A middle-aged white dude tries really hard to understand a changing world he fears is leaving him behind, while defending mayonnaise.

Sawyer travels across the country writing about diners - the great American diner - until she finds one she might not be able to leave.

While healing from a divorce, a young writer accepts the invitation of an older gay couple, whose marriage is falling apart, to stay the summer at their waterfront cottage. [almost ready for a reading!]

While visiting his family’s secluded cottage on Nantucket Island, Owen, a typically urban fifteen-year-old boy, and his fisherman father clash until an unlikely and healing communion with an injured whale awakens in Owen a forgotten boyhood and connection with the sea.

Nominated for Six 2019 Helen Hayes Awards, including Best Production of a Play (producing company: 1st Stage Tysons)

"Affecting and inventive ... the play spins an almost novelistic narrative about loss, healing and courage in the face of death ... " - Celia Wren, The Washington Post

"Bartlett has a light touch as a writer. His descriptions of loss are captivating and ring true to life because they are drawn from his own deeply personal experience of love and loss. Despite its preoccupation with death, Swimming with Whales is joyful, funny, and surprising in all the ways that life everyday can be." - Jenny Munich, Broadway World

"Dramatic issues of abandonment, illness, loss, and grief are countered in the play by love, humor, support, and redemption. The play reestablishes to the characters, and to the audience, the comforting power of nature." - Chuck Leonard, DCMetroTheaterArts

"As the blood family heals and the intentional family regrows its roots along the sands of Nantucket, we see a poignant, at times hilarious, journey of healing and reconciliation. Bartlett weaves a whale of a tale; one that is worth sharing." - Jeffrey Walker, DC Theatre Scene

"A mixture of magical realism, laughter and healing from heartbreak with an unlikely wellspring propelling the story into a spiritual parable." - David Siegel, The Connection

Recently crowned, Edward II struggles to lead England while navigating a relationship that could bring about his downfall. A contemporary reimagining of Christopher Marlowe's EDWARD II. E2 premiered at Maryland's Rep Stage in November of 2019.

"Playwright Bartlett ... skillfully distills Marlowe’s large cast of courtiers, clerics and other characters to just a handful of figures, the protagonists in an engrossing, romantic saga that also reflects meaningfully on homophobia, privacy, social inequality and political corruption." -- Celia Wren, Washington Post

"An imaginative and beautifully executed production ... Striking design, unforgettable performances and superb artistry in Bartlett's poetic new play." -- The Baltimore Sun

"Bob Bartlett’s new play E2 certainly proves it can make a head-turning entrance. This bold and sensuous take on the oft-told tale of King Edward II unfolds against a techno-punk frieze of video lighting and color-form columns that turn even austere 14th century stone into a cushy setting for a Studio 54-style blowout." -- DC Metro Theatre Arts

"... [this] dance party on the edge of the apocalypse works smashingly, with brilliant light, looming digital portraits of the characters that are Robert Mapplethorpe-like in their black and white starkness, sumptuous fabrics and a modern, linear set design that rivet the eye." -- DC Theatre Scene

Bear has accidents. One a month, every month, without fail. Fender benders, broken ankles, a busted this or that - abrasions, lacerations, punctures, a broken heart. Try as he might, he can’t shake the accident bug until Chance, an unemployed paramedic living in her 1978 Volkswagen Beetle, wanders into his lonely world.

"Bartlett gives us a funny and provocative show involving three people: the dour, accident-prone Bear who owns the laundromat, Chance, who is either a late-night customer or his lover, or both, and Buddy, the worst best friend ever ... a play (at least in part) about the persistent wrongness of memory." - DC Theatre Scene, Five Stars

"Bartlett’s script has a technical sophistication. He tells this story in layers, withholding and revealing information with precision and skill, ratcheting up tension with each iteration of the story." - DC Theatre Scene, Five Stars

“The Accident Bear is an unusual play, staged in an even more unusual location ... a funny, yet touching play about relationships that uses memory in a way reminiscent of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. As a bonus, it is performed in the place that inspired it and where it was written, a small space that allows for a powerful intimacy between the actors and the audience." - DC Metro Theatre Arts

"Bartlett’s play is a comic, quirky and heartfelt paean to quirky, comic, yet ultimately heartwarming people. It is so involving, and so well-acted, that the trappings of the laundromat — the rows of washers and dryers, the old candy machine, the faded signs — soon become part of the story itself, putting the audience front and center emotionally as well as physically." - The Bay Weekly

"You can smell the lint in the air. You feel the cold air sweep in on the entrances and exits ... using the Laundromat as a theatre is unusual, but not without precedent. From the Greeks congregating on hilltops to medieval troupes who performed from the back of wagons to the concept of the whole theatre developed in the 1970s by Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, who thought the actual theatre should become part of the set, thespians have performed for audiences in many unique settings." - Maryland Theatre Guide

"Just a marvelous experience. I felt like a fly on the wall of somebody's life. Moving." - Audience Member

"One of DC Theatre Scene’s twenty-four favorites of 2018." - Lorraine Treanor, DC Theatre Scene

A collection of stories set in a roadside motel near Disney World - tales of hapless and hopeful people in transit to the happiest place on Earth.

Inspired by Bruce Springsteen's LONG WALK HOME. Mr. Tomlinson - a white man in his late fifties or sixties or older, a cane at his side, spends his afternoons sitting in front of the vacant storefront of the hardware store his family owned and operated for decades - accepts that his small, big world has changed.

A prepper is mysteriously trapped in his isolated Montana cabin with a family of refugees during an end-of-days event.

An army vet and his thirteen-year-old daughter set out on a drive from our nation’s capital to Wichita to murder an abortionist in this piercing snapshot of radicalized America.