Thirty-one of my one-act plays have gone up, all over the US, many with multiple productions in many states. A few have also gone up in England and Ireland. Please let me know if you would like to read one of the short plays because you are looking to produce theater works -- or because you think it would make a good short film. (Several of them have.) JudyKwrites@aol.com.
PRODUCED ONE-ACT PLAYS
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION was my first produced play. It's an hour long. It went up in NYC in 1996, and later had a staged reading in Brooklyn. Four downwardly mobile slacker friends have a series of phone conversations in the early 1990s. Carla and Anthony have been best friends since high school. They talk about having a turkey baster baby together though they are both broke and their friendship works best on the phone. Bo loves Anthony, though they keep breaking up. Lynn is Carla's high-maintenance college friend who calls her from a street pay-phone. It's a play about what a drag it was to be a young person in NYC when the fear of AIDS was mind-crunching and all-pervasive . . .
CROWDED HOUSE as a one-act (I've since written a full-length version) is also about an hour. If IMMACULATE CONCEPTION was about isolation, with characters wandering with their phone cords in separate spaces, never making eye contact even when a few feet apart, CROWDED HOUSE goes to the other extreme. It's a play about roommate Hell, a romantic comedy of sorts in which seven people wind up trapped in a hot apartment, and one guy has to go for it with the woman he loves. It has been produced in New York and Los Angeles.
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION was my first produced play. It's an hour long. It went up in NYC in 1996, and later had a staged reading in Brooklyn. Four downwardly mobile slacker friends have a series of phone conversations in the early 1990s. Carla and Anthony have been best friends since high school. They talk about having a turkey baster baby together though they are both broke and their friendship works best on the phone. Bo loves Anthony, though they keep breaking up. Lynn is Carla's high-maintenance college friend who calls her from a street pay-phone. It's a play about what a drag it was to be a young person in NYC when the fear of AIDS was mind-crunching and all-pervasive . . .
CROWDED HOUSE as a one-act (I've since written a full-length version) is also about an hour. If IMMACULATE CONCEPTION was about isolation, with characters wandering with their phone cords in separate spaces, never making eye contact even when a few feet apart, CROWDED HOUSE goes to the other extreme. It's a play about roommate Hell, a romantic comedy of sorts in which seven people wind up trapped in a hot apartment, and one guy has to go for it with the woman he loves. It has been produced in New York and Los Angeles.
HARD TO GET has been produced six times in NYC. One of those productions was brought out to Long Island. It has also gone up Los Angeles and my home town of Leonia, New Jersey with the Leonia Players Guild. It runs about a half an hour. Steven comes back to the office where he used to temp; Mark left him a message that led him to believe they had extra work for him. But when he gets there everyone has left but Mark. Mark, it seems, misses his old gay "buddy," and also wants Steven's advice on how to hit on his replacement: a beautiful girl named Alison whom Mark does not know how to approach. Mark sees her as a tease, playing hard to get. But Mark may himself be messing with Steven's mind, reminding Steven of why he moved on from that office in the first place, and Steven has to call him on it. HARD TO GET was published on-line in Detour: Memphis. It was produced in 2016 in the Warner International Playwrights Festival. It was to be produced in 2020 in the Masculinities festival in Vancouver, Canada -- postponed due to the pandemic.
FACE TO FACE WITH THE ENEMY has been produced six times in NYC, once in upstate New York, once in Los Angeles (along with CROWDED HOUSE and HARD TO GET in 3 Klass Acts, the West Coast premiere of three of my short plays), once in Galway, Ireland -- a production which moved to Dublin -- and once in Arundel, England. It runs about half an hour. Dierdre comes to a restaurant to confront the woman sleeping with her doctor husband. She is disconcerted to find that Kristine is actually a lovely person who claims, plausibly that she did not know Douglas was married and feels horrible about the whole thing. Dierdre has been pretty lonely for a long time and needs someone to open up to . . . When the snarky waiter is not hovering 'round them, the two women talk and find some things in common. The postcard below shows Valerie David and Brenda Lee Urbanus in a two-play showcase at the Producers Club directed by Jeff Love. FACE TO FACE WITH THE ENEMY is published in the Nashville anthology Soundtrack Not Included.
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TALK TO ME is almost completely a monologue play. It has been published in The Rockhurst Review and was made into a short film by Allan McCall. The play has been produced six times in NYC and once in Kansas. It runs about fifteen minutes. Trevor, the morning after a big fight with his wife Maggie is trying to get her to stop giving him the silent treatment. He tries apologizing, being funny and charming, reasoning with Maggie, accusing her of coldness, talking about hard times with his parents when they gave him the silent treatment . . . Trevor is smart and likable, but as he talks it becomes clear that he struck Maggie the previous evening. Her silence may stem partly from shock, and the choice she has to make.
