For this Throwback Thursday, I will highlight my play “Shadows of Men” – one of those plays where I can’t help but wondering why it has never been produced, especially after seeing it read and seeing how much it resonated with audiences.

Among my repertoire of straight plays, “Shadows of Men” ranks “number three” – the third play I wrote, after “Fifteen Men in a Smoke-Filled Room” and “Harriman-Baines” – and one which I have always personally enjoyed, encompassing, as it does, the theme of the dignity of the human individual and how that dignity is often threatened by abstractions and ideology.

Way back in 2020 or so, I initially encountered the story of John Dos Passos in Civil War Spain in the book “Intellectuals” by the British historian Paul Johnson – where Joh Dos Passos, who came to Spain to participate in a propaganda film in favor of the leftist Spanish Republic, ended up becoming obsessed by the fact that his dear friend, José Robes, had gone missing – ultimately discovering that Robles was executed by Spanish Republican forces, who were heavily backed by Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party. (John Dos Passos ended up writing extensively about his experience, which turned him away from leftism, until he ended life as a traditional conservative.)

Over the years, I have had relatively little traction with “Shadows” – and indeed, the play has only been read twice… never actually produced… which I hope will soon change.

The first staged reading was part of the Baltimore Playwrights Festival in 2016, where the play was read at Fells Point Corner Theatre and directed by the great Barry Feinstein.

The second staged reading was by Arts Forth Worth in Texas, where the play was presented by the group Altered Shakespeare as part of Arts Forth Worth’s 2021 new play festival.

“Shadows” is one of those plays that I’m still striving to see produced, because I know that it works and that it carries an important (and eerily relevant) message for the modern ear.

You can catch the reading of the play at Arts Forth Worth below: