Back in high school, Ronnie, Val and Daryl made a vow to take care of one another if any of them got sick. When Ronnie’s abusive homelife and mental illness test their vows, the three separate to start new lives. Years later, when Ronnie is found wandering the streets of Trenton, NJ, Daryl and Val reluctantly reunite to try to get Ronnie the treatment she should have gotten years ago. In the process, old wounds are reopened, and the three friends are forced to confront how they failed one another in the past, as well as the need to forgive one another in the present.

• Cast Size: 3W 1M
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Just how well do you know all your “friends” on social media? In this fast-moving “light comedy about dark people leading private lives in public places,” when the grieving Charlie Windsor meets the gregarious Diana Black-White in a New York Theater District bar they become instant BFFs. Much to the consternation of his closest friend since childhood, Broadway actor Ed McGrath, Charlie is almost immediately hurled into an overwhelming whirl of dark secrets, questionable loyalties, and highly dysfunctional family dynamics; a world for which Charlie is completely unprepared. Goddess Of The Hunt is a gleefully silly homage to those romantic comedy thrillers of the 1960s via Roman mythology, updated to the creepy, contemporary world of social media and – perhaps too much – information sharing.

• Cast Size: 4M 1W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Cassie, a young LDS woman who has spent years in Chicago, returns to her family home in Utah in July 2015 to mark the tenth anniversary of her father’s death. Her visit comes soon after the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage. As she reconnects with her cultural and religious roots, Cassie and her family struggle with how the deeply held beliefs of the LDS faith shape their views on family and personal happiness. Amid these tensions, they navigate the complexities of faith, identity, and love in a changing world.

• Cast Size: 3M 6W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Renowned author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has spent years in pursuit of contact with the other side. Famed magician Harry Houdini has been on a parallel journey–to debunk the very notion. With the help of the brash and unpredictable medium Mina Crandon, the two come to the table for one final seance. The baggage all three bring with them results in a chaotic and strange experience that none will ever forget. In an era when society’s relationship to truth and evidence was rapidly evolving, what does it mean to ask for one–or receive one?

• Cast Size: 2M 1W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Natalie and Sam Grayson are out for a quiet Sunday morning walk when they find themselves embroiled in an argument with a stranger who kidnaps their dog, Jackson. They report the incident to the police, and their case is assigned to a friendly but vaguely threatening sergeant who insinuates himself into the most hidden parts of their lives. The play examines the nature of irreparable loss, the consequences for our lives, and the slow disappearance from the world of the ancient touchstones we have always relied on for comfort and sustenance.

• Cast Size: 3M 1W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Lucia Beltran, a Mexican immigrant with no political experience, dares to run for City Council in her adopted city. She’s driven by a conviction that the poor deserve better—but her campaign puts everything at risk: her government-funded job, her safety from an obsessive ex, and her place in a country that doesn’t make space for outsiders. With forces pressing in, two voices battle for her soul—Star Spangle, the relentless champion of assimilation, and Santa Lucia, the patron saint of integrity and self-definition. Caught between survival and belief, Lucia must navigate treacherous terrain where identity, justice, and resilience collide. Will she find the strength to stand her ground, or will the system silence her before she’s even heard?

• Cast Size: 4W 4GN
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

A door-slamming comedy about mistaken identity and aborted infidelity. “A Night in the Garden of Eden” is the story of a very conservative gentleman who is inveigled to spend attempting to have one night in the decadent Garden of Eden Speakeasy with a very sexy showgirl during the Roaring 20’s. Of course, this being a farce, everything goes wrong for our would-be-philanderer husband, including finding his wife at the Garden of Eden finding his wife with at the Garden of Eden with another man.

• Cast Size: 5M 3W 1GN
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Mandy Gladstone is struggling to write a play about her father Clark, an inventor. She relives her adolescent fascination with Clark’s secretive nature, his manic episodes, his trips to California, and how, at the end of his life, he received a series of mysterious and threatening postcards from Sadie Hurtz, a giant doll shackled to a chair in an abandoned amusement park trailer. When Mandy herself receives similarly threatening postcards from Sadie, she decides to investigate. Her pursuit of the truth reveals carefully guarded secrets about her family, about her father, and about the haunted nature of creativity.

