobby is serving life for killing another drug dealer, and he's a repeat offender who dealt drugs to children.

The climactic final scene forces both characters to confront their deepest truths. Bobby reveals he lied because he was afraid Nina was too intelligent for him. Nina must admit her own pattern of destructive sexual behavior - sleeping with multiple colleagues and even picking up a stranger immediately after being intimate with Bobby. Both characters are forced to acknowledge their self-hatred and self-destructive patterns.

Despite the devastating revelations, they choose each other. Bobby asks Nina to marry him while they dance the bump in the empty classroom, and she accepts. They commit to building a life together based on truth rather than lies, even though the practical challenges are enormous - she faces losing her job, and he has decades left on his sentence.

Themes: The play explores love across racial and class lines, the possibility of redemption through honest connection, the difference between manipulation and vulnerability, and the courage required to build authentic relationships. It's ultimately about two damaged people choosing to risk everything for the possibility of genuine love and transformation.

Set against the backdrop of Harvard University in 1956-57, "The Kistiakowsky Play" brings to light the true story of Professor George Kistiakowsky's crusade to expose and eliminate Harvard's discriminatory admissions practices. The play opens as Kistiakowsky, a Ukrainian-born physical chemist and Manhattan Project veteran, faces complaints from undergraduate students who find his rigorous academic standards unreasonable. Dean McGeorge Bundy mediates a conflict with Travis Tyler, a privileged student who mocked Kistiakowsky's accent and was publicly called out for his lack of preparation.

The central catalyst arrives when Kistiakowsky's daughter Vera introduces him to Joel Rosenstein, a brilliant 17-year-old from Bronx Science who dreams of studying nuclear physics at Harvard. Joel's revelation about Harvard's Jewish quota system opens Kistiakowsky's eyes to an institutional injustice he had been blind to despite decades on the faculty. This discovery explains why his classes are filled with unprepared students like Tyler while genuinely gifted scholars like Joel are systematically excluded.

When Joel is interviewed by Dean of Admissions Wilbur Bender, the encounter exposes the prejudiced evaluation process. Despite Joel's exceptional academic credentials and passionate knowledge of nuclear physics, Bender dismisses him based on stereotypical assumptions about Jewish students. Joel receives an unprecedented "early rejection" letter, a fabricated policy designed specifically to crush his hopes.

Kistiakowsky confronts both Bundy and Bender about the quota system. While Bundy equivocates with administrative doublespeak, Bender openly defends the policy, arguing that Harvard must maintain its tradition of producing "cultured gentlemen" rather than "neurotic eggheads." He warns that admitting more Jews would lead to an influx of other undesirable minorities and destroy Harvard's character.

Refusing to accept this injustice, Kistiakowsky rallies faculty colleagues to form a petition demanding an end to the Jewish quota. He hires Joel as his research assistant on nuclear policy proposals, defying administrative pressure. The conflict escalates when alumni donor Jotham Rogers visits to threaten both Kistiakowsky's position and his recent appointment to President Eisenhower's Science Advisory Council. Rogers warns that faculty who signed the petition could face investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee, using McCarthyism as a weapon to silence reform efforts.

The play reaches its climax when Kistiakowsky, subpoenaed to appear before HUAC, refuses to be intimidated, turning the hearing into an indictment of the committee's own un-American activities. His testimony about Harvard's discrimination becomes part of his broader critique of institutional prejudice and intellectual persecution.

Meanwhile, Dean Bundy secretly supports Kistiakowsky's cause while maintaining plausible deniability. He orchestrates the creation of the Ford Committee to study admissions policies, with the understanding that its findings will be strategically leaked to force public accountability. The play demonstrates how social change often requires both public confrontation and behind-the-scenes maneuvering.

The historical moment proves crucial as the Soviet launch of Sputnik in October 1957 shifts American priorities toward scientific excellence. Suddenly, the "gentleman's C" tradition that favored well-connected mediocrity over academic merit becomes a national security liability. Dean Bender recognizes this paradigm shift and announces his resignation, acknowledging that Kistiakowsky's vision of merit-based admissions has become inevitable.

