Work — WILLIAM JACK SIBLEY

Theatrical Plays and Screenplays

If You Loved Me (2004)

The production, directed by Jerry Pilato for Actors Theatre of San Antonio, isn’t avant-garde. It won’t scandalize you with slang or ask you to accept an alternative format. It’s a simple, straight-forward production of a good old-fashioned story. And it’s excellent. The script, which was workshopped at the Tennessee Williams Playwright Festival in Key West, Florida, The New Dramatists in New York City, and The Attic Theater in Los Angeles, is smooth and mature. Sibley, an award-winning playwright and novelist, is hardly a neophyte, and his experience and confidence are on display in this unapologetically plot-driven work about love, loss, and family history with a regional twang.
Mean (2011)

In June 2011, Sibley's new comedy play "Mean" had a staged reading at the New Dramatists Theater in New York City. Academy Award/Tony/Golden Globe winner, Ellen Burstyn, Saturday Night Live's, Rachel Dratch, and "School of Rock's, Chris Stack, all came together to for a hilarious night of comedy.
Amor: Screenplay (2014)

Sibley asks, "Can true love exist in a marriage of convenience between the town drunk and the town hooker in order to uphold a conservative community sense of propriety? Amor is the funny and romantic true life tale of two Mexican American misfits who find each other just when they resign themselves to the fact that love has passed them by. Set in small town Texas in the repressed 1950s, Andreas Castillo is a rugged local cowboy , A man’s man with the soul of a poet and an obvious drinking problem. Dominga Vargas is a sultry beautiful woman whose lived hard and played even harder. Returning home to care for her elderly mother, she finds work waitressing and picking up a few extra dollars utilizing the worlds oldest profession." To see more visit the YouTube teaser here.

Theatrical Plays

GOVERNORS MANSION – In a historical estate run by female relations, a young man is heavily influenced by his grandmother, the Governor of Texas.
MORTALLY FINE – Young woman working her way through college as a sex worker in a small Texas town is pursued by an older widowed rancher.
MR. AND MRS. COFFEE – Couple opens coffeehouse in New Orleans French Quarter and discovers French impressionist (Edgar Degas) painting hidden inside walls of ongoing restoration work.
IF YOU LOVED ME – Young woman inherits her father’s Texas cattle sale barn and discovers a long-kept secret about her late mother.
MEAN – Famous New York actress can’t find anyone to accompany her to Kennedy Center honoring her tumultuous career.
RAIN/ PRINCESS ELIZABETH/ MALTA (one-act) – Future Queen of England, Princess Elizabeth, spends the first years of her marriage on the island of Malta – and a rainy afternoon stuck in an elderly native’s souvenir shop.

Screenplays

DEAD GIVEAWAY – Woman murders the same man twice? Or is she being set up by her wealthy, aging, politico husband?
WHERE ALL THE RATTLESNAKES ARE BORN – Artistic couple leaves New York City for rural life on his family ranch in Texas. She teaches art at a community college; he works at a local newspaper. She gets a scholarship to spend a year in Italy making art – he won’t commit to accompanying her due to aging mother and budding affair with youthful sweetheart
AMOR – Based on a true story, a 1950’s Texas vaquero/amorous cowboy falls in love with the town hooker, who’s forced into an unconventional marriage with him, at the behest of the Sheriff and his rancher employer seeking to restore peace in their small, conservative town.
DECEMBER STORY – What if you were facing the worst Christmas of your life – no money, no job – and a 6-year-old son desperately looking for Santa Claus everywhere? Depression-era setting in the American southwest.
RELATIVE TRUTH - Successful, Black career woman searches for her adoptive parents with no luck. A poor, white hillbilly woman arrives at the woman's upscale home one day stating she is her mother - and her idiot savant, faith-healer twin brother is waiting in the car outside to meet her.

Screenplay Collaborations with Diane Ladd

HOT WATER BISCUITS – (Based on Broadway play, THE TEXAS TRILOGY, by Preston Jones). A West Texas woman seeks a better way of life and ends up trapped in the same environment she was determined to leave behind.
HIGH MAINTENANCE (retitled, "ALMOST YOURS") – Black struggling actress in NY takes a well-paying job to escort a depressed white gay millionaire (secretly arranged by his even wealthier and clueless elderly parents) around Caribbean resort.
LAST OF THE BAD GIRLS (from the original screenplay by Sibley) – Two college-age brothers inherit their late grandfathers Biloxi, Mississippi Burlesque House – now being managed by three aging, feisty and reluctant-to-release-control-of strippers.