RUSSELL
DAVIS' plays include Appointment with a High Wire Lady,
The Last Good Moment of Lily Baker, The Second Death of Priscilla, and
Sally's Gone, She Left Her Name. They have been produced at Light &
Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, Yale Repertory, and Actors Theatre of Louisville,
among others including at the Mark Taper's New Work Festival, Sundance
Playwrights Lab., National Playwrights Conference, and New Harmony Project.
He was resident playwright at People's Light for the Theatre Residency
Program of the NEA/TCG. He has received fellowships and grants from
the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts,
New York Founda¬tion for the Arts, McKnight Foundation, New York
State Council on the Arts, and Tennessee Arts Commission. He is a past
member of New Dramatists. His stage adaptation of Avi's Crispin: The
Cross of Lead, the Newbery Medal winner for children's literature in
2003, is scheduled for production at People's Light in 2007-08. He worked
as the consulting writer with the juggler Michael Moschen in Michael
Moschen in Motion at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival
and at the Lincoln Center's SERIOUS FUN! Festival. He and Paul Meshejian
collaborated with Jon Held, a juggler and former member of Airjazz,
to develop Tales of Lunacy, which was presented at the 3 Legged Race
New Theater 2002 Conference in Minneapolis and subsequently produced
by Touchstone Theatre.
THE
DAY OF THE PICNIC
Betsy Fullbright
keeps hearing someone outside, or down the hall, call out yoo hoo. One
time it even sounded like it came from the picture on the wall. Another
time it was perhaps the television, or muzak speakers. A couple of times
this yoo hoo sounded even like herself. Meanwhile, the nursing home
staff have vanished and most everyone else is away on a picnic. A silent
black man, who arrived the night before, now sits in a wheelchair and
stares at her. Could this be someone she knew once upon a time in Kenya?
Did this person somehow follow her here after all these years?