SCRIPTED IMPROV has been produced twice in NYC. It was produced once in North Carolina, and once in South Carolina, under the title MAKE IT UP AS YOU GO ALONG. In this ten-minute play, A and B, a guy and a girl in an acting class, have been sent into the performing space to do improv with the only instructions being: A has something and B wants it. As they try to figure out who their characters are and what they want, they get tangled in a discussion of sexual politics and risk-taking in theater. NEW YORK TODAY was a fifteen-minute 9/11 memorial play, presented in NYC in 2002. OUT TO LUNCH began life as a ten-minute comedy sketch with the Oxford Comedy Revue Workshop. It was later done by the comedy troupes Lost Cat and The New York Hysterical Society in NYC. It has been staged as a short play in Kansas City and Oregon. Recently, it was done as an animated piece by the Intergalactic Space Rangers. (See: my film page.) Alan asks his co-worker Margaret to have sex with him. But Margaret suspects that Alan has a hidden agenda; he really wants to have lunch with her. OUT TO LUNCH is in an Applause Books anthology of five-minute plays. [See: Below, for an excerpt from a review of the book in the British Theatre Guide in 2017.] |
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IGNORANCE IS BRIS is about ten-fifteen minutes long. It has been produced three times in NYC, including once in the Samuel French Festival. It has also gone up in Beverly Hills, Brooklyn, Queens and Massachusetts. Rachel and Danny are fuming and fighting as they wrap presents for his nephew's bris. Rachel feels Danny has framed her as anti-circumcision to his family, though Rachel is also Jewish, so this ceremony will be awkward to attend. And she thinks Danny played down his own doubts about circumcision; she accuses him of being disloyal. They debate aspects of their marriage, and also whether they think circumcising a baby boy is an ethical thing to do. These photographs are of Sharon Chaitin-Pollak and Daniel Dolinov in the Theatre@First production Surprise Kisses, an evening of short plays which included IGNORANCE IS BRIS, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That production was directed by Margaret Mays.
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INTERPRETING A DREAM is a ten/fifteen-minute bi-lingual play in English and Spanish. Ivania has been called to the high school principal's office because, although she has been in the US for a while, she refuses to learn English. Ariel has been called from class to translate. She uses discretion in how she does this; when the principal launches a boring story or attempt at humor in English, she cuts to the chase in Spanish, and when Ivania says something critical about English as a language or the US, Ariel puts things more tactfully. Ivania says she doesn't really live in the US; she lives in her mind, in an image she keeps of herself in her bedroom in her own country, looking out at the courtyard, playing her abuelita's records on the phonograph. And as the principal and Ariel discuss her case, Ivania gets up and goes to that dreamspace that is most real to her. INTERPRETING A DREAM has been produced four times in NYC. One production came out to NCC, the community college on Long Island where I used to teach. It has gone up in Chicago's Bailiwick Directors' Fest and at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan. It has been published in the magazine Luna and in the anthology The Art of the One-Act, and most recently in 25 10-Minute Plays for Teens, published by Applause Books.
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THE OTHER WOMAN is a ten-minute play first produced in the 6 Women Playwriting Festival in Colorado. It has also been produced here in Nashville, Tennessee. Trent decides to "come clean" and introduce the two women he is involved with to each other. But it turns out that the women are old college friends, and if Trent was expecting a big cat-fight over him, then things do not go as planned ... It was to have been produced in Vancouver, Canada in the Masculinities festival, postponed due to the pandemic, and it has been chosen to be produced by the Ritz Theatre in Haddon Township, NJ in their 10-Minute Comedy Play Festival, when it is safe to stage that festival. In 2019, THE OTHER WOMAN was recorded as a podcast with a talk-back session afterward by Panglossian Productions in their Best Of All Possible Podcast series:
EMIT TIME is an odd little ten-minute play, written in response to a call for plays about palindromes. They liked my play but did not get other submissions. (Gee, I wonder why?) Otto and Anna discuss palindromes and ideas in a rather circular way. The play has been produced once, in Ohio. It's been published in the British on-line magazine The Cro Magnon.
THE CHILD IS THE MOTHER OF THE WOMAN is a twenty-minute play, produced once in Cornwall, NY. It had a staged reading in Nashville. It was chosen by 2Cents Theatre Group in Hollywood, California to be in their 28th Ink Fest of Plays -- postponed due to the pandemic in 2020. Margaret tries to reason with her difficult teenager Meg, who is very much like her and used to be close to her -- until she found out that she is not Margaret's daughter, but rather her clone.
