BIO
Deb Norton is a playwright, actress, teacher and the Artistic Director of Theater 150. After attending the masters program at A.C.T. in San Francisco, she joined their acting company to play roles in 1918, Babylon Gardens, Twelfth Night and more. Then after a six-year stint in N.Y.C., she moved back to the west coast to author and star in her first full-length play, The Whole Banana, in Ojai and then in Los Angeles, where she garnered rave reviews and a movie option. Deb's training as an actor and her 20-year's working in theater, have lead her to an unconventionally holistic approach to writing and teaching.
THE WHOLE BANANA
Review Quotes from Los Angeles
Deb Norton's "The Whole Banana" is Hysterical… Norton is a major discovery… Sidesplitting…Norton's authorial voice is fertile… Norton should have packed houses aplenty while awaiting the development deal she and this tickling property so clearly deserve.
– LA Times
Actress Deb Norton has written a dynamite performance vehicle for herself... Norton imbues the play’s life-blocked heroine, Fran, with a captivating amalgam of vulnerability, vitality and humor… thoroughly enjoyable... In a tour de force performance by Norton, Fran’s nonplussed acceptance of the absurdities in her life is hilarious.… Norton’s dialogue is crisp and zestfully original. She manages to imprint the essence of each character with an economy of dialogue and action.
– Daily News
Playwright Deb Norton’s romantic fantasy is an amusing romp that avoids many of that genre’s clichés and gets additional lifts from Norton’s poignant and witty performance as Fran.
– LA Weekly
Hilarious...
– Daily Candy
Synopsis
It's the dead of winter in New York City and Fran is suffering from artist's block, quitting smoking and ending her long-term, dead-end relationship. She tries to make contact with her "Higher Power" in the hope of making some sense of her struggle. But instead of "The" God, Fran attracts the attention of "a" god, Hermes, who takes up residence in her life and brings her into full contact with a limitless kind of love she never could have imagined. The trouble begins when Fran, unable to accept that Hermes must, inevitably, return to his various godly duties, devises a way to trap him in his earthly body.
Read the first few scenes from The Whole Banana (Stage play)
Read the first few scenes from The Whole Banana (Screenplay adaptation)
A FOGGY FAIRY TALE
An animated screenplay
A Queen banishes the ocean for killing her eldest of 3 sons. A generation later her youngest son, now king banishes the least favored of his twin daughters. Next thing you know the banished twin returns to do some serious banishing of her own. Memory, color, laughter, tears, even the month of May, all exiled! An irreversible trend of family dysfunction that will spread ruin and destruction as far as the eye can see? The twin turned evil and the kingdom she is revenging herself upon, can only be saved by her sister... who no longer remembers who she is.
Read the first few scenes from A Foggy Fairy Tale
10-MINUTE PLAYS
Helping
Kevin is just home from the rehab center where he has been learning to walk on his new prosthetic legs and his mother is determined to be helpful. Kevin is determined to manage this on his own. Mother and son become entangled in the intricacies of how to help and be helped while Kevin's need to relieve himself becomes more and more of an emergency.
King of Everything
In one unlucky moment, the last shred of connection Gil has to his ex-girlfriend, Melanie - a parakeet named Aimless - is stricken dead. Melanie, summoned by Gills incoherent wailing over the phone, has arrived to take the situation in hand. In their attempt to give their pet a proper burial, Melanie and Gil discover some hidden truths about their relationship.
Dancer in Cowboy Country
A Barby-beautiful babysitter, escaping her obnoxious boyfriend and his slasher movie, catches her 12-year-old charge in the throes of a soulful self-created dance and enjoys the opportunity to make fun of him. She can't help but see herself in this strange boy and soon he has her wishing she remembered how to dance like that.
The Romance
Jim has decided to propose to Mary Ellen, but his nerves are shot. Before he can pop the question, he needs assurances from her that her drastic and often deadly romantic gestures will stop. A struggle ensues as they both wrestle with the question, "Is love enough?"
