True story: In 1937, long before his fame as a writer, future Beat Generation icon William Burroughs (then 23 years-old) met a German Jewish woman named Ilse Herzfeld Klapper (who was 37 years old at the time) in Dubrovnik. A year later, they were married.

Ilse Burroughs received a visa from this marriage which allowed her to avoid repatriation from Yugoslavia to Nazi Germany. She arrived in New York in 1939 and was hired as a secretary by exiled anti-fascist German writer and activist Ernst Toller. 

Toller was a poet and World War I veteran who came to wider notice in 1919 as a leader of the short-lived Worker's Republic in Munich. As happened in a similar uprising in Berlin insigated by the Spartacists earlier in that same year (led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg),  Bavaria's revolutionary government was brutally suppressed in two months. 

Toller escaped execution and was sentenced to five years in prison. The plays and poems he wrote in jail -- including a play that prophesied the rise of Hitler -- made him an international literary and political luminary. 

Toller was public enemy number one to the Nazi regime when it took power in 1933. His apartment in Berlin was raided by the Nazis shortly after the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933.  Toller was in Switzerland when the Nazis came for him. He never returned to Germany. His books were burned in the fires lit by Joseph Goebbels on Berlin's Opernplatz in May 1933.

As an exile, in Britain and the United States, Toller became a leading figure in the anti-fascist resistance. He gave speeches, wrote articles, raised money for the hungry in Spain. He even wrote film scripts in Hollywood.

Hotel Mayflower imagines a collision between these three travelers in a Manhattan hotel in 1939. It asks hard questions about the artist's role in politics. Can a writer change the world with words? Or should the author stand apart from levers of power?

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The world of Hotel Mayflower is not far from our own. It's a landscape of political refugees and exiles, growing fascism, and relentless attempts to erase and rewrite history.

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​NOTE: Hotel Mayflower was initially titled  Three Suitcases. The play was submitted to the 2019 Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's  National Playwrights Conference and given three public readings under that title before 2023.

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