William Missouri Downs

A divorced Hollywood screenwriter, fueled by caffeine, antidepressants, and low-grade panic, watches her career dissolve into the fog of middle-aged invisibility. Once chased by studios, she is now ghosted by them. Desperate to stay relevant, she takes a job writing an “inspirational” film about a child in need of a lung transplant, only to realize the so-called true story may be a complete fabrication.

At the same time, her teenage son becomes convinced that his favorite video game, Drone Strike, is somehow triggering real-world deaths. While he spirals into paranoia, she spirals into moral free fall, polishing lies into something marketable, emotional, and profitable.

As fiction is sold as fact and truth becomes just another special effect, she is forced to confront an uncomfortable question. If everyone prefers the story to reality, does reality still matter?
Inspired by Ivanka Trump’s line, “Perception is more important than reality,” this sharp, darkly funny dramedy explores ambition, motherhood, digital fear, and the seductive power of lies, and the stories we invent to survive when the truth is no longer trending.

A playwright writes an earnest, wildly absurdist climate-change play. George and Martha annihilate it with a cruel, viral YouTube review. Millions watch. The show dies. Art is buried beneath comments.
So the playwright kidnaps them.

Locked in a room and stripped of their phones, George and Martha are forced into the last remaining human ritual: sustained conversation. It does not go well. Reality bends. Sanity loosens. Eventually, the playwright gives up and hands the ending to artificial intelligence.

Not a musical, but cursed with songs anyway, including “Stanislavsky Gave Me Herpes,” this feral comedy dissects outrage culture, algorithmic thinking, and the collapse of attention in the digital age.

A comedy about forgery, art theft, and family. The Smith family rarely agrees on anything, but when their son Johnny returns home for the first time in four years, they reluctantly reunite to celebrate their father, a failed painter who has improbably won the Yoko Ono Lifetime Achievement Award for Non-Objective Art. Then a Picasso disappears from the nearby Detroit Institute of Arts. Suddenly, Johnny’s homecoming takes a dangerous turn, and a night meant for redemption slides into suspicion, absurdity, and chaos.

This dark comedy explores what is real and what is counterfeit in a pixelated world where artists are treated like employees and art is reduced to a commodity.

Through a series of hilariously random encounters, the play skewers our desperate search for meaning, wondering whether existence is a profound mystery or just one endless Zoom call, occasionally interrupted by Amazon and DoorDash deliveries.

Asking Strangers the Meaning of Life is designed for simple staging and flexible casting, with five to ten actors doubling roles as needed.

This play can also be used in scene study because it contains ten short two-person scenes.

In Shakespeare's day, men played the women's roles. In this new comedy, women play all the men's roles. It's the story of Jessica, an actress who has been cast to play Hamlet in New York. After accidentally interrupting a performance of Hamlet starring Patrick Stewart, Jessica thinks Mr. Stewart is stalking her; she also faces an uphill battle through a maze of self-important humanities professors, Freudian psychiatrists, and a Danish mother only to discover she doesn’t understand Hamlet, or herself. The search for identity is the theme as Jessica takes on her emotional baggage and an existential overload, as well as her self-doubt and disdain for Danish fondue. In the end she takes the stage and finds herself.

"This wickedly clever new play from William Missouri Downs, dubbed 'a comedy about a tragedy,' uses an all-woman cast to explore questions of courage and conscience in a modern setting, managing to both spoof Shakespeare and pay homage to him in a two-hour show that moves like lightning." - The Patriot News Harrisburg

"With the colorful script and vivid characters Women Playing Hamlet is a slam dunk..." - Kansas City Examiner

"What's amazing lies in the script where Downs dissects Hamlet's intricate character and puts all aspects of Hamlet's persona in Jessica's challenge to scale the ladder to play the part." - Kansas City Examiner

"A rollicking satire jabbing shallow pop culture, overly reverential attitudes toward literature and the intensive navel-gazing shared by actors." - Florida Theatre On Stage

"Silly, profound and ultimately moving" - Florida Theatre On Stage

"Downs's script has... theater history and some of the eternal questions about playing Hamlet woven into its fabric, along with funny and sobering truths about the actor's life." - Miami Herald

When an April Fool’s prank spirals out of control, Muslim students at a small liberal arts college file a formal complaint. Hoping to contain the damage, two well-meaning professors invite a Somali poet to deliver the commencement address. Fresh off the plane, the poet quickly proves she does not share the college’s devotion to political correctness, and she upends the professors’ tidy assumptions about what a Muslim woman should be. As pressure mounts to cancel the speech, all three are forced into an uneasy reckoning with diversity, free expression, and the quiet absurdities of modern campus culture.

