Short Form
Ten-Minute Plays
Joanie & Freddie on Valentine’s Day. Produced by Playhouse 44. Director Jennifer Valentine. JOANIE-Lucy Loveland. FREDDIE-Jaden Levitt.
- Compact, Powerful Stories
Ten-Minute Plays
Best Wine with Lemon Muffins
When twin Stephanie is kidnapped to the Nebraska Plains by her could-not-be-more-different twin Cyndi, they comically confront freedoms of adventure versus responsibilities of love, as they try to bury old wounds with a freight train, lupines, and a cemetery where ravenous coyotes, or possibly goats, cast watchful eyes.
Image: ID 287751568 © Elena Veselova | Dreamstime.com
Always a Line
Always a Line can be performed as a single 10-minute play or in conjunction with Permanent Ink for a 20-minute performance. What happens when pork rinds, an old theatre, and a classic Pontiac Firebird collide with Thunder Down Under and a blindfold? Bride-to-be Rae is about to find out when her bestie Karina surprises Rae with her bachelorette party…or is it? Old memories and promises put a hilarious spotlight on change, and test the bonds of childhood days at camp, experiences in college, and what it really means to grow up with a bestie.
Permanent Ink
Permanent Ink can be performed as a single 10-minute play or in conjunction with Always a Line for a 20-minute performance.
The night before Dick’s wedding, his Captain Morgan-loving best man lets lose a secret about the bride-to-be, Rae, and her childhood friend, propelling a drunken Dick to confront her. With the comedic help of the mysteries of life from the ancient, cagey theatre usher Fester, Dick must ponder whether love, permanently ink within in the very tissue of your life, is more real than plastered fear.
Unto the Breach at the Maison de Ville
For 365 Women A Year Inspired by Mrs. (James Oscar) Louise “Mother” Nixon New Orleans, Louisiana – 1857-1947.
Set in 1947 New Orleans, as returning veterans were trying to find their new battles, Louise “Mother” Nixon and her Technical Director Ethel Crumb found their Le Petit Theatre under fire from those who would try to tear down the ramparts. Will Louise find a writer whose words drip like Spanish moss off the Cypress to help Ethel and her as they go “Once more unto the breach, dear friend.” to save the theatre?
The Wrong Taxi?
As the world explodes in many forms, from racism to a virus to gun violence, one threat seems quiet: terrorism. But is it? At the airport, Derrick and Jamal are thrown together, fathers from different worlds trying to do what is best for their families in the midst of terrorism’s ugly consequences…yet again. Will they come together in understanding, or will they blow up like another bomb? The answer lies with a date palm, a hat, and the Red Sox.
Image: ID 19929349 | Airport Taxi © Typhoonski | Dreamstime.com
Italian Now
Freak Out
Three old friends lived through their tumultuous teens in the 1970s, their blossoming twenties in the 1980s, growing into their own as thirty-somethings in the 1990s, and now, as the decades whisk by at break-neck speed, turning fifty is about change and acceptance…or is it? When one friend holds onto the past, do the others want to bring her to the present for her…or for themselves?
White Bra with a Pink Bow
It is 1973 – the year of Billie Jean King, The Partridge Family…and Vietnam. Becca and her friends are entering eighth grade and should be flying high on popularity and first crushes. But Becca made a promise to her dad, a promise she desperately wants to keep even as life propels her forward. With one simple piece of clothing, Becca and her friends confront a terror that haunts them as they try to move forward.
The Perfect Job
Broken Wings on St. Maurice
Trey was always Maggie’s hero but that was before the home they loved as children truly became the city that care forgot. As Maggie longs for a safe cocoon, Trey struggles to find a haven for them both. On this Fat Tuesday evening, as the setting sun turns everything a dusky grey, memory and truth collide on broken wings, and “safe” may be a fragile connection.
Bones of Home
An old woman, a young man: strangers separated by years, ideals and desires, yet drawn together by loss which seems insurmountable. Miriam’s loss may propel her to close the curtain on her life which no longer holds the comfort of old homes and long love. Dillon’s could send him home to a drafty old Treme cottage in New Orleans where he might whisper to the ghosts of his dead parents. Their meeting, on a neglected porch in Provincetown, Mass., could change them both.
*Illustration by Cynthia Secof Hersch
Proverbs
In 1927 New Orleans, the powers-that-be make a decision to blow the levees to save the city, at least that is how they see it. Claude is hell-bent on stopping them and while he tries to entice Eulalie to help, her only concern is getting home to see her long-estranged daughter to try to make things right. The mystery of good and evil come into question with the power resting in the hands of a crazy-eyed Horse-man as the horse-drawn streetcar on which they all ride becomes a prison where sins must be atoned.
“Like Tony Kushner writing Angels in America – and you know he is the only man who could write that – when something is this well done you sit there and say ‘Of course.'” Mark Bly, Dramaturge, Educator, Author.
Sliding
Who You Got to Believe
It is human nature to hold on to and fight for home, even if a structure no longer exists. For slightly-touched, elderly Kathleen, who returns to New Orleans four and a half years after Hurricane Katrina, a set of forlorn concrete steps epitomizes home. With stubborn resolve she refuses to leave. She is visited by tender-hearted, elderly Ray who has been helping re-build New Orleans. He pleads to get her to safety as they struggle with their hope, belief, and the true meaning of home.
“It is truly one of the best examples of a ten minute I’ve read.” Robert Boles, Director, Educator, NPP Playwriting Chair, American College Theatre Festival, Region 1
* Sheilagh Weymouth-AEA and L.B. Williams-AEA in Estrogenius production directed by Zoya Kachadurian in New York City
Everything has a Season