The play concludes with Joel's acceptance to Harvard under the reformed admissions process, representing not just personal triumph but institutional transformation. Kistiakowsky's fight has succeeded in opening Harvard's doors to students previously excluded by prejudice, fundamentally changing the character of American higher education.

Through this deeply personal story, Alan Brody explores themes of courage, prejudice, academic freedom, and the moral obligation to fight injustice. The play shows how individual acts of conscience can challenge powerful institutions and create lasting social change, while also examining the complex intersection of academia, politics, and social justice during the Cold War era.

Act I introduces us to Rochel Kremer (daughter of a murdered theater owner), Leib Arnovsky (a director haunted by loss), and Mordecai Solomon (a former partisan with a secret mission). Together with dancers Max Silver and Eleazer Goldstein, musician Chaim Marx, and actresses Duna Gortner and young Esther Mendel, they form "The Yiddish Musical Chamber Theater."

Their production "Yesterday and Today" combines classic Yiddish theater (Sholem Aleichem's "The Lottery Ticket") with contemporary songs and ends with the audience singing the Partisan's Song together. The company provides both entertainment and emotional healing to displaced Jews across Poland.

Beneath the theatrical mission runs a parallel story: Mordecai secretly works with the Bricha, smuggling Jewish children out of Poland to Palestine. When a ship carrying 164 children and 49 elderly people is turned away by the British and sinks, the personal becomes political.

Act II follows the company's escape to Munich, where they perform in displaced persons camps. They encounter both supporters and opponents, including a traumatized rabbi who argues that hope is blasphemy after the Holocaust. As the company gains success and American military support, tensions arise within the group.

The climactic moment comes with news that the United Nations has voted to create Israel. This joyous occasion also marks the beginning of the end for the company, as the displaced persons camps start closing and survivors begin emigrating to new homes worldwide.

The play concludes with the company's final performance: a live radio broadcast in Yiddish on German radio - the first since the Nuremberg Laws. It's both a triumph and a farewell, as each member must choose their own path forward. Some go to Israel, others to America, each carrying the memory of their brief time as "a company of angels" who used art to affirm life in the shadow of genocide.

The play explores themes of survival, artistic purpose, faith after trauma, and the tension between collective memory and individual healing. It's ultimately about how art can serve as both witness to horror and vehicle for hope.

MatchPoint
by Alan Brody

Act I establishes the present-day reunion while revealing the past through flashbacks. Frank, now 58, teaches at a private school with his wife Dori, a former professional tennis player. When Kevin arrives, the tension is immediate - there's clearly unfinished business between them. Through memory sequences, we learn that twenty years earlier, Kevin was Frank's most promising student, a talented but driven young man who left Stanford to train with Frank.

The flashbacks reveal Frank's dangerous obsession with the young Kevin. While Dori was competing on the professional circuit and dealing with a pregnancy, Frank became emotionally and sexually fixated on his student. The relationship never became physical, but Frank's feelings were intense and all-consuming, reminiscent of his earlier struggle with drug addiction. The crisis came when Dori miscarried while playing in Australia, and Frank chose to stay with Kevin for a tournament final rather than go to his wife.

Act II escalates the confrontation as Kevin's true desperation emerges. His venture capital business is failing, he's broke, and he sees Frank as his only salvation. Kevin attempts to manipulate Frank through a combination of nostalgia, implied blackmail, and sexual proposition. He threatens to expose Frank's past feelings and drug history, which could destroy Frank's teaching career.

The climax occurs when Dori returns and the three-way confrontation explodes. Kevin reveals Frank's past feelings for him, hoping to drive a wedge between the couple and force Frank's hand. However, Dori proves stronger than Kevin anticipated. She sees through his bluffs and manipulations, recognizing him as a desperate hustler rather than the threat he pretends to be.

