Rachel Atkins

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is one of the most known and retold stories in the world. Frankenstein’s Mary Shelley tells the equally compelling true story of Frankenstein’s young author alongside her original tale of horror. An unmarried, ostracized, pregnant teenage mother when she wrote her first novel, Mary Shelley faced as much death, drama, romantic and family problems during its writing as her characters do. The ways her life informed her creative choices sheds new light and offers a new point of view about this classic horror story. Moving back and forth between the layered worlds of the book and the world in which Mary Shelley was writing (and sometimes blending the two), Frankenstein’s Mary Shelley is a dark, gothic drama about an extraordinary young woman, the strange times she lived in, and all her many monsters.

Ideal for university, high school and youth productions. A full-length version of this script is also available: https://newplayexchange.org/plays/208025/frankenstein%E2%80%99s-mary-sh….

What would a group of girls do if they were abandoned alone and away from adults and civilization? Baalzebub is a response to the classic novel, Lord of the Flies, in which a group of post –World War II schoolboys are stranded on a desert island. In Baalzebub, a group of girls are stranded together on another kind of deserted island, left behind at a refugee camp in an unnamed war zone, including some who have been raised and living as boys. As time passes without rescue, the girls face the adult challenges of creating and maintaining a working society. How are the ways they cope and behave the same as the boys in Lord of the Flies? How are they different? Baalzebub both mirrors the plot of Lord of the Flies, and follows its own story, reflecting a different, modern group of female characters struggling under their own unique circumstances to cooperate, understand their differences, define themselves, and survive.

Ideal for university, high school and youth productions. A full-length version of this script is also available: https://newplayexchange.org/plays/208005/baalzebub.

Like the Presidential State of the Union address, The State of the Students is a message to the public on the current conditions of our nation. A group of youth reflect on our recent years of social injustice and political unrest through their own personal stories, experiences, points of view and hopes for the future.

Created for the Western States Center’s Common Good Masterclass for Artists & Cultural Workers: Combatting Racism, Antisemitism, and Antidemocratic Movements, directly from the writings of young people. In January 2021, I posted an online questionnaire for young people, asking for their thoughts, feelings and experiences around racism, antisemitism and white nationalism. Between January and May 2021, 137 youth participated from all over the United States. The words are their own voices.

This script can be customized for any cast. A full-length version is also available: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NJETeXEUY0rMf23eXuQI_5YbzRl8xrBfH3L…

The fight for women’s right to vote is one of the most misrepresented, misunderstood American civil rights movements. The little commonly known about it is skewed toward a few elite white women. This play follows the movement through its untold stories of race relations and conflicts, highlighting contributions from and barriers faced by suffragists of color (present yet invisible in the white mainstream, and simultaneously running their own, separate movement), spanning its official 72 years and beyond.

In Act 1, Frances Harper, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others begin their demands for women’s rights through the abolitionist movement. Their relationships splinter as the movement splits in the post-Civil War schism over the 15th Amendment, and as the century turns, they must pass the torch to the next generation of women.

In Act 2, Ida Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Alice Paul, Harriot Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth’s daughter) and others continue the fight through increasingly radical activism and increasing racism in the mainstream white movement, forcing the women of color into battle for inclusion as well as suffrage.

With the centennial of the 19th Amendment and the 2020 elections, and in context of today’s social and political environment, this story couldn’t be more timely. This play brings forward the marginalized voices of the African American suffragists silenced by history, draws parallels to today, and makes these stories accessible for contemporary women, people of color, young people, and others who might otherwise feel alienated by traditional, white male-dominated history.

In 1958, a young African-American woman makes the life-changing decision to start passing for white, creating a ripple effect through multiple generations. In 2013, her granddaughters accidentally discover her secret and seek out the family she left behind. Moving back and forth through time, what happens in between is a frank and funny look at the shifting boundaries of tolerance, as they are all faced with the many questions of what identity really means.

