Great Plains Theatre Conference

Rob Florence

Rob Florence is a New Orleans playwright whose play Katrina’s Path was presented at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Region VI last March, where the one-act Pecking Order also received a staged reading. In 2007 Katrina’s Path received a staged reading for the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) national conference and was assigned to Dr. Melinda Wilson’s upper-division “Multicultural Perspectives in American Theatre” at the University of California at Sacramento. In 2006 Rob’s play Fleeing Katrina was well-received at the Midtown International Theatre Festival in New York. Parts of this play were part of a staged reading entitled “Voices from the Storm” at the Culture Project’s IMPACT Arts Festival. Rob Florence is the published author of two books on New Orleans cemeteries and holds an MFA with distinction in playwriting from the University of New Orleans.

Katrina's Path

- An African-American E.M.T. realizes that Katrina victims who caused her profound distress end up giving her strength.
- A flippant, brassy gay man takes great pains evacuating his infirm, recalcitrant mother, constantly and hilariously
scrapping with her.
- A “Skull and Bones Gang” member testifies to the suffering as evoking Congo Square slave gatherings, concluding: “Katrina was the ancestors showin’ us: whatever you throw at me I can handle.”
- A pregnant woman undertakes a post-apocalyptic-like journey in returning for her abandoned cats.
- An Uptown woman with pet ferrets befriends ominously tattooed, pierced kids who defy stereotyping by proving to be Good Samaritans.
- A savvy tour operator and an elderly Cuban woman travel a surreal crazy quilt finding themselves in one outrageous situation after another bouncing from refugee site to refugee site.
- An eccentric, homeless, elderly black man is taken all the way to Sacramento, California via Arkansas before returning to New Orleans, feeling improved.