WHAT'S HELD BACK, produced in Chicago, in Otherworld Theatre's Paragon Festival in 2019, is a ten-minute play. It is set in a dystopian, almost cyber-punk future. Brandon Prince is the scion of an important business family. He has grown up with Lottie Scrim as his "comforter" -- a girl who gives him emotional support and sexual comfort and whatever he wants from her. She soothes him, and commiserates with his troubles, and clucks over him, and tells him how wonderful he is. She is a poor girl whose family lives out in a hazardous region, and her job as a comforter in a fine home means perks and protection for them. But Brandon has just been humiliated by an uncle at a family board meeting. He blames Lottie; he says spending so much time with her has made him "soft." He goads her to express how she really feels about him, and threatens her family -- and he finally gets more than he bargained for. A 2020 production with Act 1 in Nashville got scuttled by the pandemic.
PUPPETS DALLYING has had four productions in NYC, plus one in upstate New York, a high school and a college in New Jersey, the Dorset Playhouse in Vermont and a college in Pennsylvania. I directed it in the Samuel French Festival. A family appears on a talk show. Young Hamlet is miserable because his mother has shacked up with his father's brother. Gertie and Claude are all over each other, even on the show, which disgusts him. Ophelia is the "surprise" guest; he does not treat her well when she appears on the set. And he has harsh words for Cindy, the host of the show, and the way she provides entertainment by parading families like his in public, so the audience can ogle their shame and misery. The play is ten to fifteen minutes long.
THE CHILD IS THE MOTHER OF THE WOMAN is a twenty-minute play, produced once in Cornwall, NY. It had a staged reading in Nashville. It was chosen by 2Cents Theatre Group in Hollywood, California to be in their 28th Ink Fest of Plays -- postponed due to the pandemic in 2020. Margaret tries to reason with her difficult teenager Meg, who is very much like her and used to be close to her -- until she found out that she is not Margaret's daughter, but rather her clone.
WHAT'S HELD BACK, produced in Chicago, in Otherworld Theatre's Paragon Festival in 2019, is a ten-minute play. It is set in a dystopian, almost cyber-punk future. Brandon Prince is the scion of an important business family. He has grown up with Lottie Scrim as his "comforter" -- a girl who gives him emotional support and sexual comfort and whatever he wants from her. She soothes him, and commiserates with his troubles, and clucks over him, and tells him how wonderful he is. She is a poor girl whose family lives out in a hazardous region, and her job as a comforter in a fine home means perks and protection for them. But Brandon has just been humiliated by an uncle at a family board meeting. He blames Lottie; he says spending so much time with her has made him "soft." He goads her to express how she really feels about him, and threatens her family -- and he finally gets more than he bargained for. A 2020 production with Act 1 in Nashville got scuttled by the pandemic.
PUPPETS DALLYING has had four productions in NYC, plus one in upstate New York, a high school and a college in New Jersey, the Dorset Playhouse in Vermont and a college in Pennsylvania. I directed it in the Samuel French Festival. A family appears on a talk show. Young Hamlet is miserable because his mother has shacked up with his father's brother. Gertie and Claude are all over each other, even on the show, which disgusts him. Ophelia is the "surprise" guest; he does not treat her well when she appears on the set. And he has harsh words for Cindy, the host of the show, and the way she provides entertainment by parading families like his in public, so the audience can ogle their shame and misery. The play is ten to fifteen minutes long.
APHRODITE'S DUNGEON II: GIVE ME ADONIS! is about an hour long. For a while the Looking Glass Theatre in NYC was running a bawdy late-night cabaret show about ancient Greek gods and Goddesses and culture. I wrote the second installment. It featured a sketch in which Zeus bumps into Jehovah and tries to sell him on the idea of knocking up a mortal maiden, one where Socrates comes out to give his Apology ("I'm really, really sorry!") and it had Mirth, one of the graces, as a really cheesy stand-up comic with material like: "Hey, Orpheus! Look behind you! No, really, look behind you, I think you dropped something! Made you look -- psych!" That was about the level of it . . .
SEX WITH YOUR EX is a monologue play, produced once in NYC and once in Nashville. A woman explains how and why she wound up moving to Nashville, and writing a song called "Sex With Your Ex." (The song is on my first album, Brooklyn Cowgirl.) _CDBabyBrooklynCowgirl
Here is the end of the play with Monica Ortega doing an amazing job in the role (she was cast less than a week before the show opened, and learning a ten-minute monologue play and doing it with feeling in so short a time is quite a feat) in Tennessee Women Theater Project's Women's Work Festival:
Here is the end of the play with Monica Ortega doing an amazing job in the role (she was cast less than a week before the show opened, and learning a ten-minute monologue play and doing it with feeling in so short a time is quite a feat) in Tennessee Women Theater Project's Women's Work Festival:
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(Below and right -- photos taken by Andrew Watkins of NIGHT OF THE LIVING RELATIVES from Bite-Sized Theatre's Halloween Spooktacular in NYC in 2019.)
