When Churchyards Yawn and Other Plays

Previously published as When Churchyards Yawn and Other Plays by Jeanmarie Simpson, this revised and expanded Second Edition gathers four bold theatrical works about grief, power, memory, faith, survival, and the haunted afterlives of story. This edition includes a new foreword by a respected playwright, along with expanded contextual and production materials for readers, actors, directors, educators, and theatre-makers.In When Churchyards Yawn, the dead of Hamlet find themselves trapped together in Purgatory. Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius, Laertes, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet's father must confront not only one another, but the wounds, evasions, cruelties, and longings left unresolved beneath Shakespeare's tragedy.Lear: A Solo Adaptation strips King Lear to one actor, one cloak, and the final flickering moments of a dying mind. Memory, madness, authority, regret, and identity collapse into a single theatrical act as Lear relives the ruin he made and cannot undo.Ghosts of the Gilded Stage turns to the theatre itself as a haunted space. In this solo drama, an aging actor returns to an empty stage and sifts through the fragments of a life spent in costume, light, longing, exclusion, and devotion. Both elegy and protest, the play meditates on artistic legacy, access, memory, and who is permitted to enter the room.Even Unto Death begins in the silence after Joan of Arc's execution. Rather than centering Joan's battles, the play remains with those left behind: her mother, her father, her brothers, and the women who worked beside her. In a domestic world of bread, ashes, faith, and unbearable absence, the play interrogates motherhood, war, sainthood, inherited trauma, and the grief that refuses to settle.By turns funny, devastating, irreverent, intimate, poetic, and raw, When Churchyards Yawn and Other Plays speaks to artists and readers drawn to classical adaptation, feminist theatrical response, spiritual inquiry, accessible performance, historical memory, and plays that insist the dead-and the silenced-still have something urgent to say.Performance rights are not included with purchase of this book. For licensing and permissions, contact Upstage Left Press. Read more