Stephen Wylie

Welcome to Amsterdam, a dying mill town in upstate New York where a toxic plume flows under Main Street, the largest employer is the state prison, and inspiration comes from a self-help guru who's hijacked the local radio station. Even the zoo is worn out—its only animal is an old orangutan addicted to cigarettes.

Enter Tyke. He's quit his struggling rock band and come home to find a more settled life. He wants to reconnect with friends and family and especially forget Monica, the volatile and self-destructive singer he's been involved with for years. When Monica shows up on Tyke’s doorstep to rekindle their relationship, she vows to surrender her wild side. But it doesn't take long for old habits to resurface, leaving Tyke to choose between living in comfortable chaos with Monica, or staying in a town that’s as stuck as he is.

Finalist for the Stanley Drama Award, Animal Yell is a darkly comic exploration of post-industrial America and the things that trap us—both in and beyond our control.

(Full-length play in two acts, available for production)

Set in a deteriorating YMCA boarding house in 1970s urban Pittsburgh, Rude Times tells the story of an elderly widower known only as "the Old Man" who has retreated from the world. By day he has interactions with a cast of characters who try to reach him: his dutiful son Clarence, a well-meaning church volunteer named Mrs. Crystal, and twelve-year-old Cherry Hugg, a shoplifter with a hole in her heart. But at night he talks with Bert, the African American Vietnam veteran who eats lunch in the hall outside his room. As their conversations become increasingly intimate, Bert begins to confront the Old Man about why he keeps his door perpetually locked.

Premiered Off-Broadway at the American Place Theater and in Houston by the Chocolate Bayou Theater, Rude Times explores isolation, memory, and the invisible walls people build to protect themselves. It's an unflinching look at how people who need each other most sometimes can't cross the distance between them—even when they're separated by nothing more than a door.

(75 minute play in one act, available for production)

The Warrens are a military family who have moved and moved and moved again. As Mrs. Warren unpacks her newest house, she rhapsodizes about finally having her family together in their forever home. But hockey-obsessed son Lyle grouses about the lack of ice rinks in Tennessee, husband/father the Colonel goes away to build highway rest stops for the Army Corps of Engineers, and sister Maddy brings home her revolutionary Black all-star athlete boyfriend Wade. When Lyle goes AWOL during the family Thanksgiving dinner, he joins a group of wanderers hitchhiking cross-country and leaves the rest of his family to disintegrate.

Winner of the Norman Lear Comedy Award and produced by the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, Skaters is a family comedy/drama about disconnection and the American tendency toward perpetual motion over rootedness. It asks: In a mobile society where people can go anywhere and be anything, have we lost the ability to stay still and truly see each other?

(Full-length play in two acts, available for production)

Richard, a dying ex-punk painter living in Binghamton, confronts Trill, his childhood friend, about a portrait he painted of her 30 years ago which has been at the center of their falling-out. He intended it as "a warning" against their romantic involvement; she saw it as objectification and betrayal. When Fee—the new downstairs neighbor who uncannily resembles the painting—enters, she reads it as survival and strength. Almost Vacant is an elegant chamber play about how art distorts reality, how we project our own meanings onto images, and how letting go is the only redemption available.

(One-act play, available for production)

At an "Intelligent Families Intensive", single New Yorkers sick of dating and desperate to start a family use AI matchmaking to find a radically different kind of relationship: no romance, just co-parenting. The AI algorithm promises optimal matches based on values, goals, and biomarkers. But by the end of the first episode the pairings are delightfully complicated: a former priest with a transitioning hockey player, a high-powered divorce lawyer with a gay Brazilian jiu-jitsu instructor, a former actress with an awkward annuity salesman.

As these mismatched strangers navigate the messy reality of building families without falling in love, UNNATURAL FAMILY asks: What if we approached parenthood the way our ancestors did—as a practical partnership rather than a romantic fantasy? And what happens when love shows up anyway?

A comedy-drama about everything that's natural and unnatural about families.

(Hour-long episodic series. Pilot complete. Co-created with Abby Ellin.)

American soldier William Bradshaw returns to bombed-out Berlin in 1945 and reconnects with his former landlady. As they reminisce about life before the war, they inevitably remember Arthur Norris—the enigmatic con man, Communist agitator, and masochist who drew everyone into his orbit as the city collapsed into fascism.

In 1932, young William arrives in Berlin as a naïve writer searching for material. When he meets Norris on a train, he thinks he's found the perfect subject for a story. But as William becomes enmeshed in Norris's world—Red Front rallies, sexual blackmail schemes, sadomasochistic parties, and espionage plots—he must choose between remaining a detached observer or becoming complicit in the tragedy unfolding around him.

Adapted from Christopher Isherwood's first Berlin novel with a framing device that adds the emotional weight Isherwood felt was missing from his original, THE LAST OF MR. NORRIS explores complicity, survival, and the seductive danger of watching the world burn while pretending you're just taking notes.

(Five-episode limited series. Pilot complete.)

Produced by Shoestring Radio Theatre and aired on their network of public and satellite stations, Zoom is a radio play told entirely through recordings made on a digital voice recorder—a Father's Day gift to 80-year-old WWII veteran Wendell from his son Lloyd. What begins as an attempt to preserve family history becomes an intimate portrait of memory, aging, and mortality.

Through 24 recordings spanning a year, we hear Wendell's fragmented war stories, childhood memories of his eccentric Uncle Newt, and mundane daily reminders, while his adult children Lloyd and Emily navigate their obligations to their increasingly forgetful father. The recordings capture stolen moments, family arguments, a girlfriend's song practice, and Wendell's growing confusion as his health declines. The device meant to preserve the past instead documents its disappearance.

(Hour-long radio play, available for production)

On the day after Thanksgiving, in an upper-middle-class American home, KID announces their decision to deliberately get arrested at a protest against government-run torture training facilities. MOM and DAD, both progressive liberals who marched in their own youth, are torn between supporting their child's ideals and fearing for their safety. Through scenes that jump back and forth in time—triggered by the words "After" and "Before"—the play reveals both the lead-up to this life-changing decision and its immediate aftermath, exploring the gulf between agreeing with a cause and being willing to sacrifice everything for it.

Presented by the Abingdon Theatre in NYC as part of their [BLANK] v. [BLANK] festival, After/Before asks whether comfortably supporting causes from a safe distance is adequate to confront systemic evil. What do families lose when one member chooses moral consistency over personal safety?

(Ten minute play, available for production)

Tennessee Williams is holed up in a Charleston hotel having fled his volatile relationship with Pancho Rodriguez. He's supposed to be finalizing the script for A Streetcar Named Desire, but instead he distracts himself with a new play about a Sailor and Heavenly Blaze. While Williams reads the new work aloud, Pancho's voice interrupts from off-stage, accusing Williams of perverting reality for artistic exploitation. When agent Audrey Wood arrives to remind Williams of his professional obligations, the nested stories collapse into each other and Pancho's desperate love curdles into threat. A campy examination about the artist's predatory relationship to life.

(Ten minute play, available for production)