• Cast Size: 3M 3W
• Running Time: 90+. minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

This contemporary re-imagining of the Joan of Arc story takes place over the course of one night in Oakland in May of 2020, as five teenagers shelter in a candle factory following a George Floyd protest. Stories and timelines combine as moments from the past reverberate into the present, illuminating the revolutionary vision of Joan of Arc, exploring solidarity in the face of oppression, and revealing the way this classic heroine’s spirit continues to permeate our world today. At once humorous and harrowing, this 60-minute chamber piece unravels at a break-neck speed, alternating between realism and an avant-garde theatrical style as the past and present collide, turning the Saint Joan myth on its head and revealing the ways in which each of us is both the savior and destroyer of a world that is burning. 

• Cast Size: 4W 1NB
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Grace, a young teenager, and her sister escape their abusive stepfather after a very scary evening. They are each placed in different foster homes. The home Grace is placed in at first seems to be the perfect place. The truth quickly emerges when she finds herself in a Cinderella-type situation. Grace longs to be loved and supported. She keeps her treatment a secret in hopes of finding what she wants, a family.

• Cast Size: 1M 7W 6GN
• Running Time: 40 minutes
• Royalty Rate: $40 per performance

Shiloh struggles with anxiety as he navigates a day filled with challenges. Desperate for a change, he goes to a wishing well outside of town and makes a wish for a better day. The wishing well’s spirit awakens to grant his wish but warns him of the consequences. Sending Shiloh back in time to relive the day. Initially, everything seems to go right for him, but soon he realizes that his friends and teachers are facing escalating troubles as a result. In a moment of panic, Shiloh calls on the well spirit for help to wish for another chance to make things right, learning that true change comes from facing challenges. Be careful what you wish for.

• Cast Size: 10+ Any
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

The paths of six intriguing characters intersect as they navigate the unpredictable and challenging twists  and turns of aging. On the slide into seniorhood, they encounter relationships and experiences, some painful, some sensual, and some just downright silly. When all is said and done, will they  find that life has  left them with anything more than simple memories?

• Cast Size: 3M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

In the aftermath of Beth’s death, all those she loved, including her feuding daughters, her estranged ex-husband and her overwhelmed fiancé, seek to mourn her in their own way. Instead, however, they are forced to deal with one another and the complicated ties that bind them together because of Beth.

• Cast Size: 2M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Eleven Short Plays and Comedies For and About Today’s Seniors

All you need is a bench!  Choose how many plays to use.  You could add projections. Or plants. Or anything else you can dream up.  But keep it simple. The plays can be produced in any order.  Have fun!

• Cast Size: 2M 3W or More
• Running Time:> 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

In the wake of a devastating school shooting that rocks a quiet Midwestern town, April, a determined Protestant minister, finds herself at a crossroads when her troubled young adult son, Derek, brings the shooter into their home as a hostage. The tension unravels as they confront the moral and emotional turmoil of their situation, grappling with dangerous decisions and unforeseen consequences that could change their lives forever.  

• Cast Size: 7W 4M 6GN
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

For a group of working-class families and desperate dreamers in the Frederick Douglass Housing Projects, the struggle to hold on till morning is a way of life.

• Cast Size: 3M 7W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

HEAVENLY SUNLIGHT takes place in 1984 in the home of a middle-class black family from Haines, Illinois, on the occasion of Calvin (Cal) Thorne’s thirty-fifth birthday. Family pathology is the underlying theme: the ideological brick wall that separates Ben and Cal (father and son); the enabling of Lily toward Cal (mother and son) and her unspoken dread; Jean’s pressure to be the perfect daughter; and Ben’s feeling of invisibility. With the arrival of relatives, the Thomases – Miriam, Ben’s older sister; Abe, Miriam’s conservative husband; and Harris, their son who is on the spectrum – comes competitiveness, resentments, the gay baiting of Cal, and a well-kept family secret. It is a play about dreams deferred, moments missed and great expectations.

• Cast Size: 4M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

In a small New Jersey pub, on the other side of the train tracks that cut through the back of St. Gertrude’s Catholic Cemetery, two desperate strangers—a disgraced cop and an ex-beauty queen—take shelter from a frigid storm and struggle to forge an unlikely bond one lonely Christmas Eve—oh, and it’s also funny. 

From the creator of CEMETERY PUB, WIESENTHAL, and TELL HIM IT’S JACKIE comes Tom Dugan’s latest dark comedy, IRISH GOODBYE—hailed by critics as “genius,” “hilarious,” and “wonderful.”