Witty, intelligent, beautiful, rich, entitled, and spoiled, Emma Woodhouse loves to be a matchmaker, though she has vowed to never marry herself. After claiming success of the match between Mr. Weston and her beloved former governess, she decides to prove her skill to neighbor and frequent sparring partner Mr. Knightley by matching Mr. Elton, the local vicar, with Harriet Smith, the simple and less-privileged girl Emma has recently taken under her wing—despite Mr. Elton’s pursuit of Emma herself, and the proposal Harriet has already received from Mr. Martin, whom Emma deems unsuitable in status for her friend. When Frank Churchill, Mr. Weston’s flirtatious son, and Jane Fairfax, the accomplished niece of local chatterbox Miss Bates, enter Highbury’s limited social sphere, complications and misunderstandings foil all of Emma’s plans, revealing her obliviousness to the true nature of almost everyone around her—including herself. After Emma rejects Mr. Elton, he rejects Harriet and brings home a bride who thinks even more of herself than he does, and Emma persuades Harriet to fall in love with Frank Churchill instead. Mr. Knightley and Mrs. Weston continue to warn Emma off the risks of meddling in other people’s lives—but it isn’t until Frank Churchill’s secret engagement to Jane Fairfax is revealed and Harriet confesses her belief that Mr. Knightley is in love with her, that Emma must admit her hubris and errors. When she learns her own heart, she realizes that she’s in love with Mr. Knightley herself. Happily, Mr. Martin proposes to Harriet again, rekindling the love she’s harbored for him throughout Emma’s interference, so that when Mr. Knightley finally reveals his own love for Emma, she can accept, and everyone can live happily ever after. Adapted from the novel by Jane Austen.

An 8 actor version of this script is also available.

The inexperienced young MISS takes her first job as a governess in an isolated country estate run by the kindly but equally inexperienced MRS. GROSE. Her orphaned charges, the angelic MILES and FLORA, have been placed there by their inattentive guardian UNCLE, who has left strict instructions not to be disturbed by anything that happens there. What seems idyllic to MISS at first soon turns horrific, as she becomes aware of the secrets and mysteries surrounding the house—including the presence of her dead predecessor, Miss JESSEL and her lover, Mr. QUINT. Are the ghosts real or imagined? Are they trying to possess the children? As MISS confronts a growing threat that only she seems to see or understand, this insular world closes in around her.

This narrative theatre-style adaptation moves back and forth in time as MISS tells her story to DOUGLAS, a young man who may—or may not—be MILES as an adult. In a dramatic form that relies on point of view, the ambiguities of perspective, identity and reality within Henry James’s classic tale are highlighted even more strongly, leaving both characters and audiences wondering: what is the truth?

Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is one of the most known and retold stories in the world. Frankenstein’s Mary Shelley tells the equally compelling true story of Frankenstein’s young author alongside her original tale of horror. An unmarried, ostracized, pregnant teenage mother when she wrote her first novel, Mary Shelley faced as much death, drama, romantic and family problems during its writing as her characters do. The ways her life informed her creative choices sheds new light and offers a new point of view about this classic horror story. Moving back and forth between the layered worlds of the book and the world in which Mary Shelley was writing (and sometimes blending the two), Frankenstein’s Mary Shelley is a dark, gothic drama about an extraordinary young woman, the strange times she lived in, and all her many monsters.

Ideal for university, high school and youth productions. Two 30-minute, competition-length versions of this script are also available (for larger and smaller casts): https://newplayexchange.org/plays/208033/frankenstein%E2%80%99s-mary-sh…

What would a group of girls do if they were abandoned alone and away from adults and civilization? Baalzebub is a response to the classic novel, Lord of the Flies, in which a group of post –World War II schoolboys are stranded on a desert island. In Baalzebub, a group of girls are stranded together on another kind of deserted island, left behind at a refugee camp in an unnamed war zone, including some who have been raised and living as boys. As time passes without rescue, the girls face the adult challenges of creating and maintaining a working society. How are the ways they cope and behave the same as the boys in Lord of the Flies? How are they different? Baalzebub both mirrors the plot of Lord of the Flies, and follows its own story, reflecting a different, modern group of female characters struggling under their own unique circumstances to cooperate, understand their differences, define themselves, and survive.

Ideal for university, high school and youth productions. A competition-length one-act version of this script is also available: https://newplayexchange.org/plays/208013/baalzebub-competition-one-act.

Moving back and forth through time and place, OUT OF TIME examines the relationships of three different pairs of women dealing with disaster and its aftermath. Angelina and Sarah are immigrant sweatshop workers who have both escaped dire circumstances in their home countries, trying to escape the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. A century later, Angelina’s great-granddaughter Angie is trapped with co-worker Miranda in a post-9/11 office skyscraper disaster. Angie’s Muslim-American roommate Sera and Miranda’s sister Trish struggle to make sense of their losses together. All are strangers forced to develop connections under extraordinary circumstances—each, in their own way, in the wrong place at the right time. It’s a play about life and death, choices and consequences, chance, hope, grief, loss and survival. And sometimes, it’s funny. Really.

