Paula Kamen

Offers prime comic role to older actress. A 2022 O'Neill NPC finalist!

Tagline: For the ambitious woman, is a man ever a plan?

The story is about a complex friendship between two generations of ambitious women writers -- including Dionne, a groundbreaking libertine feminist philosopher obsessed with dieting.

Inverts the traditional form of a play, with a woman's friendship at center, and the men playing supporting roles.

The story: At first, Judith, a young author, doesn’t know what to make of Dionne. In her first visit to Dionne’s almost-magical cottage in Michigan, Judith even fears that Dionne is trying to recruit her into an orgy. But soon Dionne and Judith bond over their shared struggles, and Dionne becomes Judith’s valued mentor, helping her overcome a major career crisis, caused by disabling chronic pain. But clashes how to achieve their other goal in life – domestic bliss — rip them apart. Judith is suspicious when Dionne decamps to Kankakee, Illinois with a longtime boyfriend on parole; Dionne is more upset when Judith choose a traditional route of marriage and kids -- and financial dependence -- in suburban Buffalo Grove.

Meanwhile, they both struggle with the need to be alone to create -- and questions about how to control the unruly body: its fertility, its weight, its pains, its addictions, its wayward lusts.

Dramatizes a very pivotal -- and not often dramatized -- time in life for a woman, her late 30s, when basic life-determining decisions about work and family get made.

Also made first cuts for ScreenCraft Stage Play and Gary Marshall New Works Festival competitions in 2022, ranking highly as a comedy.

Timely, unflinching and provocative part-documentary play, Jeff-nominated for best Ensemble in 2024 for Idle Muse production at the Edge Off Broadway in Chicago. Had celebrity reading off-Broadway at Rattlestick in NYC, featuring Cynthia Nixon and Kathy Najimy, before the pandemic benefiting A is For. Has had dozens of readings and seven full productions across North America. Monologues and scenes excerpted in many anthologies, most recently in Frozen Women, Flowing Thoughts, published in 2024 by Venus Theatre Company, the longest-running regional feminist theater company, and Choice Words, the first abortion-literature anthology, edited by Annie Finch in 2020.

Since Roe was overturned in 2022, it has had two full productions and at least five readings, including its first readings in states banning abortion, Florida and South Carolina, where it raised money for local abortion funds.

The part-documentary play is based on original interviews about “the best-kept secret” in Chicago, “Jane,” an underground abortion service that operated from 1969 to 1973. This network, run by a feminist collective of mostly middle-class housewives and students, was the one safe alternative for about 11,000 Chicago women of all backgrounds. In all those years, “Jane,” which boasted no fatalities and operated in private apartments throughout the city, was well trusted by and commonly received referrals from police, university administrators, social workers, clergy and hospital staff.

Since 1999, it has been a favorite of colleges, for its many diverse roles for young women, with a reading at Temple University and full production at UCLA in late 2022.

This play was featured in September 2019 in American Theatre Magazine as a play being used to raise awareness for abortion rights, featuring a high-profile celebrity reading that month at Rattlestick Theatre in NYC to benefit A is For, starring Cynthia Nixon, Kathy Najimy, Ana Gasteyer, Monique Coleman and others:
https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/09/18/a-is-for-art-about-abortion-…

NPX included the play on a list of recommended plays on reproductive rights:
https://newplayexchange.org/features/reproductive-rights

I provided sources to the 2022 HBO-produced documentary, "The Janes," mainly ordinary women that I found who used Jane while researching this play. That includes Crystal, a Black woman who accompanied her friend to a Jane abortion as a teen from the West Side.

This drama addresses how when abortion is outlawed, it still goes on, and can be a harrowing experience even in the best of circumstances. It also inspires about the power of feminist organizing to meet women's most urgent and vital material needs.

Offered for free for pro-choice fundraisers.