The play's resolution finds Frank finally understanding the nature of his past obsession - it wasn't love but a form of self-destructive addiction to Kevin's contempt and manipulation. Frank refuses Kevin's demands, and Kevin leaves defeated, still unable to face the truth about himself.

The final moments show Frank and Dori beginning to process what has been revealed. While their relationship has been damaged by the revelations, there's hope for healing as they remember their younger selves and acknowledge that "only amateurs think time's the enemy."

Themes: The play explores obsession versus love, the corruption of mentorship, the cost of ambition, and the difference between authentic achievement and empty success. It's ultimately about the possibility of redemption and the strength required to face uncomfortable truths about oneself.

Reckoning Time is a musical meditation on the final moments of Walt Whitman's life. As the dying poet lies struggling for breath, he encounters his beloved Peter Doyle and must choose between three ships that represent different aspects of his existence.

The first ship, "Paumonok," carries his childhood and early life - his parents, his youth in Brooklyn, his early struggles as a journalist and his awakening to both his sexuality and his poetic calling. Through memories of family conflict and his journey to New Orleans, we see the formation of the man who would dare to "sing America."

The second vessel is the Brooklyn Ferry, representing his literary legacy and Leaves of Grass. Here Whitman revisits his revolutionary poetry - his celebration of the body, democracy, and spiritual connection - while confronting the scandal it caused and his transformation into "The Good Gray Poet," a sanitized public figure he barely recognizes.

The third ship emerges from his work as a Civil War nurse, where he comforted dying soldiers and witnessed America's greatest trauma. This vessel embodies his role as national healer and the mythic status that both elevated and imprisoned him.

As Whitman agonizes over choosing just one ship - one version of himself - a fourth, unexpected vessel appears: a schooner carrying the voices of future American poets he inspired, from William Carlos Williams to Maya Angelou. In this final vision, he discovers that his true immortality lies not in any single identity, but in the continuing song of American poetry he helped birth.

The piece explores the tension between authentic selfhood and public persona, the price of literary immortality, and the ultimate question of whether a life dedicated to art can achieve the spiritual unity Whitman so desperately sought.

 ARE YOU POPULAR — A Play by Alan Brody

Set in Rockville Center, Long Island in November 1956, Are You Popular? exposes the dark underside of postwar American prosperity. Seventeen-year-old Brenda Cohen discovers she's pregnant by her boyfriend Gary and confides only in her unpopular friend Noah Greisinger, who desperately tries to help her find an illegal abortion.

The story unfolds in the Cohens' basement recreation room, a symbol of their newly acquired suburban wealth. Brenda's father Howie has transformed himself from a Brooklyn shoe salesman into a successful but ruthless businessman, complete with plans for a fallout shelter and dreams of real estate development. Her mother Alice lives vicariously through Brenda's dancing ambitions while struggling with the isolation of suburban life.

As Brenda, Noah, and Bobby Black scramble to raise money for the abortion, the adult relationships around them begin to unravel. Howie is having an affair with Barbara Greisinger (Noah's mother) while manipulating her husband Jerry, his business partner, through threats and lies about Jerry's supposed communist sympathies. The women bond over shared loneliness and lost friendships from their Brooklyn days.

When the abortion goes catastrophically wrong, Brenda nearly bleeds to death in the family rec room. The crisis strips away all pretenses: Alice finally sees her husband's true nature and banishes him to his own fallout shelter, while Barbara realizes she must return to her decent but war-traumatized husband Jerry, who has already quit Howie's business to work with competitors.

The play climaxes with Alice's transformation from submissive wife to empowered woman who demands her husband reform completely before she'll take him back. She offers him Jerry's job - but only if he can become honest and decent. The title's bitter irony becomes clear: in 1950s America, being "popular" often meant being complicit in a system built on lies, manipulation, and moral compromise.

Part of Brody's Victory Blues Trilogy, the play traces how the promise of postwar prosperity corrupted the values that supposedly won the war, leaving families fractured and individuals struggling to reclaim their authentic selves from the roles society demanded they play.

