Plays and Novels

Novels by DC Fidler

Wood Whisperers

Before Homo sapiens invented speech, there were humans who remained connected to animals in ways that modern humans cannot comprehend. For tens of thousands of years, those abilities have been passed from generation to generation. People with “the gift” live among the rest of us, keeping to themselves. The day has arrived. They are stepping out from the shadows. (Second Edition)

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Boogieban

Boogieban is the story of Lawrence Caplan, a Vietnam War veteran working as a military psychiatrist. Before retiring to sip wine with his wife on their sailboat, Peacemaker, Caplan must assess one last soldier. This young specialist stubbornly insists that he is “good to go” back to his unit in Afghanistan. Caplan soon discovers, however, the soldier is tortured by nightmares and flashbacks. The young soldier’s stories have an unexpected effect, lifting Caplan’s amnesia for events in Vietnam. Together, the two men launch on parallel journeys of the heart that will change them forever.

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Recipient (Short Story)

Inside my head is ugly. Unrelenting wars between dreams, imagination, memories and invading demons. Explained by a navy doctor. “Seaman? You have multiple devils dancing in your head.”
I hear chants. Began when I was five.
I won’t tell you what my head sailors chant. You would fear me. If I authored those chants, I would fear me.
But I’m not author.            I’m recipient.

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Plays by DC Fidler

Ahulaqs

In 1988, an Arizona judge orders a kid from a Crips Gang to be flown to an Alutiiq village on Kodiak Island for rehabilitation. Not only is the remote area at the end of the world, there are rumors that giant, hairy, Ahulaq creatures wander the mountain snows, snatching young women who wander from the village.

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Anniversary of Miss Nanette Pringle

In 1934, ninth-grade teacher Miss Pringle died. Her students pledged to gather every five years to celebrate the ways Miss Pringle touched their lives. In 1959, eight of the forty-year-old, former students gather in Rob’s Diner in Lubbock, Texas. They are a diverse group. An Italian porn star, a Chicago nun, a homeless physicist living beneath a Baltimore bridge, a Manhattan house husband, a California surfer dude, a woman Air Force pilot, a man owning a Nashville championship wrestling and country-music corporation, and the Lubbock diner owner. The former pupils share memories about the discreet life of Miss Pringle, never grasping the big picture. The audience, however, with an omniscient, voyeuristic view, can unravel stunning mysteries of Miss Nanette Pringle.

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Begat

Loralee Phillips is a middle-aged televangelist. She enjoys money, power, and glory as she rules over her Raven, North Carolina mega-church. Her home life is a series of challenges as she struggles living with her liberal co-minister husband and rebellious son. Both family members frequently tease and torment her. Loralee’s dreams of religious order shatter when her high-school son becomes interested in a young college woman of a different race, a young woman who seems to have mysterious ties to Loralee’s husband. Loralee becomes desperate for a solution and ponders seeking advice from a member of her congregation, a man with alleged ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

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Boogieban (Script)

This script of Boogieban is a two-actor version of the larger cast play for use in rehearsals and performances. This version premiered at None Too Fragile Theatre in Akron, Ohio in 2018.

The play is about Lawrence Caplan, a Vietnam War veteran who became a military psychiatrist. Caplan is retiring after losing his own son in Afghanistan. Before leaving, he is ordered to assess one last soldier, a young specialist, who stubbornly insists that he is “good to go” back to his unit in Afghanistan. Caplan soon discovers, however, the soldier is tortured by nightmares and flashbacks. Unexpectedly, the soldier’s story begins to lift Caplan’s amnesia for his own horrors in Vietnam. The two men launch on parallel journeys of the heart that change them forever.

Winner of the Cleveland Critics Circle 2018 Theatre Awards
* Best World Premier in the Cleveland Area
* Best Actor (Travis Teffner and David Peacock)
* Also nominated for best director and best sound

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Boogieban: The Play (Extended Version)

Boogieban: The Play is the expanded seven-actor version script for the stage play with addition of five additional roles of Lawrence Caplan’s wife,  his daughter, his boss, his boss’s wife, and Jason Wynksy’s best friend.

Lawrence Caplan is a Vietnam War veteran who became a military psychiatrist. Before retiring to sip wine with his wife upon their sailboat, Peacemaker, Caplan is asked to assess one last soldier. His patient is a young specialist, Jason Wynsky, who stubbornly insists that he is “good to go” back to his unit in Afghanistan. Caplan soon discovers, however, the soldier is tortured by nightmares and flashbacks. Unexpectedly, the soldier’s story unveils Lieutenant Colonel Caplan’s amnesia for Vietnam. Together, the two men launch on parallel journeys of the heart that will change them forever.