• Cast Size: 1M 1W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

It’s Still You follows Paige Taylor, a self-made, no-nonsense entrepreneur whose thriving business has left her personal life in the dust. She insists she’s over her ex, Darren—until a surprise run-in in Central Park shakes that certainty. What starts as a casual hello spirals into confessions, unresolved feelings, and one inconvenient truth: Darren is now married. With kids. And claims to be miserable. Against all logic, they reconnect. What follows is a messy, hilarious, and unexpectedly heartfelt journey through flirtation, temptation, denial, and one extremely awkward (and hysterical) encounter with Darren’s wife. As Paige teeters between emotional closure and emotional chaos, she must decide if what she feels is real—or just nostalgia in a better outfit. It’s Still You is a fast-paced romantic comedy about love, regret, and the seductive pull of the past. Sometimes the hardest person to get over… is the one you let get away.

• Cast Size: 2M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

A 3-part psychodrama set in two versions of New York City in 1907: Edith Wharton’s uptown and Jacob Riis’ downtown. Four characters toss their tangled versions of a single narrative back and forth, reenacting unreliable memories, jumping in and out of time, space, character and gender. The fifth character is Delancey Morris, who’s never seen, but holds the others’ lives in the balance. In Leisure, Grace’s Hunter’s closeted husband Harry has just committed suicide, so she and her maid Lucy reenact the events leading up to his death, including Grace’s affair with Delancey. Labor rewinds to the days right before Harry’s suicide, with events told from the point of view of servants, Lucy and Gilbert. Lust fast forwards to moments before Harry’s suicide, where a still alive Harry expands the narrative even further, reliving his tortured life as a closeted man and years-long love affair with, again, Delancey Morris.

Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Cast Size: 2M 2W

Running Time: 90+ minutes

Aphra publishes an article detrimental to her ex-husband, Professor Oliver Randall, and he confronts her about it. Did Oliver help Aphra or did he take advantage of her, as she asserts in her article? Aphra brings up the past and how a much-older Oliver manipulated her when she was his student. She accuses him of exerting his power over his female students and blurring the line between seduction and consent. Catharine, another former student of Oliver’s, arrives and together the women recount how Oliver seduced his students with wine and sex games. The women warn him that they have told the college what he has done but Oliver refuses to admit his behavior was improper and he leaves. Helen, the department chair at Oliver’s college, appears in Oliver’s office shortly after with a plan of her own.

• Cast Size: 1M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty rate: $75 per performance

This full-length queer crime family drama follows brothers Danny and Travis Greenwood as they unravel the crime of their deceased sister Willow, and who exactly killed her. As Danny and Travis formulate a plan to catch the killer, we realize that Travis’ wife Erin may be hiding her sexuality and past relationships from both current partner, Detective Gwyneth Berkeley and her family. All the while, Danny just wishes he could have something to keep Willow alive. To try and rekindle their relationship, Erin decides to propose to Gwyneth during Willow’s funeral celebration nonetheless – which backfires. This sends everyone into a spiral, hurting Danny the most, leading him to try and commit suicide, and landing unconscious in a hospital room and grasping at straws with his former lover. Once Danny recovers, it’s now up to him and Travis to find out who really killed their sister out of love or closure.

• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
• Cast Size: 4M 3W 1NG
• Running Time: 90+ minutes

SWEET is a darkly comic play told through two parallel worlds: a seventeenth-century Hungarian castle ruled by a countess obsessed with eternal youth, and a modern-day trailer in Sweet Home, Oregon, where Jackie, a meth cook battling trauma and codependency, must confront her past when her estranged teenage half-sister arrives unexpectedly for Christmas. As the Countess prepares a grotesque holiday ritual in her dungeon, Jackie scrambles to hide the wreckage of her life. The timelines begin to blur, connected by dreams, memory, and a mounting sense of reckoning. With an all-female cast and a rich blend of twisted humor and sharp insight, Sweet explores cycles of abuse, the cost of survival, and the ghosts we carry through time and across generations.

