Cassandra, a young princess, makes nightly broadcasts from the besieged city of Troy, begging for help from the outside world while UN peacekeepers pull out and abandon the people of the city. Outside the city walls, she can hear the armies of Agamemnon, preparing for their final assault. Back home in Argos, Clytemnestra waits for word from her husband, trying to banish from her mind the memory of her daughter, slaughtered ten years ago as an act of sacrifice to ensure victory. Her surviving child, Orestes, is beaten and punished by his teacher for his weakness and vulnerability. A battered and blind messenger returns to Argos, telling a horrible story of the death of Troy. When Agamemnon comes home, victorious, he brings with him as war booty the crazed remains of a shattered Cassandra. Cassandra feels death and doom all around her, and becomes possessed by the ghost of the murdered daughter, Iphigenia. Clytemnestra is horrified by this, but welcomes her husband home, making him walk on a red carpet made of his murdered child’s clothing. Once inside the house, she murders Agamemnon and Cassandra. Orestes murders his mother in retaliation.

This retelling of the ancient myth throws a harsh spotlight on our own cycles of violence—both personal and political.

The oldest story known to humankind. The king of Uruk (modern Iraq) has done it all: killed monsters, fought wars, built his city…and now he is bored. Stronger and smarter than anyone around him, restless and impatient, he has turned in on himself and become destructive. His people cry out for help to the goddess Ishtar, who sends Gilgamesh a companion, Enkidu, a wild man who is in every way his equal. The two men become fast friends and have many adventures together. Gilgamesh, devoted to his friend and rejecting the love of the goddess, enrages Ishtar, who takes Enkidu from him to make him suffer. Horrified by the death of his beloved friend, Gilgamesh sets off on a journey to find Utnapishtim—the sole survivor of an ancient, world-destroying flood—to learn the secret of immortality, and the answer to why human life must be filled with suffering.

Reviews:
“[Gilgamesh is] an extraordinary evening of beauty and terror.”
~ Marshall Yeager
Off-Off Broadway Review, April 6, 1995

“Ordover’s script [for Gilgamesh] has taken generous liberties with its root text, injecting lots of comedy… and sharpening what could have been a sprawling mess into something grand but accessible…. A weird, wonderful, rather unlikely masterpiece.”
~ Chris Page
Get Out Magazine, Arizona Tribune, June, 2004

Reviews:
“[The King of Infinite Space] is a satisfying, compelling piece of writing with more dramatic turns than a week’s worth of made-for-TV movies….a superb script.”
~ Robert L. Pela
Phoneix New Times, March 28, 2002

“Andrew Ordover’s darkly ritualistic The King of Infinite Space…is an actor’s dream, full of the kind of subtext, depth, and emoting that performers love to tackle.”
~ Mark S.P. Turvin
AISLE SAY Phoenix, March 21, 2002

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Two stories run side-by-side. In Paris, the newly elected president of the Czech Republic visits an old friend who left Czechoslovakia twenty years ago and refuses to return, even after the fall of Communism. In the other, a small-town schoolteacher in the Slovak Republic tries to find new freedom and meaning in the so-called new world. She falls in love with a disaffected young American who has come to her town to teach English, and turns to him for help in standing against her alcoholic, desperate husband, and her complacent, fearful school director.

Reviews:
“[Motherland is] deeply relevant…Off-Off Broadway at its best!”
~ Charlie Whitehead
TimeOut New York, March 13-20, 1996

“One of the best new American plays I saw this season was Andrew C. Ordover’s Motherland…”
~ Richard Hornby
Hudson Review, Summer 1996

When young slacker Mordecai Mann learns that his activist, hippie parents have been murdered, he inherits from them nothing but an old car and a mysterious poem. With his best friend reluctantly in tow (an African American law student named Jim), Mordecai sets out across the country to find the hope and vision that drove his parents, the hope and vision they were too busy to pass on to him while they were alive. The play is narrated by an older version of Jim.

Reviews:
“Scenes from a Broken Hand is not to be missed… the production is all the best that smaller theatre has grown to represent…. Moving and lyrical.”
~ Miles Minnies
Back Stage West, December 29, 1994

Prague, 1592: the center of art and culture, in a growing, changing world. Superstition is giving way to science, and the old Age of Faith is slowly becoming a new Age of Reason. Although life has been getting better for the long-reviled and ghettoized Jewish community, economic problems and an encroaching Islamic war are threatening to make things difficult again. The Hapsburg emperor, Rudolf II, has raised the old Jewish Tax, to pay for his various scientific and artistic indulgences. Now he is ordering the Jewish
moneylenders to call in their debts, to finance his war. Easter approaches and the Protestant merchants, fearing the loss of their businesses and homes, push the emperor to lead a pogrom, to wipe out the Jews and cancel all the old debts.

Standing alone against the growing threat of violence is Judah Loew, a quiet and scholarly rabbi. Afraid for the safety of his friends and family, but having nowhere else to turn for help, he puts his faith in the mystical powers of the Kabballah, where ancient stories tell of a golem–a giant, powerful man of clay, who can be created with certain prayers and rituals to save the Jews. As his scientifically-minded disciple watches with astonishment, Judah Loew attempts to do what no human outside of fairy tales has done,
and create life. Can he do it in time to save his community? And if he can, will he be able to control the monster he has created?

Reviews:
“This compelling new play [The Golem] is a work of considerable passion and clarity.”
~ Charlie Whitehead
TimeOut New York, May 8, 1997

A young, Jewish New Yorker, an average and unremarkable investment banker, is happy and content with his life—until he awakens one Christmas morning, bleeding from the hands. Although the mysterious wounds have no special meaning for him, the rest of the world sees his condition differently.

As word of his “stigmata” spreads, fundamentalists and true-believers of every stripe
latch on to him as proof of various millennial, apocalyptic prophecies. A southern
preacher proclaims him the Antichrist, an Orthodox Rabbi uses him as a rallying-cry to
push radical Israelis toward re-building the Temple on Mount Zion, and a young,
spiritually lost girl believes he is her personal savior.

The “messiah” himself doesn’t believe in much of anything, and wishes he could return
to his unremarkable life and be left alone. Unfortunately for him, though, the fate of the
world might just be in his hands.

Reviews
“Rich and often funny… [The Wind on the Water] skillfully maintains the balance between serious inquiry and social satire…. You can almost hear the footfall of the barbarians at the gates——a scary sound on this eve of the millennium.”
~ Francine Russo
The Village Voice, October 20, 1999