Stage Plays
Star Bright
Star Bright accepted for publication by JAC Publishing and Promotions, publisher for Super Cooper and Philosophical Differences
Stay tuned for availability: http://www.jacneed.com/
PDF of a to-the-letter recreation of the interview I did with Christina Collins from CNC's Harvard Post: Post Interview, 08/02/07
Star Bright
Free Public Reading w/ a terrific cast at Harvard, MA Public Library Nov. 3 & 4, 7 p.m. was a great success!
Into a hospital set straight out of a Magritte painting – with stars shining above a hospital waiting room and birthing room – Jamie, a B-movie actress and her microbiologist husband Elliot enter, anxious for their individual reasons about meeting Holly, the birth mother of the baby they hope to adopt. Their story unfolds in parallel to that of Dehlia, another pregnant woman, one whose medical condition places her baby at risk. Then there are those with ulterior motives: a seeming cafeteria worker who hangs around the waiting room, the wholly unreliable man in Dehlia’s life who shows up late as always, a young man popping up at the end of the first act claiming to be the birth father of Holly’s baby, and a mysterious little girl who is waiting, waiting – for something. A comedy with serious underpinnings about the families Fate seems to create.
PDF of a to-the-letter recreation of the interview I did with Ellie Vinacco from CNC's Harvard Post the following week: Post Interview, 11/17/06
Audio Excerpts from Star Bright (MP3 format)
| An On-Purpose (Janet Dauray, Barbara Schapiro, Bob Eiland) | PlayMP3 Play Wav |
| Fusion (Olivia Enriquez, Bob Eiland) | coming soon! |
| When Baby's Ready (Viv Tyndall, Janet Dauray, Barbara Schapiro) | PlayMP3 Play Wav |
| Extremophiles (Viv Tyndall, Bob Eiland) | PlayMP3 Play Wav |
| Autumn Rainbow (Janet Dauray) | PlayMP3 Play Wav |
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Super Cooper
Now Available From JAC Publishing and Promotions!
He put the lump in schlump. That’s Cal Cooper, small town man-boy always at the ready behind the counter of his dad’s butcher shop, a place where most folks aren’t what they seem. Lately Coop’s been getting the weirdest cravings: for toothpaste, cigarette butts, even ammonia! Not to mention for Lana, his fiancée. It all seems to correspond with the recent shortage of the peculiar green serum his adoptive parents have been giving him since he was a baby. And with the entrée onto the scene of the very British, sexy but not very kosher Lois Lanagan. Soon Coop, much to his wonderment and consternation, finds he is able to do things he could never do before. Like sense what people are thinking, hypnotize virtually anyone at will, perform inhuman feats of strength…. Cal’s best friend Lexie loves watching him tear phone books in half. If only Cal could fly! Oh well. So what has he become? Not a bird. Not a plane. It’s Super Cooper. A warm comedy about families and social consciousness. For the hero inside of us all.
Audio Excerpts from Super Cooper (MP3 format)
| Birthday Surprise (Viv Tyndall, Bob Eiland, Barbara Schapiro, Janet Dauray) | Play MP3 Play Wav |
| Flying? (Viv Tyndall, Bob Eiland) | Play MP3 Play Wav |
| Spit (Bob Eiland, Barbara Schapiro) | Play MP3 Play Wav |
| Outtake | Play MP3 Play Wav |
Subscribe to NEED (New England Entertainment Digest)
http://www.jacneed.com/subscribe_Eiland.html
Philosophical Differences
Available from JAC Publishing and Promotions!
Winner of Honorable Mention in Writers Digest Script Competition
1 of 3 plays selected for Stageloft’s New Plays Festival
It may be a long off-season for poet Sam Klein. He just can’t seem to hit Fate’s change-ups, and now he’s whiffed in the game of marriage -- again. Third divorce. The good news? At a chance meeting in a shrink’s office, a psychic senses that Sam and the lovely young woman in the next seat have loved and lost each other countless times over myriad lifetimes. Jackie’s her name. Sure enough some months later, Sam and Jackie meet again -- for the first time they think. Soon he’s in love anew. And we know love is grand! But -- wouldn’t you know it -- she’s involved with someone. Teri’s her name. Figures. But down is not out. Sam and Jackie become fast friends, and discover they both have desperately wanted to parent a child. “Tick tick tick,” says the biological clock. What follows are angst, laughs, poetry and complications.
http://www.jacneed.com/JAC/Full-Length/Eiland_Philosophical.htm
Audio Excerpts from Philosophical Differences (MP3 format)
| Allergic to Cats (Barbara Schapiro, Bob Eiland, Janet Dauray) | Play MP3 Play Wav |
| Dinner (Bob Eiland, Viv Tyndall, Barbara Schapiro*, Janet Dauray) * dog barks: Barbara Schapiro |
Play MP3 Play Wav |
| I Saw You Last Night (Bob Eiland) | Play MP3 Play Wav |
Subscribe to NEED (New England Entertainment Digest)
http://www.jacneed.com/subscribe_Eiland.html
All For One
We could call it a love “triangle” murder, except one of the lovers is more than one person (as in multiple personality disorder). Then again, can we call it a “love” triangle murder if two of the lovers have no idea a third is in love? And just to complicate matters, all three narrate the action and have differing stories. Regardless, when a mother with a mysterious past and a prodigal daughter are in it together with a strange man who writes commercial jingles for a living, you’ve got trouble -- not to mention a big twist at the end. An adult drama that takes a head-on look at a traumatized family grasping for life preservers in stormy waters.
