Elaine Slater
Plays
For a link to Elaine's page on the Playwrights Database click here.
"Guilt" (2000)
Quarter Finalist Stage Play - New Century Awards
Quarter Finalist - New Horizon Awards
It is said that if everyone is guilty then no one is guilty. But is this true? The audience must decide.
Excerpt:
"...It is 1968. On a dark street in Vienna, Karl has just been killed by a hit and run driver. Back in New York his grieving widow, Sarah, believes it was a terrible accident. Karl’s colleague, Uri, thinks differently.
Why would Karl be targeted and by whom?
Uri believes he knows the answer but he needs Sarah’s help. First he must convince her that her family was deliberately betrayed to the Nazis in 1938, a betrayal that left only Sarah, then 13 years old, alive. He must convince her, and quickly, that her life is now in danger. Something has changed – someone new had entered the scene. Sarah is no longer safe.
Sarah adamantly refuses to believe that any in the tight circle that surrounded her family would have betrayed them. But she soon discovers that something has indeed changed as her past intrudes upon the present with a potentially deadly outcome..."
Elaine Slater's Film Script of the same name deals with much the same story but in a much different form. Quarter Finalist Film Script New Century Awards.
"Welcome to Sunnyvale Acres" (2001): Stageplay workshopped at Ryerson University, Toronto
Winner of Alumnae Theatre Works In Progress competition.
Newly arrived resident at Sunnyvale Acres Retirement Home, Anne Brockhurst, doesn't think Sunnyvale is the place for her, and has no hesitation in saying that these are not her kind of people.
Insulted and angered. Sophie Ostrovski, formerly assistant conductor of the Mendelsohn Choir, an aging hippie and earth mother at Sunnyvale, goads Anne. Sophie's explicit language and talk of her former lovers, infuriates Anne and shocks fellow resident, Myrna Thomas, an Afro-American former professor of Biblical Studies. Sparks fly and tempers flare, but Sunnyvale is soon invaded by problems from the outside as well.
"Welcome to Sunnyvale Acres" is a play about human beings who do not lose their humanity, their character or their sense of fun just because they have become "seniors." It is a play that will resonate with those who hope one day to be there, those who are almost there and those who have already arrived at the unknown territory of sixty or above.
"Welcome to Sunnyvale Acres" will make audiences laugh and will make them cry. It is about people who refuse to be invisible. Sophie, Anne, Myrna and Sam, the principal characters, reaffirm that growth never stops, that we all keep learning and changing.
"Silent Scream" (2001): A Dark Comedy
Quarter Finalist, Stage Play, New Century Awards
A husband and wife are seated in a shabby living room. HE is a salesman, macho and benighted. SHE is trapped in marriage with an ignorant man. SHE is staring out the window contemplating suicide. He doesn’t try to dissuade her - only tells her it won’t work - why doesn’t she take up knitting instead? Does this sound like a comedy?