Dale Ramsey, Writer
Since moving from my native Virginia to New York in 1975, I have written plays, articles, program notes, audiovisual scripts, and grant proposals. Today I am seeking a publisher for my novel, The Snow Lashing.
Professionally, I worked in publishing as a book editor and helped to develop a program in basic writing skills.
I was the dramaturge (literary guy) of the Pearl Theatre Company, an off-Broadway producer of classic plays, for thirteen of its seasons. The Pearl produced my play Deep Swimmer, adapted from Ibsen's The Wild Duck, in 1987. Other plays, such as my drama Thoreau in Love, were staged off-off Broadway.
​
Please scroll down to see more!​
MAJOR PROJECTS
The Snow Lashing
A novel about love, sex, and Shakespeare
​
SYNOPSIS
Set during the Reagan years, The Snow Lashing tells the story of grad
student Piers Bergl, whose loneliness has haunted him from childhood.
At last, he meets a soulmate, Leni Bauer, and over time love sneaks up
on them. Yet, at the end of a joyful day together, Leni suddenly confesses
her devotion to Orlando, a man in El Salvador for whom she has waited
for four years. It becomes a struggle for Piers to cling to his hopes. Sometimes
Leni’s faraway hero appears to be a fantasy.
Piers is a scholarly detective, determined to solve an old mystery about the witches in Macbeth. But now
a woman in black, Simone, comes to Piers for help. She loves his friend Mark Longo. But Mark is a serial womanizer, and Simone winds up in intensive care. It's yet another mystery.
Piers and Leni become lovers, but Orlando, who has seriously let Leni down as the new year begins, is finally on his way from El Salvador to see her. Piers struggles with disbelief over what is happening. Close to despair, he courts physical danger skating on a lake in fierce winds and snow, and soon he is tipping toward academic failure. In the end, he solves the puzzle of Shakespeare’s witches, and he discovers the blood-stained answer to the mystery of the woman he loves.
Deep Swimmer
A drama in two acts,
freely adapted from The Wild Duck, by Henrik Ibsen.
Produced off-Broadway in New York City
by the Pearl Theatre Company
as part of their 1986-1987 season.
LEFT TO RIGHT: Joel Bernstein (Mozart in the Jungle), Laura Rathgeb, Frank Geraci, Laura Margolis, Pinkney Mikell, and (top right) Lee Roy Giles (No Place to Be Somebody).
Ibsen's play is relocated to Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1950s. Deep Swimmer revisits his great themes of delusion and the demon-haunted agendas that drive people to ruin. The cast comprises ten actors, down from the cast of twenty-four required for the original play.
​
Silk Road Journal
A drama in two acts, presented as a staged reading in 1999 at the Pearl Theatre Company.
A cast of ten actors, script-in-hand, played nineteen characters, taking the audience on young Tom Dyson's theatrical expedition from New York City to Chinese Turkestan in the years preceding the First World War (and back again).
​
The following year Silk Road Journal was awarded an honorarium from the Lucille Lortel/White Barn Foundation and was given a staged reading at the White Barn Theatre, in Norwalk, Connecticut.
ABOVE: Illustrations from the promotion.
OTHER PLAYS
The School Master
A performing version in two acts of an unfinished, untitled tragicomedy (commonly known as Platonov) by Anton Chekhov. Commissioned by the Pearl Theatre Company and presented in a reading by the resident acting company in May of 2003.
Old Sayings
Yours truly refueling in front of the Pearl Theatre at its early location.
A drama in two acts, presented at
New York University in a lab theater
reading in April of 1983. (The male
lead was played by a young Bill Pullman.)
​
Madeline Kelly has two men in her life, Peter and Ray. But only Ray, an attorney, impresses her as a great catch. He helps her with her rent, and has a video camera too!
