Maureen McGranaghan

[Full Length Drama]
[Produced by Void Theatre Co. in 2024 Piccolo Spoleto Festival; Runner Up, Todd McNerney Playwriting Award]
Em and Belle, a lesbian couple, are the happy new parents of a son named Rory. Belle harvested her eggs and carried the baby, with a friend providing the sperm. However, the procedure resulted in six embryos, and the couple must now decide what to do with the remaining five. Belle wants another child, but Em demurs. Do they donate the embryos to another couple or to science, or let them be destroyed? The play visits them once a year for a decade, as they grapple with this decision again and again, their relationship at stake each time.

[Full Length Drama]
[Second Round, Austin Film Festival Playwriting Competition]
Hailey is reeling from the loss of her autistic sister, Riley, killed in an accident on a nighttime odyssey. She is also grieving her latest miscarriage, while she treats Alison, a recovering opioid addict awaiting the birth of her own child. Learning of her miscarriages, Alison makes Hailey a dramatic offer of her baby, only to give birth prematurely. Meanwhile, Hailey learns a shocking fact about Riley and finds she must forgive those closest to her.

[Full Length Drama]
[Semi-Finalist, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference]
Sweet Dreams follows a Japanese family just after World War II in their village about fifty miles from Hiroshima. Miyuki, 23, and her nephew Eichi, 12, were in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped. Eichi's father, Jun, was away fighting. Now, several months later, Miyuki shows troubling signs of radiation sickness, and Sergeant Denis Hayes has arrived in their village, charged with bringing bomb survivors to an American base for evaluation.

[Full Length Drama/Comedy]
Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1891: Georgy Ivanitch Orlov is an indifferent government official and confirmed bachelor. When his mistress Zinaida spontaneously decides to leave her husband and move in with him, it turns his life and household upside down. His irreverent pals mock him; his maid takes to stealing everything she can get her hands on; and his strange and secretive footman, Stepan, develops feelings for Zinaida. Soon Orlov is looking for any excuse to escape his home. Meanwhile, Stepan reveals himself to be a revolutionary in disguise, spying on Orlov but now besotted with his mistress.

[Full Length Drama]
A teenage William Shakespeare meets and becomes devoted to the Jesuit priest and soon-to-be martyr Edmund Campion in the midst of the swirling political intrigues of Elizabeth’s England. As religion and politics become hopelessly blurred, the mercenary and devout alike pursue power, and Shakespeare risks his life for love and faith.

[Full Length Drama]
[Winner, Southern Playwrights Competition]
Seventeen-year old William Faulkner, future Nobel laureate in literature, embarks on the annual family deer hunt with his drunken, dissolute father, Murry, and overbearing grandfather, John Wesley. When Reelfoot, a decades-old bear that is the subject of much local lore, makes an unexpected appearance, Faulkner decides to hunt this legendary creature in an act that will prove his manhood once and for all.

But he has also been scribbling verse and, encouraged by his friend Phil Stone, secretly aspires to be a writer, a profession maligned by his grandfather. As the hunt proceeds, Faulkner resists John Wesley's attempts to mold him in the mythical family image and seeks to connect with his father through their mutual love of the wilderness.

Meanwhile, the family closes in on Reelfoot, and Murry attempts to sabotage the hunt in desperate reverence for the bear. In a final confrontation, Faulkner himself must decide whether or not to sacrifice Reelfoot, whom he's come to see as the spirit of the woods and the symbol of his father's stymied dreams, in order to gain his own freedom.

Ten-Minute Play
Matt and Tabitha are virtual strangers who have just made love at Tabitha’s place. Now she’s asleep and Matt’s ready to depart. But he’s not getting off that easily. As Tabitha observes, it may well be less intimate to sleep with a stranger than to help yourself to a glass of milk in her apartment.

Ten-Minute Play
Tina wants pancakes and ends up learning the secret of her parentage in a time-bending story of daughters, sisters, and a mother.