NIGHT OF THE LIVING RELATIVES is a ten-minute play that Tom Delfino has made into a short film. The play appears in the Smith & Kraus anthology The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2012:
_BestTenMinutePlays The play has been produced in NYC several times, and in Nashville. John and Sally, a married couple, bicker while waiting for John's undead zombie sister Rose to serve them food. But Rose becomes unruly, Sally is angry that John lied and does not have a gun on hand to shoot Rose through the head if she becomes violent -- and the zombie problem all over the neighborhood may be getting out of hand. ISMENE'S PRESS CONFERENCE was produced in Buffalo, NY and had a staged reading in Nashville. It is published on-line, in Xenith: _ISMENE'S PRESS CONFERENCE It is a re-imagining of Sophocles' play Antigone. Ismene Kadmos is reporter on Thebes TV, as well as the niece of Kreon, King of Thebes; she is trying to overcome a traumatic/shameful family history and build her own life and career. Ismene's radical sister Antigone demands that Ismene help Antigone sabotage the latest election because Uncle Kreon steals elections through easily hacked, touch-screen computerized voting machines with no paper trail. Ismene is horrified and refuses but does not turn Antigone in. When Ismene realizes that the new computer program to "adjust" the exit polls is fraudlent, she gets into a discussion with Bob, her boss, about what journalism is and the right thing to do . . . and Ismene is left with a choice to make. I have removed one character since the play appeared in Xenith. Now the play only has three characters: Ismene, Antigone and Bob. I'm afraid this play has become topical once again . . . and it is published as a stand-alone script by Brooklyn Publishers. ISMENE'S PRESS CONFERENCE |
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THE PLAY'S THE THING is a ten-minute play, produced once in South Carolina. Two characters, one right-wing and one left-wing, attempt to collaborate on a play, or at least that is the dream of the earnest lefty character, who wants to incorporate both points of view in a balanced way into the script, but he is mocked and baited by the right-winger, until both are shouting . . .
LIVING IN A ROAD MOVIE has been produced in the Bolder Life Festival in Boulder, Colorado. Teenage Trey tries to reason with his father in the break room of the megastore where Dad works, saying they can't keep on living in the van parked in a neighbor's driveway; they have to admit they are homeless and do what is best for Trey's younger brother Scottie . . . but Dad cannot face reality, and is caught up in the idea that they can pretend it's all an adventure, a glorious road trip for him and his boys across the country. The play is published by Brooklyn Publishers as a stand-alone script:
_LIVINGINAROADMOVIE
THE EMPEROR'S INTERVIEW was produced by Dog Story Theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Emperor comes for a TV interview in boxer shorts, explaining he's very smart and he bought the beautiful material for his new suit of clothes, the best ever, a lot of people are saying, from tailors who explained that only smart people can see the cloth ... and the journalists at the station and the Emperor's PR person take it from there. The play has been published in Qu Literary magazine:
LIVING IN A ROAD MOVIE has been produced in the Bolder Life Festival in Boulder, Colorado. Teenage Trey tries to reason with his father in the break room of the megastore where Dad works, saying they can't keep on living in the van parked in a neighbor's driveway; they have to admit they are homeless and do what is best for Trey's younger brother Scottie . . . but Dad cannot face reality, and is caught up in the idea that they can pretend it's all an adventure, a glorious road trip for him and his boys across the country. The play is published by Brooklyn Publishers as a stand-alone script:
_LIVINGINAROADMOVIE
THE EMPEROR'S INTERVIEW was produced by Dog Story Theater in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The Emperor comes for a TV interview in boxer shorts, explaining he's very smart and he bought the beautiful material for his new suit of clothes, the best ever, a lot of people are saying, from tailors who explained that only smart people can see the cloth ... and the journalists at the station and the Emperor's PR person take it from there. The play has been published in Qu Literary magazine:
LIKEWISE is a ten-minute play, produced once in Queens, once in Buffalo and once in Maryland. It has had two staged readings in Nashville. Marsha comes over to the apartment of her ex, Andy. She says she is touched and surprised that he now wants to be friends, after their nasty breakup. He says after all, it was three years of their lives and there were some good times . . . but do either of them mean what they are saying, or is she hoping that she will get custody of Andy's cat Celeste, whom she misses -- and does Andy hope Marsha will take Celeste, also? The picture to the left shows actors Andy Herr and Andréa Andolina in the production of LIKEWISE in Buffalo Quickies in Buffalo, New York, directed by Joyce Stilson.