Audio Excerpts from All For One (MP3 format)
| Subtext (Bob Eiland, Barbara Schapiro) | Play MP3 Play Wav |
| Stud (Bob Eiland, Janet Dauray, Barbara Schapiro) | Play MP3 Play Wav |
| Airy (Barbara Schapiro, Bob Eiland) | PlayMP3 Play Wav |
Empty Sky
In Development
Bursts of automatic weapons and panicked screams shatter the silent darkness. Lights come up on a tense hostage situation in a Florida high school’s administration office. As Seraph, the leader of the gang and once-aspiring astronaut toys with his hostages, news spreads of a disaster in the making with Space Shuttle McAuliffe. Disasters converge in the most unexpected way in this study of a young person’s sense of emptiness and rage.
Advice and Consent
An excerpt from a comi-tragic monologue about sex ed and a high school girlfriend
My junior high school, with its keen insight into the sorts of angst that plague kids in those hormonal years, devised a truly sensitive, and remarkably discreet program to respond to our lust for knowledge: a school-wide assembly. All the girls and their moms one evening, all the boys and their dads the next. And my dad was not about to shirk his fatherly responsibility. Especially in a public forum. Unfortunately. See, he ran the TV station there, gave editorials every night; everybody knew who he was.
No place to hide.
So they herded us into the school auditorium, all of us seeker-sons skulking in the shadows of our all-knowing fathers who, we knew, were bent on exposing us as the sexual greenhorns we'd never owned up to being....
Suddenly...the house lights streamed on, the headmaster, Mr. Bates - I kid you not - grabbed the microphone and bellowed, "Questions?"
And wouldn't you know it, my dad, bless his heart, launched a hand straight towards the ceiling. Whereupon I slumped into my seat, wishing I could just, you know, merge with the cushion fibers, beseeching the Lord: "God, please don't let him call on my dad!..."
But I suppose I wouldn't have a story here if Mister Bates hadn't; so you know he did. "A question from Mr. [reverb] Eiland...Eiland...Eiland?"
So here it was to be, from my dad the community role model, with [chant] the whole world watching, the whole world watching!
We're talking about the pinnacle of prepubescent revelation, my personal heritage of the manly arts passed down as a shining torch from my father and his father before him and on through the vast sea of generations, the defining moment of my evolution from the libidinal sandbox to PG adulthood.
"Mr. Bates," my dad said in a voice of golden command, "would you please explain the importance to these young men of wearing athletic supporters when they play sports?"
Screenplays
Enemy Within
Winner of Honorable Mention in Writers Digest Screenplay Competition
On a rainy summer night, a meteorite crashes, hissing and smoking, onto the White House lawn, and becomes perched like some burnt balled up dragon in its crater bed. In the crater, something emits a small dim light, then fizzles out, heating speculation that a hostile intelligence triggered the incident. Soon after, a previously invisible spacecraft is discovered hovering over a mountain pond. A young black man from South Chicago, Louis Grand, is presumed hostage inside. Hurled terrified and confused into this crisis are a scientist and her husband, a general, the foundation of whose marriage is just starting to fracture. In the wake of some ambiguous behavior from the aliens, with the greatest single scientific advance in the history of the world - and the world’s survival - at stake, Dr. Sara Carpenter-Thomas must make the hardest choice of her life. A choice with consequences the likes of which no one has ever before had to consider.
Children's Stories
And Thea Makes a Family
Children's Book About Thea Now Available for Review & Purchase 5/26/08
The children's book I wrote for Thea about her birth and adoption, and which I had illustrated by the gifted Samantha Busfield, is now available from Blurb.com: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/250750/. If you have a young adopted child, or know someone who does, it was designed to provide a means of helping adopted kids understand and feel proud about their being adopted. When you get to the page for the book, you can click on "Review" to see the first 15 pages in low-resolution PDF.
Essays and Articles
One Father's Journey
©Robert A. Eiland, 2002
In its entirety, as published in Branches, a publication of Act of Love adoption agency
A little silver phone in your pocket quivers and rings, you answer it, your life changes. How did such a little thing amass so much power?
Seven years ago, during the first year of my wife Sharlotte's and my relationship, we pointedly decided to dispense with birth control. Ten weeks ago, we met our daughter's charming, and very pregnant, birth mother. We drove away after a three-hour visit trying to hold steady amidst a dauntingly complicated sea of emotions.
