FINALIST AT THE EUGENE O'NEILL - PUBLISHED BY TRW (Theatrical Rights Worldwide)

"Amid all the crazy plot turns, Downs finds opportunities to make valid statements about our perceptions of art, delusional self-styled "artists" and how art has lost any meaning beyond its value as a commodity." - Kansas City Star.


"How to Steal a Picasso has the audience chuckling by the end of the
first several speeches. It maintains its humor in what the author calls
"farcical reality" all the way through the fast two-act show that is still
able to make its serious points." Broadway World

"A farce with an edge!" – The Kansas City Star

"Amid all the crazy plot turns, Downs finds opportunities to make valid
statements about our perceptions of art, delusional self-styled "artists."
and how art has lost any meaning beyond its value as a commodity." –
The Kansas City Star

Otto Smith's dreams have come true. After a lifetime of struggles as an unknown painter and decades as a tour guide at the Detroit Institute for the Arts, he's won a major art award. But things quickly go wrong when a fifty-million-dollar Picasso is stolen from the museum on the same day that his long-lost son, an alleged art forger, shows up in the Motor City. Soon Otto's family is the chief suspect. This dark comedy looks at what is real and what is counterfeit in this pixilated world where we too often think of artists as employees and art as a mere commodity. How To Steal A Picasso received standing ovations, and its run was extended at the Unicorn Theatre/

SOON TO BE PUBLISHED BY TRW (Theatrical Rights Worldwide - https://trwplays.com/)

A Play Designed For stage or Zoom! When a writer meets the ghost of Franz Kafka it sets off an existential chain of events forcing the cast to confront the meaning of life. This pandemic comedy asks the question, can we justify our existence, or is life one absurd zoom meeting?

FINALIST AT THE EUGENE O'NEILL - WINNER OF THE REVA SHINER COMEDY AWARD from Bloomington Playwrights Project - Runner Up for the McNERNEY PLAYWRITING AWARD - PUBLISHED BY PLAYSCRIPTS

Also available in Spanish "Fuera de órbita"

"For a wildly different evening of fun theater." - Bloomington Herald times

You've heard of reality television; think of it as reality theatre. Mad Gravity is a comedy about Archie and Eudora, two Dada performance artists who have built a theatre in their living room. Every night before a live audience, they act out their lives. They want to build a second experimental space in their kitchen, but they just cannot take any more kitchen-sink realism. Artaud would be proud of them.

Tonight's Theatre of Cruelty performance concerns their teenage daughter, who wants to marry the son of Joe and Mary. All the parties involved have been invited to the house/theatre. But when the kids forget to tell Joe and Mary about the live audience, all hell breaks loose.

Things go from bad to worse when they discover that a comet has been spotted in the night sky. There is a 50/50 chance it will hit the earth. Everyone, including the audience, may have only an hour to live. This forces the parents to stop arguing about insignificant things like marriage and start arguing about great philosophical questions of life: Is the comet a sign from God, or is it just gravity? And what the hell is performance art?

The one-page second act (that's right, the second act is one page long) does something no play has ever attempted in the history of theatre - it lets the audience in on the meaning of life.

PUBLISHED BY SAMUEL FRENCH

Kosher Lutherans is a curveball comedy about an infertile Jewish couple and their desperate attempts to have a baby. One day their dreams come true - they meet a young, naïve, pregnant girl from Iowa who is willing to let them adopt her out-of-wedlock baby. The only problem is the girl doesn’t know they’re Jewish. All she knows about Jews is what her farmer father told her, “They control Hollywood and killed Jesus.” In an attempt not to blow the deal, the couple decides to pose as Lutherans, leading to hysterical twists and turns and a perfect play for the holiday season.

PUBLISHED BY HEUER PUBLISHING

Seagulls In A Cherry Tree is a Chekhovian comedy about Boris and Stan, two Hollywood screenwriters who have been hired by Disney to adapt Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard into a new movie for Mel Gibson. The trek to an isolated Arts Colony just outside Moscow, Idaho, to finish the stalled adaptation and get away from L.A.'s smog. The colony is full of navel-gazing, self-indulgent, philosophizing, chronically indecisive Chekhovian artists, actress, and doctors.