ASSERTIVENESS TRAINING began life as a comedy sketch when I was the only woman writer working with a would-be TV comedy show called The New York Hysterical Society. Four really good women showed up at the auditions, but the producer did not see a need for more than one or two women in the company. I wanted all four to shine at call-backs, but neither I nor anyone had written material that would allow them to -- so I tailored this sketch to their talents. All four of them got into the company; they knocked it out of the park. Assertiveness Training has been produced as a ten-minute play in Kansas and in Kansas City, MO, at a college in Los Angeles, in New Jersey, in Dorset, Vermont. It was published on-line in Wings. Two seriously wussy women take an assertiveness-training course with two very strong women that the wusses initially cringe before, but then they get mad and protective of each other -- which is the whole idea and their first break-through . . .
THE LOCKER ROOM also began life as a ten-minute comedy sketch -- when I was writing and performing with the Sarah Lawrence College Comedy Workshop. It got produced again at the Oxford Union in the Oxford Comedy Revue Workshop. Back in the US, it has been produced as a short play twice in NYC and once in New Jersey in the Jersey Voices Festival. It was published in The Rockford Review, and in the college textbook Access: Literature.
_ACCESS:LITERATURE
A guy brags to his buddies in the locker room about all the philosophers and philosophical ideas he got a girl to discuss on a date. Finally, a lonely nerd speaks up and tells him he shouldn't discuss and tell. The other guys stand over him, demanding to know what he would talk about on a date. He's not great with ideas -- but finally he says that if he went out with a girl like Sally, he'd let her know he didn't just want her for her mind. He wants her for her, as a unique physical person, with a body unlike anyone else has . . . When the guys get done laughing at him, they head off for the library.
WE'RE BEING WATCHED, like LIKEWISE, premiered in Queens in the LIC One-Act Festival. Cory and Janice sit outside. Cory is happy to be spending time with his fiancee. But Janice has an uncanny sensation that they are being watched. Is it the audience that she senses? Or, as Cory lectures her about how crazy and irrational she is -- is she sensing some force or sixth sense, telling her that marrying Cory would be a bad idea? It's a ten-minute play. WE'RE BEING WATCHED was produced again in the LIC One-Act Festival, this time at the Secret Theatre, in 2017. Don Carter directed that production. Victoria Anne Miller played Janice. If you'd like to watch it on vimeo, at the link below the picture, you need to use the password: secret
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WOOING OLIVIA was produced once, in Queens, and has had a staged reading in Nashville. It runs fifteen minutes. Two women, disguised as male actors in Elizabethan England, rehearse a scene from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. One is a girl playing a boy playing a girl. The other is a girl playing a boy playing a girl playing a boy. Complicating their situation is that each is attracted to the other, assuming the other to truly be male, but each has to keep pretending to be male also . . . Will Shakespeare wanders in and reflects on how compelling adrogynous young people can be, like the young man to whom he writes sonnets. In this production at the Secret Theatre in Queens, directed by 'Bert Brink, Dina Desmone plays Olivia, Elizabeth Gracian plays Viola and Linus Gelber plays Will:
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It has been published in an anthology of GLBT short plays.
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FIGHTING WITH MOM is a ten-minute play. It has been produced once in NYC, twice in New Jersey (including once at the Leonia Players' Guild), in Tennessee and in Wisconsin. A teen and her mother face off over the issue of cigarette smoking -- and how Mom communicates about that and everything else. The play is published as a stand-alone script by Brooklyn Publishers: _FIGHTING WITH MOM .
BUG RESCUING is a twenty minute play that has had staged reading in NYC and Nashville. It has been produced in Los Angeles, and in Chatham, New Jersey. I wrote it originally for a competition to be staged in and around the swimming pool on the roof of a hotel in NYC. It didn't win but that's standard for me; I get an idea for a play for a specific kind of competition, don't win, and something else happens . . . Michael comes looking for his girlfriend Joan at a Caribbean resort where his company is having a conference. She has withdrawn from the main activities; she is rescuing dead and dying bugs from the resort pool and setting them down in the grass. She tells him that since she was a kid, it made her feel god-like and powerful when wilted, rescued bugs came back to life. She knows she's a nerd, she's sorry she's depressed, but she hates being here, he should not have brought her, they should not be together, she wants to be back home in the city making her unhealthy art in her cluttered studio; she will never fit into his happy corporate world. Michael acknowledges that they are very different but he thinks they have a fighting chance. He helps her loosen up and see him as a stranger guy than he seems, as they are splashing and kicking their feet over the side of the pool. In a reading or in a full production, the pool edge can be represented by the edge of the stage. This still is from the Jersey Voices Festival in 2018, a production of BUG RESCUING directed by Lauri MacMillan, with Jackie Jacobi as Joan and Matt McCarthy as Michael. NJ Arts Maven, in a review, said of this production that the play contains "a touching reminder that even the most seemingly incompatible couple can find commonality. It's an optimistic idea in a world full of pessimism."
