Leadville, CO-1882. Silver Baron Horace Tabor shells out an outrageous sum of money to convince Oscar Wilde to interrupt his lecture tour of America's Wild West and direct a production of Romeo and Juliet with his lover, Elizabeth McCourt, playing Juliet. Tabor's intent is to pressure Augusta, his wife of more than two decades, to grant him a divorce so he can marry the younger and much more alluring "Baby Doe." Wilde agrees, but he must find his players from Leadville's undistinguished population of miners, hookers, barkeeps and gunslingers and at the same time maintain his artistic integrity, not an easy task in a riotous boom town. Wilde discovers that in matters of literature and the heart, the settlers of the Wild West are no less enamored of or any less knowledgeable of Shakespeare than his devotees in London and elsewhere.
About the Author: David W. Christner was born in Sweetwater, TN and raised in rural Oklahoma. He attended high school in Mountain View, a small farming community situated between the Washita River and the Wichita Mountains in the southwestern part of the state. As a Commissioned Officer in the U.S. Navy, Christner served three years at sea fighting the Vietnam War and two years ashore in Norfolk, VA. After completing his graduate education at OU, Christner settled in southern Rhode Island and for twenty years worked as a technical writer, editor and multimedia training developer for a variety of defense contractors and hi-tech multinational corporations during the day and wrote plays and novels at night. His stage plays The Wall, Bui-Doi: The Dust of Life, The Walk, Red Hot Mamas, The Babe, The Bard and the Baron, The Bitch of Baily's Beach, Ezra and Evil, What About Mimi?, and This Blood's For You have been finalists or winners in national/international playwriting competitions. Speculations on the cosmos, sex, war, religion, injustice, environmental exploitation, aging, women's issues, the homeless, the colonial slave trade and capital punishment have formed the thematic content of the plays and novels he has written so far. His plays have been produced in the U.S. Australia, Japan, Belgium, India and Canada. "Red Hot Mamas" was recently translated into Russian and Italian for pending productions in Tula, Russia and Rovereto, Italy. Christner is theater critic for the Newport Mercury in Newport, RI. The Babe, the Bard and the Baron is a former winner of Playwrights' Circle International Play-writing Festival.