About the Play:

Dennis is a full-length drama by James Ryan. This is a true crime tale of the 1980 murder of the famed civil rights and anti-war activist Allard Lowenstein by Dennis Sweeney, a former student and longtime friend who suffered from mental illness.

Dennis is a riveting factual drama about the relationship between two socially committed political activists in the sixties that culminates in the assassination of one by the other. Allard Lowenstein, the one-time Congressman and longtime liberal activist, was a professor at Stanford who mobilized white college students to participate in the civil-rights movement and register black voters in the deep south. Inspired by Lowenstein, a student named Dennis Sweeney joins the crusade and there his political consciousness is formed. Lowenstein eventually joined the political mainstream but his protege Sweeney, the former civil-rights worker, began to suffer from mental illness and drifted further and further into isolation and paranoia. Sweeney became convinced that his former mentor Lowenstein was a CIA/FBI/Whatever agent and assassinated him in 1980.

Dennis premiered in 1985 at the Ensemble Studio Theater off-Broadway in New York City.

Cast: 2 female, 7 male

What people say:

"Mr. Ryan retains an admirable sense of humor.... Some crackling scenes... open up some genuine issues." — New York Times

"A gripping look at politics, power and murder.... Engrossing theatre." — Bergen Record

About the Playwright:

James Ryan is an American screenwriter, director, playwright, and teacher. He has written screenplays for Hollywood Pictures, Warner Bros., and Spring Creek Productions. He is the writer and director of the film the Young Girl and the Monsoon, wrote for the Days and Nights of Molly Dodd on television, and his plays have been produced off-Broadway and in many theatres across the United States. He taught playwriting in the Actor's Studio MFA program at the New School for Social Research University in New York.