In this delightfully absurd farce, Archie and Eudora take the phrase “all the world’s a stage” far too seriously. Every night, they perform their private lives before a live studio audience. The problem is their dinner guests have no idea there will be a live audience.

What follows is a slow-motion collision between polite society and total theatrical anarchy. As the guests realize they are unwilling cast members in someone else’s show, manners collapse, reality wobbles, and chaos takes the wheel.

Along the way, the play tackles life’s great philosophical questions: Can people be good if no one is watching? Are comets divine messages or simple celestial physics? And, most urgently, is it ever acceptable to serve pistachios at a dinner party?

The madness builds to a second act so spectacularly unhinged it may qualify as a minor theatrical event.

Untenured professor Dr. Dick Fig has discovered that a PhD on Bertolt Brecht is not a growth industry. He is being laid off. The last indignity standing between him and the slow-moving unemployment line is the university’s mandatory exit interview.

Enter Eunice. She is the interviewer. She believes in The Secret. Dick believes in reason, conflict, and not wasting oxygen on small talk. They are not a good match. Then a despondent student begins shooting up Ronald Reagan Hall next door.

Trapped together, Dick and Eunice take cover and stumble into a series of unavoidable questions: What is the meaning of life? What is the relationship between religion and science? And why does God hate amputees? Dick lost his foot in a tragic moose accident. It was later reattached. This does not make him feel better.

The Exit Interview is not realism. A chorus of actors plays nearly two dozen roles, interrupting the main action to reenact Dick’s failed romances, his battles with small-minded colleagues, and his complicated emotional history with the moose.
When things become too intense, the chorus halts the story entirely to stage fake commercials and ten-minute plays inside the play, reminding the audience that they are in a theater and should probably keep thinking.

Kosher Lutherans is a curveball comedy about an infertile Jewish couple and their increasingly desperate quest to have a child. Their prayers seem to be answered when they meet a young, sweet, and very pregnant woman from rural Iowa who is willing to place her out-of-wedlock baby for adoption. There is just one complication.

She has no idea they are Jewish. Everything she knows about Jews comes from her farmer father, who taught her that they control Hollywood and killed Jesus. Panicked but determined not to lose their chance at parenthood, the couple does what any reasonable people would do. They pretend to be Lutherans.

What follows is a joyful avalanche of misunderstandings, frantic improvisations, cultural collisions, and lies told with the best possible intentions. Funny, fast, and unexpectedly tender, Kosher Lutherans is a holiday-ready comedy about identity, faith, love, and how far people will go to build a family.

Phil majored in philosophy, which is already a romantic handicap. To make matters worse, he is aggressively average. None of this would matter if he were not hopelessly in love with Sophia, his boss’s beautiful secretary. Phil attempts to introduce himself. She looks straight through him.
Humiliated, he confides in his best friend, Norman, who explains that office gossip claims Sophia has a glass eye. This electrifies Phil. A flaw makes her human. Human means attainable. Better yet, Phil realizes he was standing to her left. Maybe she simply did not see him. He begs Norman to arrange a proper introduction. It fails. Spectacularly. Sophia looks through him again.
Phil’s confidence collapses. Then a stranger thought arrives. What if she is not ignoring him? What if she literally cannot see him? Maybe he is trapped in a fold of hyperspace. Maybe reality has a clerical error. Maybe Descartes was wrong. Phil reaches the only logical conclusion. He moves in with the woman of his dreams, despite the inconvenient fact that she has no idea he exists.

Seagulls in a Cherry Tree is a Chekhovian comedy about Boris and Stan, two Hollywood screenwriters hired by Disney to adapt The Cherry Orchard into a feature film for Mel Gibson.

To escape Los Angeles smog and creative paralysis, they retreat to an isolated artists’ colony outside Moscow, Idaho, to finish their stalled script. Instead, they find themselves surrounded by a community of navel-gazing, philosophizing, chronically indecisive artists, actors, and doctors who seem to have wandered out of a 19th-century Russian drama and into rural America.

Every plot turn in Seagulls in a Cherry Tree is drawn from Chekhov’s plays, including The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya, and The Seagull, with a touch of invention, reshuffled to create what may be the first new Chekhov play in a hundred years.
In the end, Boris and Stan, like many Americans today, never realize the central tragedy. They are already living in a Chekhov play.

