Award-winning novelist and playwright Chris Orcutt has released The Ronald And Other Plays, a collection that includes several one-act plays formerly performed at theater companies in Maine and New York, as well as a brand newpolitical satire, The Ronald.
In The Ronald, “fabulously Caucasian” billionaire The Ronald decides to run for President of the Incorporated States of Freedomland. Aiding him in his quest are his sexy genius daughter, his accountant, his idiot sons, a TV entertainment reporter, a pizza delivery boy, and the Cork Brothers — a pair of 1,000-year-old vampires.
In the book’s preface, Orcutt describes how, a week after the 2016 Presidential Election, “I awoke with a vision of how Donald Trump had won the Presidency,” he says. “His strategy, his tactics, how he persuaded the electorate, how he gamed the media — it had all come to me in a dream. It was a miraculous moment of Gestalt.” He wrote the title play, The Ronald, in two weeks: “I’ve never had a long work simply given to me the way The Ronald was. I didn’t write it so much as it wrote itself through me; I sensed this story floating in the collective unconscious, and it chose me to draw it out of the ether and bring it to fruition.”
It’s very important to Orcutt that the message of The Ronald reach all Americans: “I’m giving royalty-free performance rights of all of the plays in this collectionto amateur theater companies — high schools, colleges and community theater groups,” he says. “I’m hoping to make these plays — especially the political satire The Ronald — available to as wide an audience as possible.”
Now that Donald Trump has been in office for a few months, Orcutt says he feels both vindicated and saddened that several of the predictions he made about Trump’s presidency are now proving true. For example, President Trump recently proposed a major tax break for corporations and the wealthiest Americans; in Orcutt’s play, the title character presents his tax policy: “We shouldn’t be paying a damn thing. We’re the wealthy. We’re the winners. We’re what make this country fantastic. The great unwashed should be kissing our feet that we choose to live here and grace this country with our presence.”
The Ronald And Other Plays includes five other comedic one-acts — all of which are available to amateur theater companies with royalty-free performance rights: The Clean-Shaven Secretary with the Pistol; Dark and Stormy Night; Front Page Above the Fold; Microbrew; and Kansas City This is Former Air Force One. Kansas City dramatizes the events of August 9, 1974 — the day President Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency.
Chris Orcutt is a professional writer based in Millbrook, NY. He has worked as an adjunct professor of writing and literature, a speechwriter and a journalist.
Orcutt’s critically acclaimed, bestselling mystery series features Manhattan PI Dakota Stevens and his beautiful chess grandmaster associate Svetlana Krüsh. Orcutt’s short story collection, The Man, The Myth, The Legend, was awarded by IndieReader as “One of the Best Books of 2013.” His modern pastoral novel, One Hundred Miles from Manhattan, was awarded by IndieReader as a “Best Book of 2014,” and in its review of the novel Kirkus Reviews favorably compared Orcutt to Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Cheever.
For more information about Chris Orcutt, please visit www.orcutt.net
The Ronald And Other Plays, and Orcutt’s other novels and short stories, are available in print at CreateSpace.com and Amazon.com, and in ebook form on Amazon.
EBOOK REVIEW COPIES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST
Media Contact
Company Name: Have Pen Will Travel
Contact Person: Chris Orcutt
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Phone: 845-705-6389
Address:PO Box 613
City: Millbrook
State: New York 12545
Country: United States
Website: www.orcutt.net