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Camp Unit

A young American college couple hike and camp in New Zealand’s rugged mountains. Although trying to retain privacy, they are first intruded upon by a strange couple, followed by two men who seem from out of this world. “Heaps” of confusion.

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Celtic Crossing

It is the 1880s in an Irish neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Harold Cullen arranges for his two handsome Irish sons to meet two lovely Irish sisters. The two sisters are daughters of Harold’s boyhood friend from his days of growing up in Dublin. The play opens with a dramatic event in 1886. Scene by scene we work our way back three years to 1883. We learn that however important destiny may appear, the journey of getting there is more magnetic. Nothing we say or do in life is small or tossed away. In fact, everything we say or do is gargantuan. But who of us grasps this fact of life as we laboriously move forward in time?

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Daugherty Park Merry-Go-Round

Twenty-year-old Angus endures Daugherty, North Carolina, a small town dominated by two businesses: pickles and roses. Outsiders are unwelcome. Even crows are chased away with small fertilizer bombs. A railroad track running along main street, divides people enswathed in peculiarities, buried secrets, gossip, racism, conspiracies, unrequited love, and a plethora of horrific wrongs. Angus attempts to balance madness by spinning on the playground merry-go-round. One summer day, a brother-sister duo appears and sets up a taco stand beside the courthouse. “Do you prefer spicy or not spicy?”

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La Dynastie

A trillionaire family with old money, prides itself in awarding grants to people out to improve the world. But the awardee’s rivals seem to be dropping dead.

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Five X

An American psychiatry professor and his eighteen-year-old nephew head to the outback of Australia. An afternoon in a local pub invites a collection of patrons reminiscent of the American West at it’s best.
Or worst?
Or insanest?
Time for a Five X beer.

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Grams

A comedy about rural America—or “a foreign country” as a young person zigzagging across America describes it. A West Virginia, down-to-earth, rural grandmother is raising three adult grandchildren who are struggling to master modern-day issues of poverty, drugs, sexual orientation, gender identity, pregnancy, and threats to lose their home. Grandma is trying to move forward with her own life. Time to bake a chocolate-marshmallow pie.

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Gyges

A fifteen-year-old boy with loss of movement and sensation in his right side, is adopted from a Catholic orphanage by an elderly woman. The woman lived a reclusive life as a physician and brilliant medical researcher. During seven years of living together, they discovered one another to have spectacular research talents and set out to discover if they could invade animal and human minds to learn what it is like to know others from within. Will they use such research for altruistic or selfish explorations?

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Hijacked Lives

A street youth is afraid of everything, including yellow school buses. He has never been outside of Pittsburgh and is desperate to find his mother. With no real plan, he impulsively carjacks a depressed fracking CEO driving a Mercedes. He points his antique gun at the driver and tells him to drive to Chicago. Because that might be the city where his mother is. Or maybe not.

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The Last Farm

As a rural West Virginia farm family wakes to coffee, toast, bacon, and grits, TV news reports the obliterations of Tel Aviv by a nuclear blast. Before the family can comprehend what is happening, the farm’s power goes out. Family secrets emerge, revealing one son’s unusual and disturbing gifts. It’s a complicate time on the farm.

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Persons

A magistrate interviews a couple to assess if their case needs to go to trial or if their case can be arbitrated. When asked what the case is about, the woman reports that the man raped her. The man reports he did not. As the couple argues, various personalities pop out from the man. Soon various personalities pop out from the woman. What is a magistrate to do?

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School Children Hiding Under Desks

Gina McDaniel invites you to her dinner party on June 27, 1953 to celebrate her law school graduation. Eisenhower is the United States President. Korea is the battlefield. Joseph Stalin died earlier this month. Hank Williams died in January. Movie stars Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson are not gay. The Catholic Church censors all movies and television shows. Oveta Culp Hobby is the first woman Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Edward R. Murrow delivers the CBS evening news while smoking cigarettes. Senator Joseph McCarthy is pursuing the Communists and homosexuals who have infiltrated the U.S. Government. School children hide under desks to prepare for a Soviet nuclear attack. Enjoy the crab dip

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Shiraz

Lowell is a large-animal veterinarian living alone in a rural fishing village on Pamlico Sound, North Carolina. He has lived there for decades, hiding from memories of Santiago, Chile. Lowell will not speak Spanish. Lowell will not eat Spanish dishes. Lowell will, however, drink wine. One day, Justin, a young stranger from New York City, arrives for an unexpected visit. Justin’s goal is to drink with Lowell and talk about Chile. Lots about Chile. Can Lowell keep his mouth shut? Or will bottles of fine wine ease Lowell into revealing a dark past connecting him to his new visitor?