Research for the writing of Jane includes a detailed, original investigation into its past and interviews with those who were on the scene in Chicago. This includes, most notably, women who used the illegal service. The drama is stitched together from original interview transcripts, fictionalized reenactments of conversations, and historical documents, such as an excerpt from an actual "witch"-led abortion-rights street theater from the early '70s, internal memos of the group, and front-page newspaper coverage of “The Abortion Seven.”

The research was used by the makers of the PBS documentary, Jane: An Abortion Service, which aired in 1998. The interview transcripts, quoted in the 1997 book When Abortion Was A Crime (University of California Press), are also on file with the Special Collections Department of the Northwestern University Library.

The play has also been written about by drama scholars, such as in in Frontiers article about innovative feminist docudrama structure, http://muse.jhu.edu/article/530604
and as chapter in book about feminist plays on abortion, as one play that addresses the issue most directly and unapologetically.
http://www.amazon.com/Examining-Confrontation-Ambivalence-Depictions-Re…

Three versions are available, including the revised & updated 2019 version requiring fewer actors. Also available on request are two shorter student-made adaptations: one hour-long monologues-only version and one half-hour of scenes.

The new version of the play includes three main characters, which emerge organically as leaders during different parts of The Service. That includes founder Heather Booth, who went to organize the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, signed into law in 2010 by President Obama, and spearheaded by Senator Elizabeth Warren.

THE STORY:he play starts in 1965, when University of Chicago undergraduate Heather Booth, who has recently returned from Freedom Summer in Mississippi, receives an urgent call from another Civil Rights activist. His sister is pregnant and needs an abortion, and he knows that Heather, already an expert organizer, knows a lot of people. She puts him in touch with an older Black doctor who had been closely involved in supporting the family of Emmett Till in the 1950s. Soon the word spreads, and Heather receives too many calls to handle the referrals herself. Heather then recruits other activists -- many of them graduate students and hippie housewives -- and they use the code word "Jane" to describe their abortion-referral service to callers.

Heather's doctor retires, and they hire other to perform the abortions. Soon, the women of Jane or "The Service" discover that the "doctors" they have hired are not real doctors, resulting in some organizers leaving The Service in protest. Others take it as a cue to take the bold step to learn the procedures themselves and become abortionists, to be able to charge much lower prices and make the procedure more widely accessible. In the next few years, they become experts, performing more than 10,000 safe abortions. The Service continues even after a May 1972 police bust, only disbanding in January of 1973 when Roe v. Wade becomes the law of the land.

Tagline: God will provide, but first you have to do your own marketing.

A two-act (or long one-act) comedy about what makes one worthy of community support, to be considered "a good poor person" in a crowdfunding campaign -- and how invisible disability often doesn't make the cut. Offers many good parts for women (and possibly one girl).

The story is about a girl's bat mitzvah social-justice project to save a mysterious family from their congregation, about to be evicted in the middle of winter. The girl's mother, Lauren -- a former brand manager for Glade Plug-Ins, now secretly battling Long Covid --takes on the challenge with the same marketing ruthlessness as she did in her past job. But Lauren's quest to make the family in need, Eve and her daughter Grace, fit a "good poor" narrative proves challenging, as more and more poor secrets from the past are exposed. Meanwhile, with no other choice, the family in need moves in with Lauren's family, threatening her relationship with her husband, Chris, whose only religion is the Protestant work ethic

The first scene of the play made the Scene Shop Showcase at Chicago Dramatists last spring, judged by Jeni Mahoney, a co-founder of the Seven Devils play-development conference.

Set in the idealistic Chicago arts scene of the 1990s, the play recasts the old debate about "selling out" and being authentic to a new generation -- in this present age when every aspect of life is commodified. The trajectory of the central character of Brad from punk rocker to MAGA consultant also mirrors that of J.D. Vance, with old friends being mystified in both cases about this evolution.

The story:
They say nothing has more rules than punk rock, and Brad, a former '80s punk rocker, relishes breaking every one. As a top MAGA operative, he sells out in the most spectacular way possible, risking his freedom with prison, and something even more cherished: his coolness.

