The Mystery Plays

THE MYSTERY PLAYS is two interrelated one acts, loosely based on the tradition of the medieval mystery plays. In the first play, THE FILMMAKER'S MYSTERY, Joe Manning, a director of horror films, survives a terrible train wreck—only to be haunted by the ghost of Nathan West, one of the passengers who survive. As the police investigate Joe, investigates Nathan, desperate to understand why he survived and what Nathan’s specter could possible want. In the second play, GHOST CHILDREN, Joe’s attorney and friend, Abby Gilly, travels to a small town in rural Oregon to make peace with the man who brutally murdered her parents and younger sister sixteen years earlier. The man—the murderer—is her older brother. Like the original medieval mystery plays, THE MYSTERY PLAYS wrestles with the most profound of human ideas: the mysteries of death, the after-life, religion, faith, and forgiveness—in a uniquely American way.