College student Loretta has avoided home for two years. She has little in common with her blue-collar parents, and when she left for Harvard, she assumed she would never return. Then she fell in love with a polished Cambridge law student who insists on meeting her family.

The cultural gap could not be wider. He sails yachts. Her parents believe water is a gateway drug. Growing up, Loretta’s mother warned that chlorine causes skepticism. He reads Tennyson. Her parents read Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The CliffsNotes. What follows is a holiday collision of manners, misunderstandings, bruised egos, and accidental honesty. How to Survive Your Family at Christmas is a crowd-pleasing comedy about love, class, and the one thing everyone needs to endure the holidays. Forgiveness.

Dead White Males is a contemporary, issue-oriented, dark-comedy about the religious right, our schools, and the politics of teaching.

The play uses epic theatre staging techniques to tell the story of Janet Greenberg, a young, idealistic, first-year teacher. She struggles against a school board dominated by the religious right. They want to ban sex education, Holden Caulfield, and evolution from the classroom.

Janet learns how to write a "proper" self-evaluation, how to censor musicals so that they are fit for "young minds," how to deal with countless new mandates, constant curriculum changes, petty political games, all the while learning how to cover her ass in a world dominated by constant accountability.

When Doris, Janet's best friend, has a nervous breakdown (while being forced to teach creationism in her science class), Janet is called to testify against her. She must name names or lose her job.

In the end, Janet learns why there aren't a lot of risk-takers in teaching.

Maggie and Raymond have just failed their hostile workplace training seminar. The only way to keep their jobs is to swallow their microaggressions and attend the birthday party of the coworker they torment the most. Karl.
He is the office nerd. He is awkward, brilliant, and deeply underestimated. He is also, possibly, the only person on Earth who can prevent human extinction. As the world teeters on the edge of annihilation, Maggie and Raymond must decide whether Karl is humanity’s last, best hope or a master villain who has engineered the evening as an elaborate act of revenge.
Karl, the Magnificent is an absurd farce that asks a terrifying question: if the human race had to start over with only four deeply flawed people, would we survive? Or are we an evolutionary typo?

Mr. Perfect is a romantic comedy about a quirky flight attendant who survives long layovers on airport coffee and an obsessive diet of romance novels. When she finally meets her own Mr. Perfect, she attempts to consummate destiny in the bathroom of an Airbus, 32,000 feet over Dayton, Ohio. It does not go well.

Shaken but undeterred, she launches into a personal quest to uncover the meaning of life by tracing the random accidents and near misses that stitch existence together. Her search leads her into the arms of a PhD student whose thesis argues that human beings are pathetic creatures who invent meaning where none exists. Meanwhile, Mr. Perfect finds comfort with a nationally famous self-help guru, author of Ten Days to Self-Esteem and On a Wing and a Prayer: A Twelve-Step Crash Course on Conquering Your Fear of Flying.

Then fate intervenes.

A comedy about the labels we stick on one another, as if a few words could ever contain the beautiful mess of being human.

Meet Chris, a newly hired and painfully self-conscious adjunct professor trying to survive in a hyper-diverse English department. His TA, Dorothy, is a confident trans woman who has seen every version of institutional chaos and lived to tell the story. Chris wants desperately to be “woke,” but his ultra-conservative upbringing keeps tripping him in public.

As if that were not enough, the university unleashes its spectacularly misguided diversity webinar, You Can’t Say That, which manages to create more panic than progress.

Then the department raises the stakes. Everyone, faculty and students alike, must wear name tags announcing their personal nouns and pronouns. There is just one problem. Chris has no idea who he is, what he wants, or which labels fit.

Trapped in a world that demands tidy identity boxes, Chris begins to unravel. As his politically incorrect blunders and private confusion about his sexuality spill into public view, he is forced to confront a brutal truth. You cannot keep clicking “accept” on identities, including your own, without ever reading the terms and conditions.

Angry Psycho Princesses is a new musical comedy about William and Kate Fankhauser of St. Paul, Minnesota, a couple so desperate to save their collapsing marriage that they take their daughter Cindy on vacation to Pretty Princess Park, a bargain-bin theme park across the street from Disneyland.

Cindy is enchanted by the animatronic “Hall of Princesses.” Snow White. Sleeping Beauty. All the classics, or at least the ones in the public domain. Her parents are less enchanted. Kate is a ruthless business executive with a bladder infection. William is an unemployed car salesman with opinions. While they argue, they miss the closing announcement.

The gates lock. The lights go out. They are trapped overnight. That is when the princesses come alive. After hours, the glitter fades and the tiaras come off. These are bitter, jaded android royals who drink too much, experiment with peyote, and despise their happily-ever-after programming. Cindy is thrilled. Her parents are terrified.

The princesses warn Cindy that she must escape while she still can. They were once human too, trapped in the park and transformed into robots by the Evil Queen. Because Pretty Princess Park is not a theme park at all. It is the headquarters of a sinister cult of war rats, ruled by the merciless Queen Badassery.

A PhD in English literature is not worth much. Just ask Dr. Helen Hand. Unemployed, broke, and drunk enough to make poor choices, Helen accepts a teaching job at a conservative Bible college in the middle of nowhere, Kansas.

There is only one problem. She is a skeptic. A liberal. And gluten intolerant. Helen enters a world governed by strict moral codes. No smoking. No drinking. No doubt. Posing as a believer, she goes undercover, determined to enlighten her fundamentalist students with reason, literature, and inconvenient questions. It goes badly.

What begins as quiet rebellion spirals into cultural warfare, romantic disasters, theological landmines, and administrative panic. This small-cast comedy takes aim at belief, belonging, and the fragile truce between faith and reason, asking whether either side is ready to listen, or if everyone is just preaching to the wrong choir.

A radical comic romp through the plutocracy now running the United States.

Ayn Rand belts out an anthem to the sacred beauty of selfishness. Then Capitalism Jesus takes the stage to explain that God wants everyone rich, and that miracles are tricky if you have a preexisting condition.

Add songs about trickle-down economics, Russian golden-shower dancers, and a full-tilt socialism polka, and you have an evening that is loud, unholy, and proudly politically incorrect.

For those who like their satire fearless, musical, and just this side of legal.

FOR MORE GO TO. https://www.fascismthemusical.com

Headset: A View from the Light Booth is a comedy about the unseen side of theater. The entire play takes place in the light booth of the Chicago Ensemble Repertory Group Theatre Project on the final night of the company’s questionable production of Hamlet. Everything that can go wrong does.

A comedy about a woman who returns to Texas to confront the dogma of her sexist, egotistical, cowboy-philosopher father.

The shadow of Ayn Rand looms large over the modern world.

Her ideas about unregulated capitalism and heroic selfishness helped shape everything from the Tea Party to her close friend and disciple Alan Greenspan, who chaired the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades. To Fortune 500 CEOs, her philosophy is what Scientology is to movie stars. A belief system. A badge of honor. A private religion with better suits.

In this intimate two-character play, Ayn Rand is put on trial. The audience serves as the jury and decides the verdict.

Was her vision of laissez-faire capitalism the fountainhead of our current economic reality? Did her celebration of selfishness evolve into social Darwinism? In her private life, did she live by the ideals she preached through heroes like John Galt?

The trial examines both the power and the contradictions of her legacy. Her intellectual influence and political reach. Her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Her impact on the Federal Reserve. Her drug use, her affair with a man half her age, and her famously volatile temperament.

Like Rand’s own play The Night of January 16th, the ending is determined by the audience. Guilty or not guilty.

The Trial of Ayn Rand is an interactive theatrical event designed to ignite debate, disagreement, and post-show conversation about money, morality, and the stories we tell ourselves about success.

A new (two-act) adaptation of Ibsen's classic drama designed for smaller theatre companies.

This is not Inherit the Wind, the 1955 play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. That play used only a handful of lines from the original trial. This one is built directly from the 1925 transcripts and edited into a ninety-minute script. Nearly all of the dialogue comes from what was actually said in the courtroom.

By staying faithful to the record, the play reveals how little has changed in the century since the trial. The same arguments remain unresolved. The separation of church and state. Academic freedom. The uneasy standoff between religion and science.

The production uses gender-neutral casting and stages the trial as if it were happening today, collapsing past and present into the same public argument.

It can be staged traditionally or performed as reader’s theatre.

A comedy about how nothing lasts forever, even love.

A short comedy about how the theatre will be changed by the Coronavirus.

Short comedy about etiquette and manners, forgetting to flush.

A ten minute play about how straight, white, privileged, male academics talk To each other in private!

Fuera De Orbita es una comedia sobre dos artistas de performance Dada que han construido un teatro en su sala de estar. Cada noche antes de una audiencia en vivo actúan sus vidas. Usted ha oído hablar de la televisión de la realidad; pensar en ello como teatro de la realidad. Artaud estaría orgulloso de ellos.