Operation Epsilon presents the true story of Germany's top nuclear scientists held at Farm Hall, England from July 1945 to January 1946. The play opens as the physicists arrive at their luxurious prison - a Georgian estate complete with gardens, fine food, and hidden microphones recording their every word for Allied intelligence.

The scientists initially focus on their scientific work, holding colloquia and debating technical problems while anxiously awaiting news of their families and futures. Their world shatters when Major Rittner informs Otto Hahn that America has dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The revelation devastates Hahn, who discovered nuclear fission in 1938 and now feels responsible for enabling mass destruction.

As the group processes this news, deep fractures emerge. Some, like Werner Heisenberg, insist they never seriously pursued a bomb and were only developing a uranium reactor for peaceful energy production. Others admit that a bomb was always a possibility they chose not to pursue with full resources. The eldest physicist, Max von Laue - who refused all war work - becomes the moral conscience of the group, forcing his colleagues to confront their complicity in the Nazi regime.

The scientists draft a memorandum attempting to rehabilitate their reputations by claiming they only worked on peaceful atomic energy, not weapons. But their efforts to control the historical narrative fail as newspapers worldwide report them as "Hitler's uranium club" who lost the atomic race to Allied scientists.

Personal tensions explode as the men blame each other for their scientific failures and moral compromises. Heisenberg, the group's leader, struggles to maintain unity while protecting his own legacy. The younger scientists worry their careers are ruined, while party members like Diebner and Bagge face potential retribution from their own countrymen.

The play climaxes with the arrival of a letter from Lise Meitner, Hahn's former Jewish colleague who escaped Nazi Germany. Her devastating rebuke forces the scientists to confront the full scope of their moral failure - not just their scientific work, but their willful blindness to the Holocaust and their passive collaboration with a genocidal regime.

Operation Epsilon explores how brilliant minds can rationalize moral compromise, the relationship between scientific discovery and political responsibility, and the way intellectuals justify their complicity with evil through claims of political neutrality and professional duty.

The Summer of Roses - a stage play by Alan Brody

When a brilliant 16-year-old boy is offered a scholarship to an elite school for gifted students, his overprotective mother sabotages his teacher and battles his father to keep their family intact during the Korean War summer of 1952.

The Summer of the Roses, a two-act family drama set in 1952 suburban Philadelphia, explores the tensions between protecting family unity and nurturing individual potential against the backdrop of the Korean War and McCarthyism.

Sixteen-year-old Tom Miller is a mathematically gifted teenager who feels isolated at his average high school. His teacher, Miss Williams, administers a special test and discovers Tom qualifies for the prestigious Boyd School in New York City with a full merit scholarship. However, Tom keeps this secret from his parents, knowing his mother Florence would refuse to let him go.

The family dynamics are further complicated by the return of Tom's older brother Gus, a naval officer on leave before his Korean War deployment. Florence, still traumatized by World War II and now facing another war taking her eldest son, cannot bear the thought of losing Tom as well. When Gus betrays Tom's confidence about the school opportunity, Florence explodes, declaring that Tom will never leave home.

The central conflict deepens when Florence, threatened by Miss Williams' influence over Tom, secretly reports the teacher to the school principal as a communist sympathizer, resulting in Williams' firing. This betrayal devastates Tom and creates a rift with his father Les, who had been secretly funding Tom's continued tutoring with Williams at his jukebox distribution warehouse.

Les faces his own crisis when his business partner Dominick demands he fire half his crew for higher profits, forcing him to confront his own compromised integrity. The parallel struggles of father and son - both caught between loyalty and principle - form the play's emotional core.

The climax comes when Tom discovers his mother's role in destroying Miss Williams' career and his father's business compromises. Feeling betrayed by everyone he trusted, Tom initially loses faith in his family. However, Les finally finds the courage to stand up to both Florence and Dominick, choosing to send Tom to the Boyd School despite Florence's opposition.

