Robert Flanagan

Set in Liberty Center, Ohio on a Saturday and Sunday in July, 1912, Jupus Redeye focuses on twelve year old Minnie Wing, a feisty girl torn between her father, Charles, a free thinker who named a son Socrates, and her mother, Almona, who wants to have Minnie baptised. To reunite her parents Minnie takes action that reaches its climax in a dramatic Maumee river baptism scene filled with comic contradiction and serious character revelation.

The play's title comes from the magical creatures Minnie and her older brother Hume Doig create at bedtime to entertain and frighten their little brother Socrates. Hume's Redeye is a dark destroyer and Minnie's Jupus a creature of sweetness and light. By play's end Minnie's growth enables her to unite the dark and the light in Jupus Redeye, a larger, more complex, and more mature being that stands as an image of her parents' new union.

Complete with parallel worlds, that of the adults and that of the children, the low comedy figures of Old Gent and Grandma, a traveling Chautauqua troupe featuring the famous rapid-fire inspirational speaker Gatling Gun Fogleman, and the Baptist meeting's spirituals, JUPUS REDEYE is an audience delight.

The script, awarded an Ohio Arts Council grant and selected by the Ohio Theatre Alliance for a week long script development conference, has been produced in Ohio by the Contemporary American Theatre Company of Columbus, the Delaware Theatre Association, Firelands College in Huron, and Circleville's Roundtown Players, and in Kentucky by the Villa Players of Thomas More College.

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A SAMPLE FROM JUPUS REDEYE

At the close of the play, family conflicts solved and warring brothers put to bed, Minnie sits looking out the farmhouse bedroom window.

MINNIE:
I love to look up at the moon. Especially when it is full and bright. I can stare at it for the longest time. It is nothing like the sun. It is as quiet as milk. Why, that -- that is Jupus Redeye's other eye! That's just what it is. Yes.

Jupus Redeye has two eyes. We almost always see only one at a time. One is the sun, the other is the moon. If you look at that red eye too long, you will go stone blind.

But when you are sleeping, that other eye, cool and white and perfect round, it watches over you all through the night.

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For production arrangements of JUPUS REDEYE or another play on this site please contact the author.