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Stone Touchin

Mama asks me why I touch all these here stones. “Howard Lee? You may be growin a man’s body, but yer brain is a four-year-old’s. Git outta that cemetery this minute. Ain’t respectful.” I shrugged cuz I ain’t wannin to tell mama nothin. When I stone touch I hear dead folk talkin like they is so much alive. You know why I think dead folk does that? Cuz they don’t know they’s dead. They’s still tryin to live out small moments. Small moments they’s stuck on.

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Sir William Bollinggreen and Company

Sir William Bollinggreen is driven to transport Mr. William Shakespeare’s finest works to the gun-shooting saloons of the grand old American West. He realizes adaptation is a necessity for plays to be digestible for cowpokes, gunslingers, and saloon women. For good measure, mix in a bit of Charles Dickens’ classics. Who in those savage lands would ever notice? After all, there is very little difference between Roman senators and Zuni warriors. Some older thespians in the weary acting troupe object, but the show must go on. As tempers flare, Mr. Shakespeare’s plots serve as templates for troupe members to love, hate, manipulate, envy, plot, and poison. “To be …. or to have been.” – Not much can rival Old West saloon show business.

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Three Diaries

Prominent Ashville citizen Franklin Kenny announced his bid for mayor. Unfortunately, several people wish him dead. If he dies, will it be by the hand of his alcohol-abusing, pill-popping wife; by his wife’s erotomanic, delusional, grocery-bag boy; by their multiple-personality grounds keeper; by the security agent assigned to their household; by Mr. Kenny’s powerful senator father-in-law; or by their commanding housekeeper? Maybe diary entries can reveal the truth. Diary entries, however, may confound reality, especially when people’s minds frequently black out or grossly distort reality.

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Voices in the Woods

In rural West Virginia’s mountains, Precious Grace Reamy does not have time to worry about her aged, bed-ridden mother, who has been lying in bed while she has been dying for thirty years. Precious Grace must cook and clean for her visiting CEO brother, movie-starlet sister, carpenter brother, skate-boarding nephew, demented uncle, and kleptomaniac aunt, who gather at the Brantley Run home place to say goodbye to the dying matriarch. The dying matriarch, by the way, is upstairs playing video games. Stelazine pills prevent Precious Grace from hearing voices, so she bakes Stelazine into her famous M&M cookies to help calm herself as well as calm visitors. There is nothing better than sitting on the porch beneath an orange August moon, spinning yarns, reliving childhood memories, and drinking milk and eating Precious’ cookies. Before the story is finished, visitors, as well as audience members and readers, will learn that Precious Grace’s pill-baked cookies are a necessity.

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Plays by DC Fidler and RJ Casey

Guilt by Association

A dual relationship exists in psychiatry when there are multiple roles between patient and psychiatrist. The patient may be a student, friend, family member, employee, or business associate of the psychiatrist.  Therapy becomes complicated. But what if the patient heads covert operations involving killing? What if neither the psychiatrist nor patient realize they are intimately linked together through one of the patient’s operatives? Treatment is not only complicated, it is lethal.

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Plays by DC Fidler and Travis Teffner

Elk and Wolf

Bailey is a young promising law student who developed his detailed life plan when he was fourteen years old. Four days ago, Bailey launched his plan by blowing up an Appalachian Mountain gas station. Trevor is a young FBI intern in the anti-terrorism division, who is assigned to interrogate Bailey. Trevor and Bailey will weather the journey of the US being brought to its knees. The two young men will also weather the dark journey of searching for a fourteen-year-old boy’s lost heart.

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Santee Delta

Lunsford Planck escaped the Santee Delta area of coastal South Carolina decades ago, determined to become an international photographer and purge past scars from his memory. For the past twenty years, Luns’ healing home base has been New York City, where he lived with his partner Jay. One week ago, Jay secretly visited the Santee Delta to paint a surprise masterpiece of Lun’s birthplace. While in the Delta, Jay was beaten and dragged behind a pickup truck and left for dead. Luns returned to the Delta to find Jay in a coma and dying. Luns now goes undercover to solve the attacks on the love of his life. He hires a local young ruffian, Colton Rivers, to help him “fix up” his deceased mother’s storm-ravaged coastal home. As Luns begins to hang out at the local bar and befriend young Colton, how far into its unforgiving swamp will the Santee Delta lure Luns?

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