J. Joseph Cox

[Still in Development]
From metal hooks, patients dangle in a purgatorial meat locker somewhere between the living and the dead. And it’s getting crowded. The bodies have been gathering ever since one brain-dead patient miraculously returned to the land of the living. As the staff at St. Anne’s Hospital desperately search for a reason for the patient’s return, Dr. Adilene Reynolds finds her life crumbling around her – the cause she has built her career on is taking a beating, her mother has become a shut-in, and her ex-boyfriend won’t stop loving her. Matters of faith and forgiveness, the brain and the heart take center stage in the quest to find an answer to the question: What’s it even mean to be alive?

The Nothing That Is Something is a play that takes place in two realms – the everyday world of St. Anne’s Hospital and a mysterious meat locker where beating heart cadavers try to make sense of a life that lead them to this place. The play searches that space outside of ourselves, between one body and another in an attempt to discover the communal soul that links every one of us together.

When is a cup of tea more than just a cup of tea? When it reveals your simple secrets to the company you share it with.

The rumors surrounding the new guy in charge are flying at this downtown office building. As nervousness around lay-offs and increased productivity requirements evolves into fearing for their very lives, the firm’s employees learn how dangerous ‘normalizing’ can be.

Stuck together during another one of their school’s “drills,” three teenagers do their best to maintain the quaintness of the old world while experiencing the horror of the new.

When Barbara Baker decides to help her friend Audrey host a candle party, the salespitch turns into a therapy session and Barbara’s true feelings about her husband’s cross-dressing slowly emerge.

[A Work in Progress] When Tess Jackson’s spotty memory becomes something more than a minor inconvenience, her tiny trailer becomes a match box where her children’s dreams strike against the rough surface of reality. If they only knew what Tess truly had in store for them…. Don’t Trust Tess! is an adventure in unreliable narration and incorrect assumptions—one where past, present, and fiction all swirl together. Just remember to keep telling yourself: witches are as real as the American dream.

Married couple, Arthur and Helen, go to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves of her loved ones. When Arthur discovers Helen has already purchased a plot and gravestone for herself next to her late first husband, his insecurities go into overdrive.

The only thing more territorial than the escaped koala living in Ray Slinger’s backyard is Ray himself. His sense of protectionism goes into overdrive when Natalie (Nate), his gender-nonconforming child, pops in for a stay and, John, his unemployed brother, shows up with a suitcase full of woe.

When John discovers that Ray is about to lose his visitation rights, he teams up with Ray’s neighbor, Gabby, and goes about trying to convince Natalie that Ray is worthy of her time. Their plan backfires when the duo stumbles onto something that hits Ray a little too close to his heart. Can this twentieth-century man survive the dawning of the twenty-first?

Koalas is a full-length tragi-comic play that explores the changing definition of what it means to be a man. It has a unit set and a cast of 5-6 including one Andrew Lloyd Webber-loving koala.

Never one to let the opportunity for a gathering pass him by, Event Planner extraordinaire, Paul Blinker, throws a wake for an aunt he never knew existed. The fact that it works perfectly as a testing ground for his wedding reception’s design concept is a mere coincidence to no one, but himself. But as the wake inside his house devolves into a backyard bacchanal, Paul’s well-laid plans for his future fall apart as well - forcing him to confront the possibility of burying his personal aspirations along with his mysterious aunt. Marriage, family, religion, and loneliness are explored with a queer eye in a two-act comedy that dares to ask the question: Snowflake? Or Ivory Passion?

Three coal miners in 1940s West Virginia fight for survival after a mine collapse leaves them trapped deep within the earth. As their hours of entombment turn to days, the need for the basic elements evolve into personal struggles for each man. A returning soldier copes with re-entering a mining industry unappreciative of his service. A seasoned miner fights to save the life of a dear friend’s son. A greenhorn struggles to understand how a future so full of hope can collapse due to the simplest of life decisions.

As the hunt for water dries up, the men are confronted with voices and shadows from the past intent on driving them against each other and themselves. Each man must search inside himself for the meaning and forgiveness needed to appease the monstrous shadows encroaching from the periphery of his own sanity.

Two teenagers, bent on being treated as grown-ups, get a surprise that makes them second-guess adulthood.

While breaking into an abandoned pizza joint, two brothers stumble upon an animatronic gorilla that brings up disparate memories for the two of them.

When her boss goes missing, Sherry Pendleton is left dealing with the loose ends of his personal and professional life.