• Cast Size: 6W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

This Odd Geometry of Time is an exploration of inter sectional feminism and climate change through the guise of a nature documentary following the lives of several notable women from history over the last 260 years and one very spirited bowhead whale named Galina. *all roles can be doubled in production as seen fit*

• Cast Size: 5M 10W 1NB
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

This moving and familiar tale about a puppet, woodcarver, blue lady, and talking cricket is told in a new gender-inclusive way that references popular culture and borrows from different performance styles, including vaudeville, classic cartoons, silent film, and sketch comedy, to ask, “What does it mean to be human?”  Based on the 1883 children’s fantasy novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi, The Tragical, Comical, Historical Adventures of Pinocchio was commissioned by Playmakers of Baton Rouge and produced with a mix of 27 professional and student actors as part of the 2011-2012 main stage season.  It was then workshopped and staged with 9 actors at the 2013 Patti Pace Festival as a keynote performance.

• Cast Size: 2M/TransM/NBM  2W/TransW/NBW  5-23+GENDER NEUTRAL
• Running Time: Under and Hour
• Royalty Rate: $40 per performance

New York playwright Wilber Weinberg is having a hard time coping. His wife Candice accepted a huge promotion in Silicon Valley.  To help, Candice sends Wilber a unique gift– a very talented AI named Goldie. She is a tech-mate who is proficient at just about everything. When director Ben Garrison asks Goldie to help “revise” Wilber’s new scenes, everyone is amazed at her talent. everyone except Wilber that is.  He feels threatened. Consumed by jealousy, Wilber starts self-medicating with vodka tonics.  At intermission for the opening of his new play, the inebriated Wilber threatens to stop the show, claiming it is not his work anymore. What’s worse is when Ben confides to Wilber that he is in love with Goldie, Wilber announces that he’s going to dismantle her, pack her up, and sell her on Ebay. 

• Cast Size: 3M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

When an ominous voice commands Roger to choose six people, he calls out the first six that come to mind. Little does he know, he’ll be stuck with these people, and ONLY these people, for the rest of eternity. With his girlfriend and ex-wife at each other’s throats, his oldest friend feeling betrayed, his mom trying to mother him, and his best friend making things worse by trying to help, Roger’s afterlife isn’t exactly what he expected it to be. Things go from bad to worse as the rules of his afterlife are awkwardly revealed via his “rep,” a voice on the phone, and what the heck is up with Mr. Fluffernutter? Things spin out of control for Roger as his actions in life come back to haunt him in ways he never could have anticipated.  

• Cast Size: 4M 3W 2GN
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Lea, a hoarder, is forced from her house by her two eldest sons, Reg and Gordon, who want flip the property. Lea sees her vast hoard as her legacy and wants to bequeath it to her children. While Reg and Gordon pretend they’re going to treasure her junk forever, Lea’s youngest son Cormac tells her the truth – and Lea disowns him in a fit of rage. From this auspicious start, an age-old plot unfolds in a media drenched, reality TV wasteland. Celebrity wannabe Ember vows she’ll do anything to beat her talented half sister Emily in a battle for YouTube hits. After proving she’s a survivor, Lea finds herself trapped in rehab, and a drag-queen fool called Chance is a lone voice of reason in a world where Twitter wars draw blood.

• Cast Size: 4M 7W 1NB
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

A newly conceived theatrical presentation of the classic tale by Thomas Mann. Join Aschenbach on his summer holiday and watch as his brief vacation quickly becomes a journey of self-discovery and an exploration of the very depths of loneliness and obsession. 

• Cast Size: 1M/M Presenting 
• Running Time: 80 minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm come to the modern age to tell five of their stories, each with a modern twist.

We see Hansel and Gretel told as a manga tale, The White Snake told as a raunchy slapstick comedy, Rumpelstiltskin told as a film noir, Rapunzel as a spy action flick and Little Red Riding Hood as a horror movie. Will these stories still hold up?

• Cast Size: 4M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Cybil is hungry. Hungry for her mother’s attention. Hungry for her dad who left. Hungry for a life where she can just be. Unable to communicate these needs, she makes herself less by not eating and obsessing over “perfect” bodies that she pours over in her magazines. When Lulu, a model from one of her magazines comes to life, Cybil finds herself teaching Lulu how to be a teen in the real world, as Lulu has an intense hunger that can’t be filled. As Cybil becomes smaller and smaller (visually becoming the person she always wanted to be), Lulu finds herself wanting more from the real world, becoming filled by food – and everything in Cybil’s life that she hates as Lulu seemingly starts to become a “real” person. 