All plot points in Seagulls In A Cherry come from Chekhov's plays (The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull), plus a touch of invention, all of which have been rearranged and shaped to form the first new Chekhov play in a hundred years. In the end, Stan and Boris (just like many Americans today) never realize that they are, in fact living in a Chekhovian world.

PUBLISHED BY PLAYSCRIPTS

Semi-Finalist @ The Eugene O'Neill

Dead White Males is a contemporary, issue-oriented, dark-comedy about the religious right, our schools, and the politics of teaching.

The play uses epic theatre staging techniques to tell the story of Janet Greenberg, a young, idealistic, first-year teacher. She struggles against a school board dominated by the religious right. They want to ban sex education, Holden Caulfield, and evolution from the classroom.

Janet learns how to write a "proper" self-evaluation, how to censor musicals so that they are fit for "young minds," how to deal with countless new mandates, constant curriculum changes, petty political games, all the while learning how to cover her ass in a world dominated by constant accountability.

When Doris, Janet's best friend, has a nervous breakdown (while being forced to teach creationism in her science class), Janet is called to testify against her. She must name names or lose her job.

In the end, Janet learns why there aren't a lot of risk-takers in teaching.

PUBLISHED BY PLAYSCRIPTS

MR. PERFECT is not what you expect in a love story. It is a romantic comedy about a quirky flight attendant who is a romance novel junkie. When she meets Mr. Perfect, she attempts to make love with him in the bathroom of an Airbus 32,000 feet over Dayton, Ohio. When it doesn't work out, she sets out on a personal search to find the purpose of life by connecting the random chance events that make up existence.

Her search leads her to find solace in the arms of a Ph.D. student whose thesis is about human beings' feeble attempt to find meaning where no meaning exists. Mr. Perfect finds comfort in the arms of a nationally known self-help guru and author of such famous books as Ten Days to Self-Esteem and On a Wing and a Prayer: A Twelve-Step Crash Course on Conquering Your Fear of Flying.

But when the self-help guru goes down on an airliner and the Ph.D. is charged with plagiarism, the lovers by chance find each other again and set out to create their own through-line, narrative, and meaning.

Now a full-length play, the original one-act version was produced at the New York City Fringe Festival a few years ago. The play was canceled after one performance when Hurricane Irene hit, but the short version did get one review from New York Theatre.com, "Hysterical! If you're going to see a play as a sort of escape, you will get more than you bargained for here."

"...Downs flexes his considerable wit in asking if our ability to live in the present has been quashed by our need for familiar outcomes. If that sounds like a lot to get your mind around, fear not, for Downs brings this down to earth in the person of Zooey, an audio-book junkie who wants her life to be the incarnation of her favorite taped stories." - Denver Post.

"Probably the wittiest new play in the last few seasons; Mr. Perfect is also very wise. In this case, Mr. Downs' laser-sharp pen skewers our need to have lives reflective of the romantic visions of authors of the past who floridly illustrate the way relationships should begin love at the first page and end happily ever after." - Colorado Critic Corner

"Hysterical! If you're going to see a play as a sort of escape, you will get more than you bargained for here." - nytheatre.com

You Can't Say That is a comedy about the labels we attach to each other as if those labels capture the sum total of who they or we are.

The story centers around Chris, a white newly hired adjunct professor in a diverse English department, who is assigned Dorothy, a transwoman, as his TA. Chris attempts to act 'woke," but his ultra-conservative childhood haunts him. The University's poorly produced diversity and inclusion training webinar "You Can't Say That" only complicates things. The department decides that all faculty and students are to wear name tags that label their personal nouns and pronouns. But Chris doesn't know who he is or which labels define him. He's trapped in a society that forces us to clip the edges of our identity to fit ready-made social expectations. Then he discovers that his politically incorrect gaffes and personal struggles with his sexuality are going public and that he must stop hitting the "accept" button on his or others' identities without first reading the terms and conditions - in other words, without understanding who he or they really are.

Our purpose in writing this comedy is to draw people out of their bubbles. When you laugh at something, you never look at it again the same way. Laughter can open our minds to new perceptions, which is the beginning of change.

This quick-moving comedy features a diverse cast and is filled with ridiculous webinars and student-written absurdist plays-within-the-plays that demand an after-performance talkback.

Beverly Hills Theatre Guild’s Julie Harris Playwriting Award

A Ph.D. in English lit isn’t worth shit - just ask Dr. Helen Hand. Desperate for a job, she drunkenly agrees to teach at a conservative Bible college in the middle of nowhere Kansas. The problem - she’s a skeptic, a liberal, and gluten intolerant. She enters a world of rigid moral rules: no smoking, no alcohol, no doubting. Working undercover, she sets out to enlighten the fundamentalist students, but it quickly goes to hell. This small cast comedy looks at our need for faith and reason.

PUBLISHED BY HEUER PUBLISHING

Headset, a view from the light booth, is a comedy about the technical side of theatre. The entire play takes place in the Light Booth of the Chicago-Ensemble-Repertory-Group-Theatre-Project, on the final night of the Company's questionable production of Hamlet. Everything that can go wrong does.

The Los Angeles Times called it "A delightfully funny play." While Kevin Fox of the Company of Lost Souls wrote, "Headset is that rare sort of play that gives audiences a look at the chaos that often happens behind the scenes of theatrical productions… very, very funny."

The shadow of Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) looms large in the world today. Her thoughts on unregulated capitalism and selfishness have influenced everything from the Tea Party to her close friend and disciple Alan Greenspan, who served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly twenty years. Her philosophies are to Fortune 500 CEOs what Scientology is to movies stars.

In this small two-character play, I place Ayn on trial and ask the audience to be the jury and vote on which ending the play will have – guilty or not guilty. Were her thoughts on laissez-faire capitalism the fountainhead that led to our current economic situation? Have her philosophies on selfishness led to Social Darwinism? In her personal life, did she live up to her heroes such as John Galt?

The trial covers the strengths of her philosophies but also her drug use, affair with a man half her age, and temperament. From her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American activities to her influence over the Federal Reserve, this play presents both sides of the argument. It lets the audience vote on how the play will end (like Ayn’s play The Night of January 16th).

The Trial of Ayn Rand is an interactive play that will lead to post-performance discussions.

PUBLISHED BY NEXT STAGE PRESS

A new (two act) adaptation of Ibsen's classic drama designed for smaller theatre companies.

A comedy about how nothing lasts forever, even love.

Short comedy about etiquette and manners, forgetting to flush.

Fuera De Orbita es una comedia sobre dos artistas de performance Dada que han construido un teatro en su sala de estar. Cada noche antes de una audiencia en vivo actúan sus vidas. Usted ha oído hablar de la televisión de la realidad; pensar en ello como teatro de la realidad. Artaud estaría orgulloso de ellos.

Las cosas van de mal en peor cuando descubren que un cometa ha sido detectado en el cielo nocturno. Hay una posibilidad de 50/50 que golpeará la tierra. Todo el mundo, incluido el público, puede tener sólo una hora para vivir. Esto obliga a los padres a dejar de discutir sobre cosas insignificantes como el matrimonio y empezar a discutir sobre grandes cuestiones filosóficas de la vida: ¿Es el cometa un signo de Dios o es sólo la gravedad? ¿Y qué diablos es arte de performance?

PUBLISHED BY NEXT STAGE PRESS

Arlen Wienberg, a Jewish anthropologist, is called to be an expert witness in a murder trial. The accused: a white police officer. His alleged crime: murdering a black man twenty years ago and burying the bones in the dirt floor beneath his brownstone. When Arlen arrives, he is shocked to discover that the defense lawyer is black.

Ira Altridge the black lawyer isn't having a good day. His first expert witness has suddenly resigned giving him only one thin lunch hour to get his new anthropologist up to speed.

Soon the two men discover that they know each other. They both grew up in the same suburb of Chicago. Ira called it Lawndale. Arlen, Judenstrasse. Some thirty years ago the suburb was a Jewish neighborhood, but now it's all black. Ira and Arlen grew up together during the neighborhood's rocky transition. In fact Arlen’s father was Ira’s landlord.

Arlen begins to suspect that he is being set up. He wonders if Ira really wants to defend officer McDill or if he has another agenda. Race and political correctness are at the center of this compact two hander.

A play about how important plays and playwrights are.