Thoreau in Love
Elegy for Snapdragons
A "pastoral" in two acts, first presented in October of 2007 to launch a play-reading series at Riverspace (aka the Helen Hayes Performing Arts Center), in Nyack, New York. It was subsequently produced off-off-Broadway at the Neighborhood Playhouse the following year.
Elegy for Snapdragons follows Travis, a classical composer who is finding no outlet for his music. His nemesis is his half-sister Caroline, a rising star on the concert stage who will not touch Travis’s compositions. The frayed nerves of these characters reflect the fraying of the arts at the end of the twentieth century.
A drama in two acts,
produced off-off-Broadway, at
the Neighborhood Playhouse, in
January of 2006.
Two brothers, Henry and John Thoreau, are devoted to each other. Indeed, Henry is over-reliant on John. Then he and John both fall in love with charming Ellen Sewell. From the ensuing crisis Henry emerges as a more independent young man, but he also needs the solace he finds in the woods at Walden Pond.
WORK IN PUBLISHING
Scriptwriting
As an Associate Editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (1978–1981), I wrote audiovisual scripts as a member of a unit assigned to create a learning system in basic writing skills. This sample visual and audio text is from the lesson I wrote on the use of sensory details in effective writing. (This project was fun to work on.)
FRAME 25:
Voice of WILLIAM: My boots clump lightly on the even, gray stone as I hike up Miner’s Point.
NARRATOR: This sentence fills in a few details that are sensory. The words clump lightly tell how William’s boots sound. The words even and gray tell how the stone looks. William shares his experience with the reader in a concrete way. He makes it easy to tell what it’s like to climb the hill in this sentence.
Editing Other Writers
Later I was the Acquiring Editor of Back Stage Books, an imprint of Watson-Guptill Publications (1993–2000). On the basis of my theater experience, I built up an under-performing imprint focused on the theater and other creative fields. I especially enjoyed working with the authors of these two titles, The Playwright’s Process, by Buzz McLaughlin, and Living the Writer’s Life, by Eric Maisel, Ph.D., which dealt with writing specifically.
FREELANCE WRITING
As a freelance writer, I did my share of workaday assignments, such as proposals for a series of books on health topics for a medical publisher. But then there were opportunities such as the following.
Poe Walking on the
High Bridge
One of my favorite articles was about Edgar Allan Poe, who enjoyed walking along the route of New York City’s first aqueduct. The article was popular when it appeared online as well as in print (in the newsletter of the Friends of Old Croton Aqueduct), in 2009.
I was also instrumental in the editing of the award-winning map (1998) of this greenway, now a New York State Historic Park, in Westchester County.
The Four Seasons: The Newsletter of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, 2000–2001
I wrote several short feature articles on the orchestra's concert season, repertory, and composers.
The Dramatists Guild Quarterly, 1984-1994
For a decade I wrote and edited articles on dramatic craft for the national association for playwrights.
Back Stage, the Performing Arts Weekly
“Meaty Roles: Are Star-Making Parts Becoming Rarities?” Feature, May 4, 1998
​
“The Rewrite Stuff: American Playwrights and the Developmental Process,” Feature, Aug. 1, 1997
​
“How One Theater Analyzes Scripts,” Article, Dec. 8, 1995
My Our Craft series, a survey of classic playwriting
manuals spanning three issues in 1989, was my most important contribution.
​
“Freytag’s Pyramid: The Dramaturgy of Gustave Freytag,” Winter issue
​
“The Dramaturgy of William Archer,” Spring issue
“The Dramaturgy of George Pierce Baker,” Fall issue
OTHER PARTICULARS
Grantwriting
For thirteen years I was the grantwriter for the Municipal Art Society of New York, a prominent nonprofit civic organization founded in 1893. I raised funds to support the Society’s mission from such sources as the
National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York Community Trust, and many others.
Education
M.F.A., Dramatic Writing, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
M.A., English Literature, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
B.A., English Literature, The College of William & Mary
SEND ME AN EMAIL