Kay Williams and Eileen Wymann

Kay Williams


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Kay Williams is a professional actress who has played leading roles at regional theaters around the U.S., including the San Francisco Actors Workshop and the Pittsburgh Playhouse. Among her many credits are the title role in “Miss Jairus,” Cybel in “Great God Brown,” and Georgette in “The Balcony,” all plays that are part of the repertory of the 42nd Street Theater in “Butcher of Dreams.” She has also performed in many, many new plays off-Broadway in Manhattan and knows how difficult it is for talented new playwrights to get produced and talented new actors to get noticed. She has acted in radio, television, and films. For several years, she worked behind-the-scenes as assistant producer with an award-winning independent filmmaker in New York. Kay is a co-author of “One Last Dance: It's Never Too Late to Fall in Love,” a novel started by her father, Mardo Williams, and finished by her and her sister Jerri Lawrence. The book won a Best Regional Fiction Award from the Independent Publishers Association and was a Finalist in a National Readers' Choice Award, sponsored by the Romance Writers of America.

Eileen Wyman is a writer of short fiction and has edited many books and film scripts. She has had a career in radio/television and is a gifted comedy writer, crafting jokes for speech writers and comedians, humorous fillers for various magazines, and captions for cartoonists. She has written additional dialogue for films. During her long career, Eileen has held a variety of odd jobs to make ends meet—teacher, social worker, office temp. When she grows up, she wants to be either a wizard or a world class tennis player.

Butcher of Dreams

Kay Williams and Eileen Wyman
Calliope Press (2007)
ISBN 9780964924161
Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (12/07) 

Synopsis: The 42nd Street Repertory Theater was an abandoned burlesque house where the homeless lived-until Lee and her staff scrub it out. The third floor makes Lee uneasy with its scattering of feathers and bones. Still, having the theater is a dream come true. If her husband hadn't died six month earlier, she'd be on cloud nine.

It doesn't matter, she tells herself, that the theater sits on the seedy fringes of Times Square, that it's under-budgeted and understaffed and that she (as Administrative Director) will play only one role this first season. It's an Equity theater, offering five plays in repertory. Times Square redevelopment makes the property desirable.

With her husband recently dead and her daughter away at college, Lee falls into a passionate affair with a younger man. Bizarre, seemingly unrelated events-beginning with a homeless person found dead on the third floor of the theater-escalate to ritual murder.

Playful improvisation becomes a deadly game. Qualities that make her a good actress-imagination, empathy-pull her through the looking glass into a nightmare world, to the brink of death. Over all hovers a Mexican mask, stolen from the tomb at Monte Alban, its eyes glittering with secrets of the ancient Aztecs and sacrifice.

The characters are based on the authors' extensive experience in theater and film. Alan Dunbar, Lee's Artistic Director, has troubling gaps in his resume; Ernst Kromer, her other director, is rigid and uncooperative. Other major characters are: Michael Day, Lee's sexy and mysterious assistant; wraithlike Fleur Mahoney, whose first role is a dead girl-and she almost is; Barry Blackwell, talented actor, compulsive practical joker; Harry O'Brien, company stage manager, who'd kill for a role. Characters from the "real" world include Alan's lover, Walter Kaplan, eccentric psychiatrist and medical anthropologist; Heather, Lee's 18-year-old daughter, who has a surprising secret life; pock-marked, cynical NYPD Detective Mordecai Green, who moonlights as an actor.