SANGUINE
by George Pate
Living in the Appalachian foothills in Northeast Georgia, Abetta Asbury has an unusual gift: the ability to enter the minds of others and remove their pain and suffering through a psychic process her family calls bleeding. After her sister-in-law, Bella, convinces her to ignore a generations-old warning about bleeding family members, Abetta begins to bleed her shut-in brother, Harlan, with disastrous results. Harlan’s greatly improved mood coincides with a series of mysterious murders. And as Harlan seems to get better, Ethan, Abetta’s patient and crush, begins to slide further and further into mental decline. As Abetta tries to strike an impossible balance, she begins to learn about the unpredictable consequences of trying to mold the world into a happier place.
- Cast Size: 2M 2W
- Running Time: 90+ minutes
- Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
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About the Playwright
George Pate is a playwright, actor, standup comedian, director, and teacher who currently serves as Associate Professor in Drama and Theater at the University of South Carolina at Beaufort. His plays have been produced and read in New York, NY, New Orleans, LA, Abingdon, VA, Columbia, SC, Greenville, SC, Charleston, SC, and Athens, GA. He won the 2008 Tennessee Williams National One-Act Playwriting contest for his play Indifferent Blue. His play Sanguine was developed by Barter Theater over two years as part of their Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights. He was also a regional finalist for Comedy Central’s Open Mic Fight. He is also a scholar, having recently published Enter the Undead Author with the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and he has published articles in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Theatre Symposium, and Theatre Journal. He is, as the last sentence demonstrates, an advocate of the Oxford comma. He lives in Bluffton, SC with his beautiful and patient wife and two sons.
Review Sanguine.