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Rhett Rossi

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Rhett Rossi

All works

About

Inspiration

Press

Contact

Dawn Goes Down to Day

A coming-of-age story

Struggling with isolation, middle-aged Ray looks back at growing up in 1980s Long Island, where boys largely raised one another in a funny, feral culture of heavy metal, schoolyard fights, drugs, and reckless games. His older brother Ric—protector and confidant—tries to steer him right, but as mischief gives way to darker impulses, violence, and overdoses, their family is forced to endure the unimaginable. What emerges is a story of boys entering manhood in a world that teaches them little beyond survival.

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lookbook

“ it’s tempting to sum up the play with a single word: terrific.” The New York Times

NY Times review

In God’s Hat

A Play

After ten years in prison, Mitch emerges to find his estranged younger brother, Roy, unexpectedly waiting outside the prison gates. The two head to a roadside motel, where the arrival of a member of the Aryan Brotherhood—whether by chance or design—unleashes mayhem. As long-buried family secrets are unearthed, dangerous new ones must be kept.

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*I was fortunate to bring this production to life in 2010 with friends and my mentor and director, Kevin Kittle. Because I was also acting in the piece, I used the pseudonym Richard Taylor—the name of my late brother, an angel‍ on our shoulders—which is why The New York Times review credits me under that name.

In a fading mill town, a fiercely independent little person accustomed to facing the world alone forms an unlikely bond with a reclusive, one-eyed diner cook who has made a life of going unnoticed. As their guarded friendship deepens into something neither expected, two lifelong outsiders must decide whether the safety of solitude is worth sacrificing for the terrifying possibility of being seen—and loved—for who they truly are.

Morris Code

A romantic dramedy

click to watch proof of concept

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A look inside the gritty world of minor-league hockey, where Mickey remains one of the game’s most feared and revered enforcers. Years earlier, a tragic event on the day he was called up to the NHL sent Mickey and his wife, Alex, into a spiral of grief and addiction. Returning to hockey—even in the minors—gave him a purpose, a brotherhood and a reason to survive. Now, as he prepares to walk away at the top of his game, Mickey loses control during a fight with Dale, a gifted young player whose career may be ruined as a result. Haunted by what he has done, Mickey’s final days on the ice become a reckoning with the violence that defined him, the game that saved him and the young man he may still have a chance to save.

A gritty sports drama

Beautiful Beasts

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Greyhounds

As Martha faces impending blindness, she attempts to reconcile with Dawn, the daughter she surrendered decades earlier. But when Dawn’s troubled life follows her into Martha’s Manhattan apartment by way of Andre, a drug dealer to whom she is indebted, their fragile reunion erupts into a volatile confrontation. At turns funny and tragic, Greyhounds forces mother and daughter to reckon with the abandonment, rage and longing that have bound them together—and decide whether anything remains worth saving.

A Play

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We Were Here

A Play

Three alleged best friends—Mike, Jillian, and Sofia—kill time in Jillian’s battered Chevy convertible while waiting for a brawl to go down between Mike and Tommy, someone to whom Sofia has an allegiance. Complicating matters, Mike and Sofia are carrying on a clandestine affair, while Jillian is secretly in love with Mike. They are the kids your mother warned you about: getting high, being bad, and finding refuge in one another. But when the truth of who they are to each other—and what the fight is really about—begins to surface, that refuge starts to fracture. Their alienation deepens, and they push a reckless game too far.

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In the Absence of

(In the Absence of is the feature-film adaptation of the critically acclaimed stage play In God’s Hat.)

After ten years in prison, Mitch expects to begin his parole alone. Instead, he is collected by Roy, the estranged younger brother he hasn’t seen in years, and driven to a roadside motel. But Roy’s reasons for coming—and what he wants from Mitch—remain far from clear.

When Arthur Cruter, a charismatic and volatile white supremacist newly released from the same prison, arrives at their door, the brothers’ uneasy reunion takes a dangerous and increasingly unpredictable turn. As tensions mount, Mitch and Roy are forced to confront the childhood they survived, the damage they inherited, and the terrible choices that have bound them together.

At once harrowing and darkly funny, In the Absence of is a thriller about guilt, judgment, brotherhood, and the search for grace in a world where God’s silence leaves men to decide for themselves what justice looks like.

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Repair Shop

A Play

After their father’s sudden death, brothers Robbie and Ian find themselves responsible for the run-down auto-repair shop neither ever expected to run on their own. Robbie feels duty-bound to keep the place alive, while Ian—desperate to prove he is more than the family fuckup—sees it as a life sentence. When a rezoning plan threatens to uproot the business, Robbie looks for a way to hold on, while Ian takes matters into his own hands, setting the brothers on a dangerous collision course. As their conflict escalates and dim-witted but tenderhearted mechanic Marty gets caught in the fallout, the play takes a darkly funny and disturbing turn. Deeply human, Repair Shop follows a group of men who can fix almost anything except, perhaps, one another.

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Missing

Data-driven college student Steven approaches Angela—a hardened mother with a dark past—with possible new evidence in the nearly two-decade-old disappearance of her daughter, Jessica. But lines are immediately drawn. Reopening the case could bring answers, but would more than likely generate new lies—inviting the media and online sleuths to reduce Jessica’s life and legacy to her addiction and the rumors surrounding it.

Their fragile alliance becomes an increasingly volatile struggle over grief, certainty, and who gets to shape the story of the missing. Intimate and psychologically charged, Missing explores what unresolved loss does to those left behind—and the narratives we create when the truth refuses to reveal itself.

A Play

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Always

A supernatural family dramedy

Morton is back from the dead. He doesn’t know why, and his daughter Anna—a successful architect accustomed to controlling every detail—isn’t exactly equipped to find out. Only Anna can see him—along with Rufus, a stoner medium who wants no part of any of this. As the unlikely trio stumbles toward an answer, father and daughter confront the grief that made them strangers under the same roof.

Meanwhile, Anna’s marriage to a philandering, pickleball-obsessed husband falters, her anxious young son pulls away, and a chance reunion with a former classmate awakens something she thought long buried. Always follows a woman caught between the dead she cannot release and the living slipping away.

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