For this Throwback Thursday, I am going to highlight my psychological drama “Harriman-Baines,” which is actually one of my favorite works, despite the fact that I haven’t been able to get much traction with it – likely not helped by its darker nature.

In point of order, “Harriman-Baines” ended up being the second “real” straight play I wrote (meaning a play that was sufficiently acceptable to be seen by human eyes) after “Fifteen Men in a Smoke-Filled Room”, authored after I went through an extended phase writing musicals and completed somewhere in mid-2011.

A little over a year later, “Harriman-Baines” won a contest sponsored by On The Brink Productions – some theater enthusiasts and recent graduates from Middlebury College in Vermont – and in conjunction with my own theatrical nonprofit (Speerhead Theatricals), “Harriman-Baines” was accepted into the 2013 Dream Up Festival (hosted by Theater for the New City) and produced in August 2013 during their festival week.

At the time, this was the first time I had the chance to see a play of mine performed, rather than read, and the process was fun from start to finish – as well as challenging – because, due to contest rules, I had to take a 120-minute play and reduce it to less than 80 minutes – which I did and which actually worked rather well – and as for the director (Charles Giardina) and the actors and actresses, I cannot say enough good things about how they handled a rather difficult play.

Now, I say “difficult” because “Harriman-Baines” is my darkest play by far – in full Tennessee WIlliams mode – dealing with a hermetic composer, Carter Harriman, who composes music to the poems of a recently deceased poet, Melody Baines, whose poems are brought to him by Melody’s sister, a bit of a nonentity, named Minnie – and how, over the course of an evening, the lies and abstractions surrounding the identity of Melody Baines are revealed to cutting effect, with an appropriate, surprise denouement.

One of the nice things about having a play about a composer (a modern classical composer, to be precise) involves the use of music – and in the promotional video below, you’ll hear some of the fine music composed by Denise Hoffman for the show.