ESCAPE FROM THE BOX
Book by Elise Forier, music and lyrics by Tina Lear
The play (before it was made into a musical) received Honorable Mention in the 1998 Jackie White Children’s Playwriting Awards. In 1999, with funding from the Washington State Arts Commission, the play was produced as a musical at the Whidbey Island Center for the Arts, starring Tina and a cast of Langley Middle School students. And in October of 2004, it was given a three-week run at DreamWrights Theatre in York, Pennsylvania.

Escape from the Box addresses issues of diversity with imagination and humor. Characters live in a world where, at birth, each child is presented with a magic box. When the child’s parents look inside it, whatever they see is basically the child’s destiny for the rest of his or her life. We follow the journey of eight losers (kids with unfashionable boxes—Gears, Brains, Beauty, Air, Teeth, Monster, Gobble and Tattle) as they step outside their boxes into new worlds.

CATHY'S CREEK
Book by Elise Forier
Music by Tina Lear
Lyrics by Tina Lear and Elise Forier
After the success of “Escape from the Box,” Whidbey Island Center for the Arts commissioned Elise and Tina to write this family musical for their main stage season in 2001. Since then, it was selected for development by the 2002-2003 Waldo M. and Grace C. Bonderman National Youth Theatre Playwriting Competition and Development Workshop (where it received a public reading at the Indiana Repertory Theatre April of 2003). It received a full production at Stages Theatre in Hopkins, Minnesota (near Minneapolis), running for three weeks in October of 2004 and was published by Dramatic Publishing in the summer of 2005.

This is a story about what it takes to stand up for what you know is right, and how one girl can change the world. Iowa farm girl Cathy Scruggs gets an assignment from her teacher to write a term paper on Joan of Arc. While working on her paper, the lonely, awkward teen suddenly finds the French farm maid has come to life and can speak to her. The two become fast friends and Cathy is introduced into a world of incredible courage and daring as her new friend sets about conquering the marauding English in her beloved France. When Cathy is called upon to do something heroic in her own time, she must find the power within herself to speak out against the prevailing pressures and destructive forces working against her.

VALERIE AND THE BEAR
Book and lyrics by Elise Forier
Music and lyrics by Tina Lear
This newest musical play was selected for development by the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference, where it received a staged reading in McCall, Idaho in the summer of 2002.

Valerie and the Bear is loosely based on the medieval French romantic poem, Valentin et Orsin. Part fable, part Commedia del Arte and part Warner Brothers cartoon, this play tells the story of a gutsy girl named Valerie, who befriends a wild boy who has lived his whole life in the forest with the bears. Accompanied by her giddy sister Ginger, a mysterious gypsy woman and stalked by the odious Pirate King, Valerie sets out on a journey to the Great Blue Blazes, where she hopes to have the secrets of her life revealed. Valerie and the Bear is a lively, hilarious and ultimately very moving story; but like all fairy tales, it has deep lessons for us all about the nature of courage and the importance of forgiveness and love.