All Good Ending

Read the Play || Production History Below

“Just looking up, just looking at me, just watching the world be
what it is.”

Characters
ANNE Newton, 30s, a contemporary Pequot actor playing a Scottish settler from 1637.
RICHARD Newton, 30s, a contemporary Pequot actor playing an English settler from 1637, married to ANNE.

May 26, 1637.
Mystic, Connecticut. Not far from the ocean, on a hot night, in the NEWTON’s home.

Plot Synopsis

All Good Ending is based on the Mystic massacre, a real incident in 1637 that occurred during the Pequot wars. RICHARD Newton is part of a war party that attacks a Pequot fort and burns it to the ground. The settlers kill all of the Pequot – all but a single newborn child that RICHARD has brought back to his wife, ANNE. After RICHARD related the horrors of the night, they fight over the fate of the child. After ANNE makes a difficult decision, the action is revealed to be a play-within-a-play, and ANNE and RICHARD are two Pequot actors staging the short play as part of a Pequot theatre festival.

Production History

Produced by The Brick Theater in Brooklyn, NY. June 1-3, 2012
Director: Morgan Ann-Zipf
Anne: Jody Christopherson
Richard: Ryan Feyk

All Good Ending was written for The Brick Theater’s Democracy Festival as part of the No Second Acts: A Collection of Short American Lives short play series. It was inspired in part by the Newton Genealogy, a genealogy that traces me back to  Richard and Anne Newtown that settled in the New World in 1638, and Steve Pinker’s study of the decline of human violence, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE.