Poor Players of the Bay Area

05/04/2025

Woke from dreaming a new play and wrote it before it was forgotten. WIT'S END. Set before cellphones on s deck facing the Pacific Ocean. A high comedy that predicts plays as we have known them for two hundred years will change form in the future.

Call now to connect with business.

04/24/2024

James Keller working on a new play, MISLEADING LADIES, a murder mystery set in the theatre. Actors etc. keep dying whole rehearsing THE WHITE DEVIL by John Webster.

06/21/2023

In-depth reading on June 30th organized by Chris Kelly and a group of actor friends.Looking forward.

12/22/2021

REMEMBRANCE, a Museum Piece completed, now the hard part, sharing with enough people to find two actors and two actresses to do it in probably a year when this terrible epidemic is defeated.

12/11/2021

Dear poor players, I am very busy making something new and special for the company,
half done, REMEMBRANCE, a museum piece, the extraordinary power of ordinary household things to trigger or open the treasury of memory not just for the characters in a play but for the audience.

10/10/2021

Initial description of new play in progress by James Keller

ALICE ROWE, a memory play
SETTING:

The space is not a room. It is the memory of a small house
In an urban back street within the tolling of a convent bell.
Stage center is a heavy old kitchen table, which was the center of life in the house. Conspicuous on the table is a wooden fruit bowl lined with china, it has tripod legs, one leg is missing. There was always fruit in the bowl but now there are various pieces of paper, which gradually are revealed to be letters, a telegram, finally a letter of recommendation. There is a screen above the table which projects cued images, mostly family photographs. A fur coat hangs in empty space until it is used. Also on the table re a pair of long black leather gloves and a stack of boxes full of shoes wrapped in tissue paper and a small heavy package that arrived in the mail. There is also a worn old sofa used as a bed. A second-hand upright piano slides in and out when called upon. Not a room in a modest house, rather a museum of memory and the things that were part of life in the house and will tell the story of its long-gone occupants.

TIME: Various years spanning the 20th century.

CHARACTERS:

TWO MALE NARRATORS, ONE OLDER, ONE YOUNGER.

TWO FEMALE NARRATORS, ONE OLDER, ONE MIDDLE YEARS..

These NARRATORS represent all the people who move in
and out of the narrative.

08/02/2021

Working hard at "composing" new play, ALICE ROWE. Something completely new for me: portraying a complete life of an "ordinary" woman through her household things.

06/16/2021

Preparing in my mind to relaunch Poor Players, new plays and a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, THE LANTERN BEARER.

12/25/2020

Am going into the new year with something completely new in mind as a play. It is called ALICE ROWE and the play will be almost over, before we know who Alice Rowe is. In fact she never appears on stage but is represented by key household items from her long life including a pair of long black gloves, a brass ashtray made out of a destroyer's guns, a full length fur coat. and several boxes of shoes that were never worn. Even the most "ordinary" lives are shrouded in mystery.

11/23/2020

Planning to do a dramatic reading with an actor and actress of my new narrative poem CIRCUMNAVIGATING CAPTAIN COOK when post-vaccinations happen.

07/19/2020

No performance time, but it should be noted that Shakespeare's theatre had plague interruptions, but he went on writing quietly at home in Stratford, poems and plays, so is the A.D. of Poor Players, including two new plays: EVE IN EVELYN, about elder abuse and WHO PLAYS THE QUEEN, a tragicomedy about gender bending in the Jacobean theatre.