In this comedy/drama, this evolution has an explosive effect on the relationships of his old Chicago friends. His close artist friend Madge, the main character, struggles to stay loyal to Brad, and preserve his lucrative advertising connections, such as using her old Riot Grrrl street cred to sell hormone pills to aging Gen X Women via Madison Avenue. Meanwhile, she clashes with her idealistic, socialist, non-compromising eternal-grad student husband to attain basic comforts, such as her ultimate life goal of central air.

Received special Commendation from Jewish Plays Project 2024 short-play festival.

The theme of this short play, rooted in Jewish history, is the incalculable loss to future generations when artists or inventors die before their prime, whether because of illnesses or other tragedies -- human-made or not.

The drama, with comic undertones, takes place in the imagination of a former Nazi, Heinz in 1995, in a Milwaukee hospital room, who, for the first time, realizes the generational impact of his crimes. While facing the imminent death of his son from AIDS, at a time when treatments were limited, he sees a news story about the death of the Jewish inventor of the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk. That sparks him to imagine a present-day confrontation with a Jewish boyhood friend, Abraham, an aspiring inventor and doctor, whom he had killed in a concentration camp during WWII.

Production, Spectrum New Plays Festival, First Run Theatre, St. Louis, Feb/March 2026.

A previous version:
Finalist in Chicago Dramatists’ “Ten-Minute Play” Competition, receiving staged reading with Steppenwolf actors. Judged by David Zak of the Bailiwick Theater, Spring 1999.

An absurd look at the desperation and isolation of invisible illness. In this short play, a woman realizes her boyfriend, whom she was just about to dump, can relieve her Crohn’s symptoms with pills made from his unusually rich and premium-grade poop. All is well until she realizes one unfortunate -- and ridiculous -- side effect.

Or:
Nicole's life is being destroyed by her Crohn's disease, which has made her unemployed and a prisoner of her bathroom. Right before breaking up with her pathologically chatty boyfriend Brian, she realizes he is a "super pooper," or part of a small percentage of the population (this is real) with medicinal-grade poop. The treatment works, and she rejoices -- until she notices some very concerning and ridiculous side effects.

Absurd 5-minute play about banality of negative TV campaign ads. Using a variety of emotions, characters use only one single line of dialogue: "What is Frank Krusniak thinking?"

Story: A producer is filming a negative campaign ad against opponent Frank. He interviews Marcy, his candidate, asking her to repeat the same line, "What is Frank Krusniak Thinking?" over and over in different tones. Frank then breaks in, confronts them, and reveals what he is indeed thinking.

Would be great acting exercise or subject for very short fillm.

Without dialogue, this comedy is ideal for an international audience.

This absurd completely physical play dramatizes how desperate -- and creative -- someone with chronic pain can be in getting help from day to day.

Synopsis: A woman with chronic back pain tries to get help to retrieve a computer mouse she has dropped into a gaping void. She orders a grabber from Amazon, and then drops that grabber in the void and orders another grabber to pick up that lost grabber. Another tactic is to book a Tinder date to get help. When he hurts his back, she enlists the responding paramedic. At the end, she starts all over again when she drops the cell phone into the same void.
Trust me, it works well on Zoom with two actors alternating reading stage directions.

PRODUCTION NOTE:
The play has no dialogue, only stage directions and sound effects.
In a Zoom reading or even a live one, one actor can read the stage directions. Or two people can read them, alternating paragraphs. Trust me, that works better than you think.

Inspired by the format and form of Krapp's Last Tape by Beckett.

A neurotic thriller/ten-minute play with introverts, showcasing the tragedy that ensues when their distinct consumer algorithms become one. It starts when a hapless woman accidentally torments a parent from her kids' school by constantly running into him everywhere she goes. This escalates until one day in the gym when they have a violent, not to mention awkward, reckoning.

Rhoda naively seeks her soulmate in another writer. Each date is represented by one of the seven male writers' monologues. Number Six ends up being a full-blown relationship, which leads her to Number Seven, a meaningless hookup.