Kato McNickle

A short play a few days before Christmas at a rehearsal for the annual Christmas Pageant. But today there's only one fool for all three wisemen, an angel that wants to wear pink, and the stand-in for baby Jesus is a corncob with a Jack-o-Lantern-head. It's more than the director can stand. A 10-minute play about learning to be kind and ask for help.

This is a tale of Robin Hood in a hoodie. A teenager in a private high school rebels against the system and posts unauthorized versions of Batman on the internet. The three teens are played by adults and all of the adults are portrayed as puppets.

A woman driven by revenge ignores the rules of time/space in order to kill a tyrant.

Part one is a room intended to be a lifeboat, stuffed with books and art and textures. In the center is a door made of wood and beautifully carved that is the entrance to the time machine with conduits and wires streaming out of its top up into the ceiling. To the side is a heavy door, bolted, made of several layers of steel (perhaps this door is a few feet beyond our view?). There are no windows. Whether these details are represented or implied is up to you and your design.

Part two reveals the room transformed into a tree with the beautifully carved door imbedded in the trunk (like the tree has sprouted in all directions from the door) and the conduits and wires are now its branches. The room furnishings are either removed or have become part of the tree, or are shoved to the back all tangled and at odd angles, as you prefer. Are there books tangled up in the roots?

Lucita has a secret way of making pancakes and a penchant for seeing the future. This morning has brought a hungry girl to her diner for a pre-sunrise breakfast. This girl, Czigany, is en route from Maryland to Oklahoma by way of most of the
Lower-48. She's been on the road for a month and has sampled pancakes every morning every place she's been, but these, by far, are the best. This morning Lucita has seen the future in the ring worn by Czigany. The ring bears a curse, but will Czigany heed the warning delivered by a stranger in a diner?

characters:

LUCITA: a waitress and owner of this diner. older than the girl. famous for telling the future.

CZIGANY: a wanderer. mid twenties. wears a stolen ring and
drinks lots of coffee.

SLIM: wiry sort. usually pretty quiet. rolls his own
cigarettes. understands the past.

requirements:
a diner with a counter, a stool, a booth, a plate of pancakes, lots of coffee. a low moon hangs in the sky as the sun rises.

Wish Play begins with a promise made to a friend. Darla has given her word that, should anything happen to Carol, she would retrieve her diary before anyone else can find it. But this is no ordinary diary. It is a hand-made journal that Carol stole from a young man on an island a year earlier. What neither Carol nor Darla realize is that this is a book that wants its readers to compose a wish, commit the wish to its pages, and then demands that the story of the fulfillment of the wish be written down on the pages. Failure to relay the rest of the story leads people to a single, sleepless, omnipresent obsession: to find the book and write the story. The power of the written word and the needs of secret desires unravel this group of friends.

CouchFullaLuv is a magical 30-minute farce about love, commitment, and the stress experienced by new couples agreeing on large pieces of furniture. But this is no ordinary day in the Furniture Showroom. Feathers from the wings of love fall from the sky, promising romance to those that hold them, and the act of sitting upon one fantastic couch can unleash their passions.
CouchFullaLuv brings six people together, for better or for worse, mostly in health, but that could change, especially once they've sat upon this sofa.

Through conversations with her voices Joan struggles to accept her fate at the hands of her enemies and the seeming failure of her mission in this tragic coming of age story. Joan's Voices delves into the internal world of the mind and requirements of the soul. As the nineteen-year-old Joan searches for love, acceptance and her own capacity for forgiveness, the forces in the world around her—both tangible and spiritual—conspire to extinguish her life.

The Noah story in modern times.

The play begins in The Void. The Void splits and we are aboard the “Moby Duck One” an authentic World War II retired Duck Boat that now serves as a tourist transport along the streets and shoreline of Pawcatuck, Connecticut. Chuck, the “Moby Duck One’s” skipper is picking up his kid sister at the theater after auditions for Shaw’s Saint Joan. Their dad is busy toiling away at a special project with a looooooming deadline -- you got it -- an ark. Soon the whole place will be under water, but first the kids must load enough supplies, burgle the local zoo, and Sally must learn her lines, having won the coveted role of Joan.

Chance of Rain: a Noah Riff came out of a ‘Bake-off” at a recent playwrights’ boot camp with Paula Vogel at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida. During our stay, there were many hurricanes spinning around, reeking catastrophic damage, and many coming close enough to us to bring much rain and wind. The water and the state of the drowning world got into our work.

The world of art and the world of words are set to collide as Danni prepares to interview Sophia for a story she writing about the content of art on their college campus. A debate ensues, a dance begins, as an unconventional romance, of sorts, unfolds.

Accompanying Danni and Sophia on their journey is a chorus that becomes both the inner and outer worlds occupied by the two women. They are Sophia’s art, Danni’s story, inhabitants of the coffee shop and martini bar, the buildings around them, and their thoughts put into the air to be breathed.

The requirements: 4 woman, 2 men, an open space, occasional furniture, 2 microphones.

A girl hears an ancient voice calling “Memphis” so she goes off to Tennessee In Search of a Better Life with Elvis. The thing is, the voice meant Egypt. Off-track from the get-go, Jezzy is on a mission to make peace with her father, a deceased Elvis impersonator who forgot he wasn’t really Elvis, even if it means stealing her mother’s car, trading it for a guitar, and ignoring the lady in the moon calling to her.

Americans are detached from the larger past, from ancient myth, from our ancestors. We fill this void with pop icons, superstars and fast food. What if our ancestors are watching? What would their words be? Would we listen? Would we even understand the language?

A woman matador prepares for a fight. A boy finds a magic ring. A beautiful young woman in blue finds a bead. A man casts a spell. Minotaurs. Toreros. is a fusion of myth, flamenco, and the poetry of Lorca.

Minotaurs. Toreros. is the wish of a boy to know his mother in her younger days, before he was born. In those days she was a famous and beautiful matador. Through a magic ring he hopes to discover the woman who would become his mother, see her life, and begin to understand his own nature. Is the boy a poet, or a torero, or is he a minotaur, a creature that ruined his mother’s life? Minotaurs. Toreros. alternates between the world of the bullfight and the world of the labyrinth.

A comedy in two acts featuring a future famous cook, a famous princess, and a famous singer, all outwitting Nazis in German Occupied France. Young Julia Child parachutes behind enemy lines outside of Paris to foil the attempted abduction of Princess Elizabeth. They enlist the help of Josephine Baker, and together this trio works to undo a the plan to overthrow Britain and the Free World.

On an island recently abandoned by an enemy force, a group of survivors struggles to resume their lives in the midst of devastating loss. Ariadne on the Island is a riff on the myth of the sister of the Minotaur, who falls in love with a foreign hero and betrays her father in order to save this man’s life. After the pair escapes, they find themselves on the island of Naxos.

This play begins on that island of refuge, updates the scenario to a mechanized war zone, and tells the story of a hard fought conflict from four perspectives: Peter, the hero; Via, the comrade in arms; Dante, former leader of the resistance; and Ana, daughter of an enemy commandant who comes to understand the true horror of the war her people have believed righteous.