• Cast Size: 2M 4W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Karen, in her mid forties, is  a famous female prize winning novelist.

She has made arrangements to meet Alan, in his twenties, the son she gave up at birth. They are meeting in a very nice hotel room in Chicago, a neutral territory for them both. She has been looking forward to this get together hoping to make a permanent connection. Her son though has other thoughts although at first it looks like he is planning to have an enjoyable meeting and he has even brought his camera with him to make a record of the big day as well some of her books for her to autograph. 

• Cast Size: 1M 1W
• Running Time: 30 minutes
• Royalty Rate: $40 per performance

Khaki Chums is based on the unofficial Christmas Day truce that took place between British and German soldiers during World War I. The play takes place on Christmas night, 1914. When young British soldier Danny O’Neill runs from the trenches onto the battlefield to escape the misery of war, he is surprised by Bamey Luntz, a young German soldier. The two peacefully set their weapons aside in honor of the holiday. Soon, British and German soldiers from both sides leave their trenches and embark upon a ceasefire during which they sing carols, share stories, and exchange gifts. As the morning sun begins to rise, the soldiers reluctantly return to their trenches to resume the war.

• Cast Size: 12M+ (can be a mixed cast of men and women)

• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Jenny Robinson didn’t ask to be the last kid in the universe—she just wanted to survive her first day at the after-school program. But when the Earth is suddenly destroyed by the gelatinous tyrant Gor-Bagg, Jenny and her oddball classmate Duncan (who turns out to be an alien) are launched on a galactic journey that includes space pirates, sentient stuffed animals, and a surprisingly smug platypus. Along the way, they join forces with Rikki Rocket and the Catsairs, dodge the hungry Nom Noms, and try to find out if anything of Earth can still be saved. With irreverent humor, absurd detours, and an occasional musical number, this sci-fi comedy celebrates courage, friendship, and figuring out your place in a very big, very weird universe.

• Cast Size: 11M, 10F (extra parts possible, gender flexibility allowed, doubling possible)
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Nicodemus and Asher are just a couple of shepherds trying to stay warm together under the stars in a time and place where that sort of thing could get them killed. When a celestial visitation sends them to witness the birth of a miraculous child, they’re swept into a tide of messianic fervor and prophecy. The star-led masses and a visiting wise man offer hope, but Asher remains cautious. Nicodemus, enthralled by the moment, contemplates abandoning their relationship to pursue a safer, socially sanctioned life with a widow and her sons. As political violence erupts driven by Herod’s fear of a prophesied king the cost of devotion becomes all too real. This queer retelling of the Nativity explores longing, fear, and faith in a world that promises salvation, but doesn’t always deliver it to everyone.  

• Cast Size: 4M 1W 1Boy 
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
  

In the year 3047, aboard a Star Trek-style starship, the crew of the Astrov faces existential drift in a future that feels oddly familiar. On a diplomatic mission, Captain Jonas January transports the brilliant but pompous Professor Jason Cole, his enigmatic green-skinned alien wife Celaria, and the melancholy Doctor Rosy to a conference aboard a distant space station. But tensions bubble beneath the diplomatic surface: Celaria’s aura disrupts the emotions of nearly everyone on board, unearthing buried desires and regrets. Meanwhile, young Ensign Ally longs for love, and Rosy suspects Cole’s illness may be more imagined than real. In the forced proximity of the ship, the crew and guests contemplate love, usefulness, and the bitter comedy of longing in a setting that may be sci-fi, but feels like a drawing room. A Chekhovian tragicomedy with warp drive.  

• Cast Size: 4M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

It’s Halloween night at The Thatcher Theater, a run-down, privately owned movie theater in a quaint small town. As the last movie of the night ends,  three movie theater employees, Ben, an amateur director with big dreams, Ashley, a sarcastic fun seeker, and Kat, a true believer in the theatrical experience, begin to clean up after a busy night.  As they clean, their boss, Rodney, a washed-up voice actor,  gives them instructions before he leaves for the night. After the theater has closed, Ashley encourages Ben and Kat to goof off before cleaning.  During the horseplay of the game, Ashley and Ben inadvertently break an invaluable object, which releases a ghostly visitor. 

• Cast Size: 2M 2W
• Running Time: Under an Hour
• Royalty rate: $40 per performance