Las cosas van de mal en peor cuando descubren que un cometa ha sido detectado en el cielo nocturno. Hay una posibilidad de 50/50 que golpeará la tierra. Todo el mundo, incluido el público, puede tener sólo una hora para vivir. Esto obliga a los padres a dejar de discutir sobre cosas insignificantes como el matrimonio y empezar a discutir sobre grandes cuestiones filosóficas de la vida: ¿Es el cometa un signo de Dios o es sólo la gravedad? ¿Y qué diablos es arte de performance?

Cockeyed - это комедия о философском понимании Декарта «Я думаю, поэтому я есть». Это история среднего философа философии, который влюблен в недостижимую женщину своей мечты. Единственная проблема в том, что у нее стеклянный глаз и смотрит сквозь него. Вскоре ему приходит в голову, что она не нарциссична, но на самом деле его не видит. Он объясняет, что единственная логическая задача - перебраться с ней и сожителем - несмотря на то, что она не знает о его существовании. Его можно назвать комедией Вуди Аллена. (3 мужчины, 1 женщина, комплект)
Cockeyed - eto komediya o filosofskom ponimanii Dekarta «YA dumayu, poetomu ya yest'». Eto istoriya srednego filosofa filosofii, kotoryy vlyublen v nedostizhimuyu zhenshchinu svoyey mechty. Yedinstvennaya problema v tom, chto u neye steklyannyy glaz i smotrit skvoz' nego. Vskore yemu prikhodit v golovu, chto ona ne nartsissichna, no na samom dele yego ne vidit. On ob"yasnyayet, chto yedinstvennaya logicheskaya zadacha - perebrat'sya s ney i sozhitelem - nesmotrya na to, chto ona ne znayet o yego sushchestvovanii. Yego mozhno nazvat' komediyey Vudi Allena. (3 muzhchiny, 1 zhenshchina, komplekt

Arlen Wienberg, a Jewish anthropologist, is called to be an expert witness in a murder trial. The accused: a white police officer. His alleged crime: murdering a black man twenty years ago and burying the bones in the dirt floor beneath his brownstone. When Arlen arrives, he is shocked to discover that the defense lawyer is black.

Ira Altridge the black lawyer isn't having a good day. His first expert witness has suddenly resigned giving him only one thin lunch hour to get his new anthropologist up to speed.

Soon the two men discover that they know each other. They both grew up in the same suburb of Chicago. Ira called it Lawndale. Arlen, Judenstrasse. Some thirty years ago the suburb was a Jewish neighborhood, but now it's all black. Ira and Arlen grew up together during the neighborhood's rocky transition. In fact Arlen’s father was Ira’s landlord.

Arlen begins to suspect that he is being set up. He wonders if Ira really wants to defend officer McDill or if he has another agenda. Race and political correctness are at the center of this compact two hander.

Ein Blick Aus Der Beleuchterkabine ist eine Komödie über die technische Seite des Theaters. Das ganze Spiel findet im Lichtkabinen des Chicago-Ensemble-Repertory-Group-Theater-Projektes statt, in der letzten Nacht der fragwürdigen Produktion von Hamlet. Alles, was schief gehen kann, ist Die Los Angeles Times nannte es "Ein herrlich lustiges Spiel." Während Kevin Fox von der Firma der verlorenen Seelen schrieb: "Headset ist das seltene Spiel, das dem Publikum einen Blick auf das Chaos gibt, das oft hinter den Kulissen der Theaterproduktionen geschieht ... sehr sehr lustig."

Set in a quirky Iowa bar in 1976, the play centers on its owners, the bashful Harry and the unflappable Hazel. Tonight is special. After a lifetime of romantic misfires, Harry is finally in love. He has met Diane, a new arrival in town who, like him, longs for companionship and a quiet life.
Regulars gather to celebrate, including the bar’s most beloved fixture, a man known only as “the Governor.”

In the 1950s, he was a serious political contender. After losing two heartbreakingly close elections, he gave up on winning. He did not give up on running. His father’s will requires him to remain a candidate in order to inherit the family money. Now he campaigns out of obligation, recycling famous speeches from other politicians and delivering them to loyal farmers who drive in from as far away as Moline to hear him pontificate.

The evening unfolds in laughter, music, and small-town hope. Then Harry makes a discovery. Diane has a husband. And he has just been released from prison. Suddenly, love, loyalty, and survival are all on the menu, and a quiet night at the bar turns into something far more complicated.