University Readers

John Ammerman's Booth, Brother Booth and Other Plays is the on-stage meeting point of the historical and the surreal. With 28 years of experience as a playwright and performer, playing more than 80 roles, including his solo performance of Booth, Brother Booth at The Globe Theatre in London, the former student of Marcel Marceau brings together his collected works into a single volume.

The titular play shows a lone Edwin Booth, brother of actor and presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth, sorting through his brother's personal effects and his own tormented memories. As he burns the costumes worn by his notorious brother he becomes the characters and familial personalities that characterized his life as a member of the famous acting family of Booths. In what Southern Voice calls "A tight, involving dramatic tour de force," and illustrated with over twenty speeches and excerpts from Shakespeare, Restoration, and 19th century Melodrama, Booth, Brother Booth confronts the ghosts of Edwin's past, brining to life a man torn apart by scandal yet searching for a prevailing ray of hope within the world of theatre.

Ammerman's plays are an insight into the nature of guilt, grief, and remorse. From The Ressurrectionists, which tells the story of two grave robbers selling corpses to medical schools in the 1850s, to Skeletons, which plays out an interrogation by Queen Elizabeth I's royal torturer and heretic hunter Robert Topcliffe and Pope Pius XII, Ammerman explores the concepts of morality and retribution through tightly written dialogue and bizarre circumstances with a darkly comedic tone.

Perfect for smaller casts and theatre festivals, Ammerman's plays present profound ideas in tangible, concise settings.