The play concludes with Tom's departure for New York, having learned painful lessons about adult complexity and moral compromise, while Florence is left alone to face her fears of abandonment and change. The roses that bloom and fade throughout the summer serve as a metaphor for the fleeting nature of childhood and the inevitable passage of time that forces families to evolve or break apart.

The drama captures the post-war American middle-class struggle between conformity and individual expression, family loyalty and personal growth, set against the paranoid atmosphere of early 1950s McCarthyism.

SMALL INFINITIES - a stage play by Alan Brody

When Sir Isaac Newton discovers the universal law of gravitation, his pursuit of God's unified design through mathematics, optics, and forbidden alchemy threatens to destroy his relationships and reputation in Restoration England.

Small Infinities, a biographical drama chronicles the scientific and personal struggles of Sir Isaac Newton from 1664 to 1720, focusing on his revolutionary discoveries and the human cost of genius.

The play opens during the plague year of 1665, with young Newton at his mother Hannah's farm in Woolsthorpe, where the famous apple incident occurs. However, Brody's Newton sees not a single apple but thousands of windfalls, leading to his breakthrough understanding of universal gravitation. The play explores Newton's troubled relationship with his mother, who abandoned him as a child to remarry, leaving him with deep wounds that fuel both his brilliance and his isolation.

Newton's scientific journey unfolds through his contentious relationship with Robert Hooke at the Royal Society. When Newton presents his groundbreaking work on optics, demonstrating that white light is composed of colors, Hooke challenges him publicly, creating a lifelong enmity. This conflict establishes Newton's pattern of secretiveness and reluctance to publish, fearing criticism and theft of his ideas.

The emotional center of the play emerges through Newton's relationships with two key figures: Edmund Halley, the loyal astronomer who becomes his champion and friend, and Nicholas Fatio de Duilliers, a brilliant young mathematician from Amsterdam. Fatio understands Newton's work with an intimacy that both thrills and terrifies the older scientist. Their relationship develops into something deeper than mentorship, with homoerotic undertones that Newton struggles to acknowledge or accept.

Newton's multifaceted genius is revealed through three interconnected pursuits: his mathematical invention of calculus (which he calls "fluxions"), his optical experiments, and his secret alchemical work. All three represent his quest to understand what he believes is God's unified design for the universe. However, his Arian religious beliefs (denying the Trinity) and his alchemical experiments could result in his execution if discovered.

The dramatic tension builds as Halley pressures Newton to publish his work on celestial mechanics, which will become the "Principia Mathematica." Newton fears exposure not only of his scientific ideas but of his heretical religious beliefs and his relationship with Fatio. The play explores how Newton's need for secrecy conflicts with his desire for recognition and understanding.

Catherine Barton, Newton's vivacious cousin, provides a counterpoint to his isolation, planning to keep house for him in London and integrate him into society. Her worldly ambition contrasts sharply with Newton's spiritual and intellectual pursuits.

The climax comes as Newton finally agrees to publish the "Principia," recognizing that his discoveries about gravitation will revolutionize humanity's understanding of the cosmos. However, this decision means exposing himself to public scrutiny and potentially sacrificing his private relationships and secret studies.

The play concludes with Newton's recognition that he is "God's prophet of science" in his age, destined to reveal divine truth through mathematics. Yet this prophetic role demands sacrifice - of personal happiness, intimate relationships, and the freedom to pursue his forbidden interests in alchemy and heretical theology.

Brody's Newton emerges as a complex figure: a man of towering intellect whose emotional isolation stems from childhood abandonment, whose revolutionary discoveries about the universe are matched by his revolutionary religious beliefs, and whose fear of exposure wars with his need to share his revelations with the world. The "small infinities" of the title refer both to Newton's mathematical method of calculus and to the infinite cosmos his laws revealed, as well as to the small, infinite moments of human connection that his genius both craves and repels.

The play presents Newton not as a distant historical figure but as a deeply human character whose scientific revolution was inseparable from his personal struggles with faith, love, ambition, and the terrible isolation of genius.