Seventeen years ago, I chose to end a marriage primarily because my first wife grew to realize the course of life best suited to her needs and aspirations did not include parenting -- and I realized I wanted to become the person I'd become by being a dad. Then after eleven years of playing Survivor in the world of dating, I met and fell in love with Sharlotte, both as a life partner and a mother for our children. I just didn't imagine at the time that the journey to the "mother" part would be so fraught with setbacks.
And that the setbacks could eventually lead to such joy: our Thea Deanna.
The physical road to that joy started with our driving down Interstate 81 at night on the 4th of July, heading south for Thea, our baby girl soon to be born, as the multicolored fireworks burst over the tree line on the east and the west, reflecting both our exhilaration and our sense of the surreal.
Although Thea's birth mother had asked us by phone to come down as soon as possible, it turned out Thea was two weeks late - and induced at that! So Sharlotte and I had two weeks of having to bide our time - cell phone constantly at our fingertips - and handle the nervousness about whether the adoption would work out. That I was nervous seemed to fly in the face of all indicators, overt and otherwise. We were so very moved when Thea's birth mother said to us something like:
"I have prayed and thought long and hard about this. I wish you all could have a child in this way, and I'm sorry you can't. But it's nurture over nature every time. I feel like I'm the vessel to bring this little girl into the world for you to parent."
Sharlotte and I arrived at the birthing room at about 7:30 the morning of the inducement, our Thea's birth day. In that one breathtaking instant, we had walked through a kind of magical doorway, into a palpable energy, audible but not visible. Thea's life force. It was her heartbeat amplified by the fetal monitor. It thumped steadily between 150 and 200 times a minute. We sat vigil with her birth mother, waiting, chatting, operating as though we moved only within an ordinary plane; while Thea's heartbeat drummed out the extraordinary message of a world, a life soon to be revealed; and an adventure soon to reach its next episode.
As Sharlotte and I were returning from our lunch break, a nurse came out and informed us the birth mother had decided not to have us in the room during delivery. For an abundance of possible reasons, her change of heart was understandable. And a little nervous-making.
We had to wait twenty minutes after hearing Thea's first cry in the world before we were invited in. During that wait, after all this time waiting, worrying, grieving, planning, we acknowledged to each other that it was possible Thea's birth mother was changing her mind. Though she had stated outright that she understood she would continue to go through a whole range of emotions and reactions during delivery and post-partum, could anyone really predict with absolute certainty the conviction of the heart in the ruthlessly real face of this little baby girl? We reaffirmed that if this were to be the case, then we would have to hold to our faith that it would ultimately be the best thing for this baby, regardless of how devastating to us.
As I waited, I think I was simply overwhelmed, unable to process, and moving in and out of psychic numbing. This was true even as I stood in the birthing room and witnessed Thea's being handed to Sharlotte. When it was my turn to hold her, I whispered, "Welcome Thea Deanna. Daddy and Mommy are here."
About two hours after Thea was born, just after we'd taken her to the nursery and placed her under the warming lamp, she clasped my thumb with her impossibly delicate, baby-long fingers and fell asleep. The numbing chaos and exhaustion in my head metamorphosed into something clear, pure and akin to bliss, only more peaceful. And full of rightness.
All the pain, the anxiety, the turmoil and disappointment we went through are floating in some alternate dimension of our consciousness, at least for now. Because everything we went through led to this baby girl, our Thea, no other.
Bob Eiland's Bio
In addition to the plays Philosophical Differences, for which he won Honorable Mention in the Writers Digest script competition, and Super Cooper, and the article in Branches, Bob has published numerous feature articles and film reviews, including in the Harvard Post/Bolton Common. He has written three screenplays, one of which, Enemy Within, also received a Writers Digest Honorable Mention, a dozen one-act comedies and a great many poems and essays.
He graduated cum laude as an English major and Drama minor from Tufts University, during which time he wrote for the Tufts Observer and the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio as an intern. After graduation, he worked as an editor for Xerox/Ginn before spending five years as a social worker and director of a children's outreach program outside of Boston. For over twenty years, he has run EGS Elite, a successful retainer-based search company for high tech executives and top 10% software engineers/architects.
Bob was Co-Founder/President of a community theater group, the Gazebo Players, and has been active as a director, producer and actor for many years. He has directed The Miracle Worker twice to critical acclaim, as well as The Night of the Iguana, Androcles and the Lion, Murder Has Been Arranged and The Most Dangerous Woman, a one-person play about Mother Jones written by his father, Ted Eiland. A few of Bob's favorite roles as a stage actor have been Charly in Flowers for Algernon, John Proctor in The Crucible, Ford in Merry Wives of Windsor, Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, Biff in Death of a Salesman, and Mortimer in Arsenic and Old Lace. In film, Bob has played principal roles in Michael Legge's Braindrainer, Night Basement and Alien Agenda: Under the Skin; and in Teja Arboleda's Got Race!. Bob and his wife Sharlotte are proud parents of Thea and Charlie.
PDF of Bob's theater resume. BEDir:PlawrtResume