"THE WRESTLING MATCH"

There was to be a royal wedding celebrated in Phthia and by royal ukase no one in the city might be absent from that.

This I heard from Aphrocleia, my hostess, the owner of taverna where I had installed myself, hidden, as paying guest. She told me that the old king had died of a fall on his great charcoal black horse while hunting, only a few weeks before my arrival. His only son, Eurytion, had succeeded him. Barely eighteen years of age, the lad was said to be already as kingly as his more pleasure-loving sire had been. Handsome, and generous, wise and courteous, if he had any fault at all, the always critical Aphrocleia declared, it was that he listened to the advice of his three older sisters over that of the male elders of the royal court. But this was not really unanticipated: the three princesses were already half grown when his mother had died, soon after giving birth to him. Together they had raised him, so naturally enough, respectful Eurytion treated the sisters as if they were his mother.

They wished him married off to one of their own friends, a woman of the second best family of Phthia, named Polydora, some years older, and beautiful, if already a widow and with a daughter. Many Phthians assumed that Eurytion would be ruled by his wife, and thus by his sisters. But then, aside from his sport, the old king he succeeded had been secretly swayed in most matters by his own three wise daughters and most thought that no harm had or would come to Phthia because of it. So matters could be worse. If the young king could keep the wife pregnant repeatedly she would be less interfering, or so Aphrocleia declared, and added that the king seemed virile enough for that easy task.

In Development

Act 1 complete
Two act full length play.
Two males.
Modern day Lower Manhattan & the Hollywood Hills

Written 2010
One act play. Movable or extremely simple sets.
Two males, two females
Modern day Manhattan

Synopsis:

Thirty years ago, four ambitious, struggling, young professionals began meeting at each of their birthdays to have an expensive haute cuisine meal. Their meetings ended when their relationships became too complicated to handle. Now that all of them are in their sixties, one suggests they revive the long forgotten tradition, for one last celebratory meal.

Roy is a successful painter; openly, even extravagantly gay, and something of a public figure. But for all his strengths, he’s also got weaknesses. One of them is for another Birthday Club member Jake, a successful businessman, straight, married too often, alone again, and for the first time in his life on a psychiatrist’s couch. Another weakness of Roy’s is Candida, his best friend, another unmarried Birthday Club member who is editor in chief of a successful New York publisher and who never wed.

The fourth member of their old group, the once very glamorous Stacey, is now on her own again, and feeling her age with a vengeance. Her various careers ended too, she’s now a self employed publicist.

She and Jake have history too. And she and Candida never saw eye to eye on anything of importance and that hasn’t changed.

The one act comedy is devised as a series of scenes of ever increasing complexity: first a quartet of monologues; then four duets; followed by trios, and then the final quartet, as at last, and despite everything, they do manage to come together. It’s a play about how we change and are changed by life and by others; and how we probably always remains the same.

Some chills coming your way
for this already hot summer!

Steve Jones' latest volume of Best New Horrors #29, contains my ghost story
"After Sunset in the Second Drawing Room Garden," and lots of other ghastly tales by master/mistresses of the genre.

Now available! The front and back matter of the book are encyclopedic.