Kyle T. Wilson

kyle@fellswoop.net

bio

Kyle T. Wilson is the author of several plays, including Customary Monsters, Smoke Gets In Your Ears, Toils And Snares, War And Jim, Country Girls, and The Day Clinton Fessed Up. While getting his MFA at Carnegie Mellon, Wilson taught playwriting to undergrads, and also taught as part of Pittsburgh Public Theater's summer program for teens. He is a two-time semi-finalist for the Chesterfield screenwriting fellowship, and he has studied with such dramatists as John O'Keefe and Edward Albee. Wilson writes Frank's Wild Lunch, a blog about his experiences as an L.A. performance junkie.

work

Plays [skip to Screenplays]

Customary Monsters
Full-length – 4w/4m

Arthur Munby and Frederick Furnivall, scholarly footnotes in the soot-covered stories of Victorian London, live lives fueled by progressive ideals and sexual compulsions. Customary Monsters is a history play about the limits of love, equality, and biography.

War and Jim
Full-length – 1w/2m

You are hereby invited to a gala opening of an exciting new art show. Your host for the evening will be New York's most underrated painter, Warfield Mitchell. He is joined by wife Catherine, herself a poet of equally undistinguished stature. Together the couple uses paintings, poetry, and performance to take you on a tour through the east coast art world of the 50s and 60s. Assisting them is a very special guest -- James Guest, to be specific -- a young gay writer who goes home with them one night to sleep off a hangover and stays for six years.

The Rendezvous
Full-length – 2m

Professor Paul Simonson, Pittsburgh's finest semi-notable author of memoir and personal history, always leaves the door of his suburban two-story Victorian open for his favorite occasional trick, Alex Schuyler. Alex, himself a budding novelist and a student in Paul's creative writing program, scares a bit easily, and after an unsuccessful attempt at a rainy Saturday afternoon roll in the hay, Paul attempts to persuade his young companion to take their relationship out of the bedroom. Making dinner plans has never been so hard.

Toils and Snares
Full-length – 2w/2m

Two sisters in the City of Angels face the tumult of bad relationships, missed call-backs, indie rock geeks, and Protestant priests. An L.A. fable of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll…and The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit.

"Smoke Gets in Your Ears"
One-act – 1w/1m

Shelly is an aging agoraphobic who is plagued with swimmer's ear and a spotty memory. Wayne is a young man who wants to take her to the movies. Will he ever get her out of the house? Will she find that shoebox full of Guatemalan photographs? Will she ever get that damn water out of her ear?

"Sleep of the Dead"
One-act – 2w

Somewhere in The Middle Of Nowhere, Arkansas, Gran is trapped in a well with her unconscious granddaughter, Betty…but that won't stop her from letting Betty know who's in charge.

The Day Clinton Fessed Up
Full-length – 2w/2m

On the day of Clinton's televised apology for improprieties with Monica Lewinsky, Elsie Kirkpatrick, President of the Clinton Birthplace Foundation, wages a war with a smart young southern studies scholar named Sarah over the future of our 42nd President's Arkansas childhood home. Caught in the crossfire is young CBF Vice President Wilbur, an underemployed liberal arts grad who carries a torch and a secret. Advised by the President himself, Elsie Kirkpatrick vows to keep her world-class collection of Clintonian memorabilia where it belongs, no matter who stands in her way.

Country Girls
Full-length – 2w/4m

While returning to her hometown of Weiner, Arkansas, for her Momma's funeral, failed phone sex operator Loralei Heynecker is confronted by her Momma's angry aerobics instructing ghost, her Daddy's new tranny girlfriend, and a kidnapping plot by her parole-breaking ex-boyfriend Cecil. Along the way she sets her sights on Cecil's cousin Percy, a hot young innocent with dreams of becoming a redneck Spike Lee. Country Girls is a southern farce with a dirty mouth and a big country heart.

"Crutches"
Ten-minute – 1w/1m

Andrew returns home for Christmas in search of a pair of homemade wooden crutches used by his crippled Aunt Sallie during her childhood, only to find that his sister, a troubled young woman named Susan, has developed a strange attachment to them.

"The Whores of West Hollywood"
One-act – 2m

A young playwright takes a meeting in a gay bar with a wanna-be filmmaker and encounters the ugly truth about his ambitions and anxieties.

"Leaving Little Rock"
One-act – 2w/3m

All Jordan wants to do is have a drink on a Friday night with his friends. His friends would rather get stoned or pool shark with hot methheads who're looking to party. It's a typical Friday night at Mid-Town Billiards…and Jordan has had one too many.

Screenplays [back to Plays]

War and Jim
A feature-length screenplay

An adaptation of Wilson's stageplay.

Billboards
A feature-length screenplay

Wade skips his own graduation in Hibley Springs, Arkansas, to go on a rampage of artful vandalism that has the whole town talking. His father thinks he's a mess, but pretty college sophomore Laney Gregory thinks he might just be the real thing.
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