Staged Reading: House on Fire

Four-flushers and thieves abound in Fishtown, PA on the edge of the Delaware River as Coleman returns home to his dutiful brother Dale and their baseball-obsessed Old Man. When they find that he’s been followed by a one-armed grifter and his ethereally-empathic sister, secrets emerge from Coleman’s other life which make it increasingly difficult to tell who is running toward or away from whom. A darkly-comic twist on the Prodigal Son story, House on Fire is a moving and funny parable of love, resentment, family, and redemption.

Lyle Kessler is a playwright, actor, and director in the Los Angeles and New York theatre where he moderated the playwright/directors unit of the Actors Studio West for eleven years and continues to moderate at the Actors Studio East. He is an actor/playwright member of the Labyrinth Theater Company and has served as Artistic Director of the Sundance Screenwriter’s Lab. He also participated in the Sundance Screenwriters Conference in Hungary, working with writers from all over Eastern Europe. Mr. Kessler was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation playwriting grant and won the New York State Council on the Arts playwriting award. He and his wife, actress Margaret Ladd, are founders of the Imagination Workshop which creates scenes and original plays with psychiatric patients, veterans and “at risk” students in the L.A. Public schools. His plays have been published by Random House, Grove Press and Samuel French.