Mark E. Leib

Playwright

Mark E. Leib's plays have been produced Off-Broadway at the Players Theatre (Art People), Off-Off-Broadway at the Manhattan Punch Line (Terry by Terry), at the American Repertory Theatre (Terry by Terry and adaptations of Chekhov's Platonov and Beaumarchais's Marriage of Figaro) and at the Edinbugh and Singapore Theatre Festivals. His play The Return to Zion was featured at the Southern New Plays Festival at Southern Rep in New Orleans, and How They Wrestled Until Morning was given a staged reading at the Circle Repertory Theatre in New York.

Among his plays are:

AMERICAN DUET
A teen-aged Jewish boy and girl meet in 1970 in her parents' unused bomb shelter. A relationship begins which continues through college, the start of careers, one failed marriage, marriage to each other, divorce and continued friendship into the 21st century. As their lives converge and diverge, subject matter includes Vietnam, Watergate. the Iran hostage crisis, the Reagan presidency, the fall of communism, and September 11. She's a social worker and a left-liberal; he's an academic and becomes a neoconservative. But not even history can keep them apart.
(1m, 1w, single unit set, 120 minutes)

A RIVER IN THE DESERT
Autumn, 1941: in a small Russian-Polish town an SS officer calls the elderly Professor Mordechai Hausner to his makeshift office in a schoolhouse. It turns out that ten years before, the officer, Colonel Nilsson, was one of Hausner's students in a philsophy course at the University of Frankfurt. Nilsson idolized this professor, and not even his Nazi training can entirely eclipse the great respect he still feels toward his Jewish mentor. Now Nilsson wants to talk with Hausner, to reminisce about their college years and to do the older man a certain favor. But Hausner is no easy man to contend with, and Nilsson is already involved in the Holocaust. What agreement - if any - can they reach?
(3m, 1w, single schoolroom set, 80 minutes)

ART PEOPLE
These 11 vignettes show us the problems, conflicts, triumphs and hazards of a life in the arts. A violinist can't get 30 people to his recitals, a dancer tries to juggle a successful career and a troubled romance, an art critic and a painter contend over the painter's addictive behaviors, a songwriter tries to forget his lone success and much more. The play begins with all six actors addressing the audience about the difficulty of the artist's trajectory, and ends with another group address on the subject of living in "God's artwork."
(3w, 3m, unit set, 120 minutes)

HOW THEY WRESTLED UNTIL MORNING
It's late in the evening, toward the end of a party in honor of the Jewish newlyweds, Jan and Nathan. But sitting alone in the forest on Jan's parents' land is T., a young man who's been in love with Jan since childhood and has carried on an intermittent relationship with her for years. One after the next, his friends attempt to coax him back to the party, but T. is too wounded to respond to Verne's optimism, Pearl's nostalgia, or even Sprig - his date's - anger. Finally, Jan herself comes to talk with her former lover, and the two try to resolve what seems not to be resolvable. And it turns out that just as T. needs something from Jan, she needs something from him - if they're both ever going to move on.
(5m, 4m, one outdoor set, 90 minutes)

THE RETURN TO ZION
Nate is a successful young attorney, engaged to a doctor, and rising fast in his firm. But he has recently become interested in his Jewish identity - and is carefully trying to learn everything from daily prayer to lighting Sabbath candles. As he becomes increasingly religious, his whole world seems to turn on him: his fiancee Laurel finds his quest pathetic, his father Moss warns him that he'll lose his position at his law firm, his boss at the firm insists he needs an employee who doesn't take a day off on Shabbat - and all put pressure on him to return to his original - secular - behavior. Nate's only ally is an African-American fellow associate in the law firm - who finds religion not anywhere near as troubling as the discrimination he's facing from the law firm's partners. Will Nate return to Zion? At what price to his personal life?
(3w, 4m, unit set, 120 minutes)

TERRY BY TERRY
Act One is called "Terry Won't Talk" and is an absurdist comedy about a little boy who suddenly goes mute. As everyone he knows tries to interpret his sudden silence according to their own interests, we learn that Terry's mother is having an affair, his father is a bully, his teacher is a terrified basket case and his schoolfriends are mostly vicious hooligans. Can anyone convince Terry to talk? Act Two is called "Terry Rex," and is a realistic drama about the author of "Terry Won't Talk" - a playwright named Terry who only writes about himself, is narcissistic and misanthropic and mistreats everyone who comes near him. Can the sympathetic little boy in Act One be the Tyrannosaurus of Act Two? "Leib is a real comer, a writer of slicing wit and intellectual velocity" - Jack Kroll, Newsweek. "'Terry Won't Talk' is...(quietly) brilliant" - Boston Globe.
(8m, 6w, unit set and living room set, 120 minutes)

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