TIMESHARE is a ten-minute play that had two staged readings in Nashville. It was first produced in my hometown of Leonia, New Jersey in the summer of 2018, and it was produced in 2019 in Northport, Long Island. Rob runs into Nancy at an odd hour in their favorite bar -- each of them has been avoiding it, afraid of meeting the other. He proposes a timeshare arrangement; each of them can hang out with their formerly mutual friends there on certain designated nights, and their nasty breakup won't affect their leisure time. But old feelings come to the fore as they talk, which complicates the situation . . .
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This play has had a reading for a radio show/podcast in upstate New York, followed by an interview with me: Onstage/Offstage TIMESHARE was also produced for several weekends in Nashville in the summer of 2019, by Act 1, as part of their One-Act Wednesdays series. TIMESHARE was published in 2020 in the Seven Hills Review, as it won 1st Place in the Ten Minute Plays category in a competition run by the Tallahassee Writers Association in Florida. |
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DIGGING MYSELF DEEPER IN is a very short monologue play about a person protesting too much and becoming unhinged as he/she attempts to explain, excuse and apologize for him/herself to the audience. ("You think I'm paranoid, don't you? Don't you?" . . ."I know I apologize too much, and I'm sorry about that, I'm working on that" . . . "I'm not in denial! I'm not!") It was produced once in NYC and once in Cambridge, England. It is published in JAC Publishing’s collection of monologues InterJACtions, Volume III. And it was produced in Brooklyn in Gi60 -- where they played it to another actor, not the audience.
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THE POE-STER is a ten-minute play in verse, riffing on Poe's poem "The Raven." A college student is cramming for an English lit exam and trying to get over a break-up -- when his Edgar Allan Poe poster starts talking to him. The play has been produced once in Buffalo Quickies in Buffalo,where director Joyce Stilson changed the student to a young woman, played by Bethany Sparacio, and once in Queens in the LIC One-Act Festival. It's been chosen to be in KDC Theatre's Writing on the Wall -- their Full Stack show done live on Zoom in London in 2020.
GETTING PLAYED was produced in Scarsdale, NY. Later, it was produced in the LIC One-Act Festival, and was published in one of their anthologies. Autumn is in the home of Bobby, a music producer who says he was impressed by her EPK. He talks about changes he'd like to make to her image and music, and explains some of her songs to her, like her song "Sometimes a Player Gets Played." He feels some of her songs are too folky and introspective and her image is not sexy enough; you have to do what it takes to get played on the radio. Bobby gets kind of flirty with her, but when he notices she is recording their conversation on her phone in her bag, and she admits that she is doing a college sociology project on sexism in the music industry, things get very ugly and confrontational. He tells her how he thinks people like her ruin rock and roll, and she tells him how she thinks people like him ruin it . . . It's a ten/fifteen-minute play.
PERFORMANCE ART is a ten-minute play. Two women come to what they think is a performance art installation of the artist Hecuba Rosenblatt. To them, it appears to be a theater space. One is Hecuba's friend and defends against charges that Hecuba's work is gimmicky and pretentious. They examine the "audience" in this space -- people sitting in rows -- and speculate about whether they are getting paid to be part of the performance art experiment. Unless -- could these two women unwittingly be part of the performance art piece themselves? I directed a staged reading of this play in Nashville, and I was startled to find video of another staged reading I did not know about on youtube:
PERFORMANCE ART has been produced in "The Art Gallery" -- with the Heartland Theatre Company in Illinois. It also was a finalist in the Secret Theatre Festival.
Here is one performance in that Secret Theatre Act One: One Act Festival in Long Island City, Queens in 2016. Barbara McGlamery directed and plays Barbara. Louise Favier plays Kiley: |
PULVERIZED! is another ten-minute play. It has been produced in Brooklyn, NYC and in the Bailiwick Directors' Fest in Chicago, where the image to the left was used. That terrific Chicago director, Rocco Ayala, wanted to make a film of it -- but a film director over ten years ago optioned it and assured me she would film it right away and refused to put in a reversion clause -- and I let her do it. She never made the film and would not let me buy the rights back -- and I feel she walked off with a piece of my soul. It's a play I feel strongly about. It dramatizes a situation that happens in America every day. Three ten-year old kids are playing, one finds a gun in a drawer in the house, and things start to feel scary. The picture on the right shows actors London Griffith and Logan McCoy from the MTW Works' show Fireworks: Gun Control; that production of PULVERIZED! was directed by Joan Kane. Torrent Theatre also did a fine production:
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BOOK OF LIFE premiered in 2019 in Skypilot Theatre's Future Shock Festival in California. It won the Audience Award. It's one of my ten-minute SF plays set in a not-so-great future. A woman goes to a library in her new, exclusive community to take out a YA story -- but it's a story she wants to live as virtual reality. She describes to the librarian the talents of the teenager she wants to be in this reality, the kind of family she wants to have, and what an active, socially adept, fearless personality she wants her avatar to possess.