In this updated version of the William Wycherley classic, Margery Pinchwife is a new bride, just arrived in the city with her husband and sister-in-law as Harry Horner, a notorious playboy, spreads the false rumor of his own impotence as cover for his affairs with the “honorable” women of society, including Sir Jaspar’s wife and her cohorts in the so-called “virtuous gang.” Horner’s former friend and possibly lover, Jack Pinchwife, desperately tries to keep Margery under his control and locked away from the temptations of city life, while also marrying off his sister Alithea to Sparkish, a ridiculous fop. Margery makes her escape, Sparkish and Mr. Pinchwife show their true selves, Horner adds Margery to his conquests, and Alithea finds a better match with Horner’s friend Harcourt. Throughout, Alithea’s maid Lucy manipulates behind the scenes of everyone’s schemes, exposing a tangled web of sexual innuendo, social hypocrisy, code-switching, lies, and intrigue that leaves no stereotype unturned.

MEL and LIZ, married lesbians, meet JEFFREY and CLIFF, married gays, on a “first date” to decide if the two couples might be a good match to start a family together.

Two sisters are swimming together. Beth tries to get Sarah to join her in the deep end of the pool. Their mother has recently died, possibly by drowning.

A multi-racial family dramedy about international adoption, Alzheimer’s, and everything that happens in between. The Horowitz-Yamasaki-Blooms are your typical Jewish-American transracial family, getting together for their traditional Mother’s Day celebration of bagels and lox and Korean potato salad. Nana is struggling with Alzheimer’s. Her adult daughters, Pearl and Lena, both adopted from Korea and with grown children of their own, find themselves at odds about their mother's care. Pearl is the in-home caregiver, as well as for her own daughter Gracie, who moved back in after college, while Lena is preparing to leave for Korea to research her birth family and heritage. Gracie has unexpectedly invited her new boyfriend Antoine to join them. Everyone has a secret. Their revelations expose all their complicated hidden truths, while examining the many expectations, responsibilities and roles women face within any modern family.

In 1916, the Treadwell mines on Douglas Island, Alaska are the largest gold-mining operation in the world, and at the height of success. George Barnett, a young geologist who’s been taken under the wing of the mine president, arrives in Treadwell to learn the business and help it to grow. Falling in love with the daughter of the mine’s hoist operator was not in his plans. Meanwhile, the miners and families who have lived and worked in Treadwell for years see a different story: problems underground, conflicts among the diverse miner population, and growing demands for a union. George puts a long-term plan into action to repair and improve conditions in the mines—but no one is prepared for the natural disaster that destroys all of Treadwell in one short night. Based on the nonfiction book by Sheila Kelly.

VOYAGE FOR MADMEN is based on the amazing and outrageously true story of Ardeo Theatre Project, a group of American theatre artists who bought a château in France, and moved there with the intention of running a study abroad program for college students, creating theatre, and living together as a community. After arriving in France on the eve of the worst storm Europe had seen in 60 years, and nearly a year in residence, the Project spectacularly crashed and burned, just before September 11, 2001.

VOYAGE FOR MADMEN incorporates elements of vaudeville, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the real-life story of Donald Crowhurst, a British amateur sailor who falsified his records in an attempt to win a single-handed round-the-world sailing race in the 1960’s. Crowhurst, Frankenstein and The Tempest are significant not only because these stories mirror many of the tragic events of Ardeo, but also because they were, ironically, the plays the company actually rehearsed while in France.

Everything in this play that you think can’t possibly be true—really happened.

MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING is based on the hilarious and heart-breaking true story of the 2nd largest cash robbery in US history. In 1997, a team of amateur thieves stole $17 million dollars from a Loomis Fargo armored car warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina, and might have gotten away with it, if not for their poor judgment and extreme hubris. Ordinary Americans saw a chance to get rich quick and took it—but they botched their plans at every turn: shopped extravagantly, bought mansions with cash, involved over 20 people in their attempts to hide the money, and even tried to have their inside man killed. Their failings were enormous and absurd, and yet MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING is ultimately real and tragic: a story about people who just wanted a better life and the consequences they faced for trying to get ahead.

Married since medical school, Miles and Candace are scientists working together on researching neural enhancements for the treatment of depression. Miles has become depressed and withdrawn from the work, until he makes a new discovery and wants to experiment with it on himself. He convinces Candace to abandon her principles and help him temporarily implant an electronic device in his own brain—and then refuses to allow her to remove it when the results reach far beyond his expectations, forcing them both to face the moral, ethical, and personal implications of what they’ve done.

A version of this script is also available for radio/podcast.