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BOOK OF LIFE had a reading with Theatrikos Theatre Company in Flagstaff, Arizona, also in 2019. |
UNTETHERED was produced in Playbytes by Playwrights in Lowell, Michigan in the Fall of 2019. It's a ten-minute play about a woman in shock after a breakup: agonizing over losing the guy she loves. She has shown up at the apartment of a college friend she has not seen in a long time; the guy she has been living with discouraged his girlfriend from maintaining her friendships. The old friend talks about how she herself was nearly destroyed by losing one guy -- but how, over time, one remembers and values things one had to give up, including old friends ... This play had a reading in August 2019 with Drunken Owl Theatre in Seattle. It won the William Faulkner Literary Competition in the One Act Play Category in 2019.
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UNPRODUCED ONE-ACT PLAYS
SOME ARE DEAD AND SOME ARE LIVING is a ten-minute play about three friends, about to graduate from college, gathering to say goodbye, in an improvised ceremony, to a friend who killed herself several years earlier. They thank her for things, they curse her for things, and the songwriter the dead girl used to harangue, and urge to write a song as good as "In My Life," sings a song about talking to her late friend in her head, every day.
HUMAN NATURE (CLOCK OF THE HEART) is a ten-minute play. Three teenage girls hang out in the room of one of them, in the 1980s, listening to albums, talking of Boy George and Michael Jackson, and other concerns.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD is a ten-minute play. Two college students talk about elephants, how intelligent they are, the ivory trade, the incredible rate at which they are being slaughtered. One student is paralyzed by the horror of it -- cannot focus on studies. While they talk, a screen shows a video of Suda the elephant in Thailand painting a picture of an elephant.
GRAVE ROBERT is a thirty-minute play in verse. A young white man who had a strange, sheltered childhood, raised by an over-protective mother who fed him a steady diet of classical English poetry has broken with all that, and with his mother. He enters a rap battle, and tells/raps his story in the course of it.
BETWEEN LIVES is a ten-minute play. Three women cross paths in a hotel lobby. An older woman waits to use the computer in the office space, feeling put out because she is not staying at her son's house though she flew in for her grandson's high school graduation. A college student argues loudly with her parents over her phone about the reasons why she has left college. With all the pain family brings these two, the third woman creeps them out: her absence of affect and lack of connections; how she just drifts between lives, traveling from hotel to hotel. This play has had two staged readings in Nashville.
FLUIDITY CHALLENGED is a longer one-act set in a future in which most people are non-binary. Some fish are hermaphroditic, and can change genders, at will; in this future, nanobots treat human babies in utero with genes from these fish, giving all people the ability, when they reach sexual maturity, to change gender over the course of weeks and months, and then switch back, or partially express more than one gender, or become asexual or gender neutral. In this largely utopian future, in which society enjoys a great deal of creativity and far less crime, mental illness and violence than in our world, a couple have announced they wish to become "gender-stuck" or "frozen" in their gender roles; they want the fish genes removed, and wish to live together as a man and a woman forever. Two therapists have to talk to this couple, together and apart, and determine whether they are sane and whether they should be allowed to undergo this procedure.
HACKING TYLER is a ten-minute SF play I co-wrote with Ron Reed. Tyler's friend Finley comes to visit; Tyler has become insufferable since Tyler rented out head space to Gordon Bollinger and the Transparency Party ... and the programming never seems to have left. Tyler accuses Finley of trying to "hack" Tyler's head -- but Finley insists Tyler has already been hacked ...
GUILT AND SHAME is yet another ten-minute SF play. It's set in a colony on Mars under a bubble dome -- a Puritan colony. Two people face the audience, each with their hands and heads held in place by a pillory/stocks. They are being publicly punished by the Puritan community, and they debate the fairness of it, and whether it is more important to avoid guilt than shame.
WHAT WE CAST OFF, WHAT WE KEEP is a twenty-minute play about two women, old friends who have not talked for decades, in part because the husband of one disapproved of the other. Now, that husband has gone off with another woman, and the jilted wife looks up her old friend, who has married an eccentric guy who wanders in and out of their reunion. The play received a special award from Theatre in the Raw in Canada in 2020, in their Biennial Play Writing Contest:
SOME ARE DEAD AND SOME ARE LIVING is a ten-minute play about three friends, about to graduate from college, gathering to say goodbye, in an improvised ceremony, to a friend who killed herself several years earlier. They thank her for things, they curse her for things, and the songwriter the dead girl used to harangue, and urge to write a song as good as "In My Life," sings a song about talking to her late friend in her head, every day.
HUMAN NATURE (CLOCK OF THE HEART) is a ten-minute play. Three teenage girls hang out in the room of one of them, in the 1980s, listening to albums, talking of Boy George and Michael Jackson, and other concerns.
ELEPHANT GRAVEYARD is a ten-minute play. Two college students talk about elephants, how intelligent they are, the ivory trade, the incredible rate at which they are being slaughtered. One student is paralyzed by the horror of it -- cannot focus on studies. While they talk, a screen shows a video of Suda the elephant in Thailand painting a picture of an elephant.
GRAVE ROBERT is a thirty-minute play in verse. A young white man who had a strange, sheltered childhood, raised by an over-protective mother who fed him a steady diet of classical English poetry has broken with all that, and with his mother. He enters a rap battle, and tells/raps his story in the course of it.
BETWEEN LIVES is a ten-minute play. Three women cross paths in a hotel lobby. An older woman waits to use the computer in the office space, feeling put out because she is not staying at her son's house though she flew in for her grandson's high school graduation. A college student argues loudly with her parents over her phone about the reasons why she has left college. With all the pain family brings these two, the third woman creeps them out: her absence of affect and lack of connections; how she just drifts between lives, traveling from hotel to hotel. This play has had two staged readings in Nashville.
FLUIDITY CHALLENGED is a longer one-act set in a future in which most people are non-binary. Some fish are hermaphroditic, and can change genders, at will; in this future, nanobots treat human babies in utero with genes from these fish, giving all people the ability, when they reach sexual maturity, to change gender over the course of weeks and months, and then switch back, or partially express more than one gender, or become asexual or gender neutral. In this largely utopian future, in which society enjoys a great deal of creativity and far less crime, mental illness and violence than in our world, a couple have announced they wish to become "gender-stuck" or "frozen" in their gender roles; they want the fish genes removed, and wish to live together as a man and a woman forever. Two therapists have to talk to this couple, together and apart, and determine whether they are sane and whether they should be allowed to undergo this procedure.
HACKING TYLER is a ten-minute SF play I co-wrote with Ron Reed. Tyler's friend Finley comes to visit; Tyler has become insufferable since Tyler rented out head space to Gordon Bollinger and the Transparency Party ... and the programming never seems to have left. Tyler accuses Finley of trying to "hack" Tyler's head -- but Finley insists Tyler has already been hacked ...
GUILT AND SHAME is yet another ten-minute SF play. It's set in a colony on Mars under a bubble dome -- a Puritan colony. Two people face the audience, each with their hands and heads held in place by a pillory/stocks. They are being publicly punished by the Puritan community, and they debate the fairness of it, and whether it is more important to avoid guilt than shame.
WHAT WE CAST OFF, WHAT WE KEEP is a twenty-minute play about two women, old friends who have not talked for decades, in part because the husband of one disapproved of the other. Now, that husband has gone off with another woman, and the jilted wife looks up her old friend, who has married an eccentric guy who wanders in and out of their reunion. The play received a special award from Theatre in the Raw in Canada in 2020, in their Biennial Play Writing Contest:
My short play Frame Within a Frame was written for a competition run by Emerald Theatre in Memphis, and it won 1st Place. They plan to produce it.
WISHES is a five-minute play. A heavy-set girl in junior high or high school is bullied and harassed, and then gets up in a school assembly and reads a poem she wrote. This play is published by Applause Books in the anthology 5-Minute Plays for Teens. So, who knows? Maybe it has been produced somewhere, after all ...
UNENDING DRAMA starts with a cat fight between two women on a soap opera, dressed to the nines, each desperate to possess a guy named Rex. When the director tells them to take a break, the women playing those characters hang out and talk of various things, including what a jerk the guy who plays Rex is -- which complicates their performance, once shooting resumes and he enters the scene. This ten-minute play had a reading in Nashville and it was a 2016 finalist for the Heideman Award with the Actors Theatre of Louisville. It had a reading in July 2019 in the Women's Theatre Festival of North Carolina's show Occupy the Stage.
PRIVATE DICK is a ten-minute play. It was chosen in 2020 to be part of the 4th Annual 10-Minute Play Festival to be staged by the Centers for the Performing Arts Bonita Springs in Florida -- probably to be fully produced by them, when it is safe to do so. A production was canceled, due to the pandemic. They published it in their Stage It! 4 volume of winners. It's about a delusional detective who seems to think he is living in an old film noir. He gets approached by a mysterious woman who is not all that she seems.
CATCHING UP WITH JOAN OF ARC is a ten-minute play. Three women meet up at their high school's 30th reunion. Each has different feelings about it, and very different reasons for being there. This play had a reading in Nashville. As with WISHES, and PRIVATE DICK, this play is unproduced but it is now published. It was a winner in a Stage It! competition in Florida, and they have put out an anthology. They gave it a staged reading in November, 2019.
