Tim Boland

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CO-WINNER/FINAL SELECTION - TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY 2025 NEW AMERICAN PLAY FESTIVAL

THIRD PLACE PRIZE - INFINITHEATRE WRITE-ON-Q CONTEST 2018

SEMIFINALIST - EUGENE O'NEILL 2019 NATIONAL PLAY CONFERENCE

SEMIFINALIST- ASHLAND NEW PLAY FESTIVAL 2019

SANCTUARY is a two-act contemporary play set in West Texas that dramatizes the story of MARIA, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico and single parent with two American-born children as she fights to remain with her children in America. MARIA escaped Mexico’s hardened streets after her brother and cousin were both killed in the drug wars and still fears for her life with the thought of being returned. With MARIA’S legal options having finally run out and facing imminent deportation, she seeks sanctuary in a small church in West Texas as the conservative PASTOR RANDY, somewhat new in his position at First United and recovering from his own troubled past, must look deep into his heart and decide whether or not to open the church doors to this "stranger." But PASTOR RANDY does not anticipate the resistance that MARIA’S presence will cause within the conservative church elders and congregation as his actions threaten to split the church and its congregants in half as they will all be asked to answer the question: where does the rule of law end and faith and love and conservative compassion begin?

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CO-WINNER LONG BEACH PLAYHOUSE 2018 NEW WORKS FESTIVAL - Staged Reading
SPOTLIGHT VERMONT 2024 - Three-Performance Enhanced Staged Reading

HAPPY THANKSGIVING is set on Thanksgiving Day, 2016, two weeks after the highly divisive U.S. presidential election.
A Michigan-state (Blue state turned Red!) married couple, two conservative Republican parents, are holding their annual Thanksgiving dinner for their three adult children coming back to Jackson, Michigan (often branded as the birthplace of the Republican party): their first-born, a liberal firebrand Hillary-supporting daughter, along with their middle child, a gay Republican son, and the baby of the family, a Sandernista democratic socialist daughter.

Annual Thanksgiving family gatherings are normally fraught with enough anxiety for this diverse and politically-engaged family, but after the long and contentious presidential campaign of 2016, this post-election turkey get-together threatens to be a disaster in the making. One American family and their binds of marriage, parenthood, brother and sisterhood will all be tested as the family members are challenged to answer the ultimate question, which comes first, party, candidate, country or family?

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FINAL SELECTION -LIVE ARTS WATERWORKS FESTIVAL 2025 - Two-Performance Staged Reading
FINALIST - OFFICIAL INVITATION - VERGE THEATRE NEW WORKS FEST 2025
SEMIFINALIST - WILD IMAGININGS EPIPHANIES FESTIVAL 2024 Table Reading
SEMIFINALIST - ROAD THEATRE COMPANY - 16TH SUMMER PLAY FESTIVAL 2025

PLATO’S BABY is a two-act romantic dramedy, with a twist of magic realism, set in the present day but suffused with a bit of Athens 400 BC, England's Golden Age of Shakespeare and QE1, and noted 19th and 20th century icons of romantic lore. A play about love. Beyond physical love. A love seeking much more. Truth. Beauty. Immortality.

KATHERINE and PHILLIP, mid-30s-late 30s, bruised, battered and disillusioned with modern day love and marriage, each wanting a child but unable to find the lasting relationship or partner to have it with, meet through a real life matchmaking service (currently in rising vogue!) designed to match people together to enter into a platonic friend, no sex, no romance, no marriage, conscious co-parenting relationship to raise a biological child of their making. Two people who have never been involved, will never be involved, decoupling love, sex and marriage from parenting, removing all the stress and conflicts inherent in traditional love and marriage. KATHERINE and PHILLIP meet and click together to be platonically for their outside-the-box family project. They will have a baby together but not be together in any way except as parents, free to be involved with others in non-parental love and sex relationships. But what was intended to simplify their lives grows more complicated as KATHERINE and PHILLIP are pulled down to earth from their other-worldly higher form of love utopia. A Greek chorus of history’s world-famous figures and experts on love, philosophers, poets, sex goddesses and psychoanalysts, PLATO, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, SIGMUND FREUD, QUEEN ELIZABETH 1, MARILYN MONROE, SIMONE BEAUVOIR and FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE frequent the stage with their words of wisdom and experience on the joy and the insanity of love as they watch over the hopeful two find their way to a higher love.

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SEMIFINALIST - THE ROAD THEATRE COMPANY 2024 Summer Playwrights Festival 15.

RENOUNCE is a two-act drama, designed to be performed by 4-7 actors, with doubling involved, set in modern day Washington, D.C. and 1850s-90s slave-owning and Jim Crow America. Anchoring the story between the American present and America’s dark past are the Black spirituals and slave songs of America's dark past. MARTIN JAMES, 40s, Black male, meets with ANTHONY WHITE, 40s, Black male, a United States Citizenship and Immigration Service officer. MARTIN has come to the USCIS Washington, D.C. office to formally renounce his American citizenship. But with one key twist. MARTIN proposes to remain living in the United States as a stateless person. ANTHONY does everything he can to dissuade and block MARTIN from renouncing. The play rotates between the USCIS office of 2022 and the characters’ Black slave ancestors of the later 1800s and their battles with citizenship and their attempt to achieve equality from slave times through Reconstruction and Jim Crow. As ANTHONY rejects MARTIN’s renunciation as not fulfilling the U.S. statute's necessary criteria for renunciation, MARTIN fights back, brings ANTHONY face to face with ANTHONY’S ancestors who he has resisted learning about, not wanting to be trapped by the family’s slave past of sorrow and tragedy. MARTIN and ANTHONY battle to define citizenship, nationality and identity, what is is to be Black in America and to whom we allegiance is owed in the fight for freedom, sovereignty, hope and redemption.

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DIVORCE HONEYMOON is a three character, one set romantic comedy. The setting is a hotel suite in the Dominican Republic.

Renee Ross (later 30s) and Peter Franklin (later 30s-early 40s) arrive at the Romeo and Juliet fantasy-themed honeymoon suite at the Hotel Domingo in Santo Domingo of the Dominican Republic. But we soon learn that they are not there for a honeymoon. They have come to the Dominican Republic for one of the island’s quickie divorces that the island is renowned for.

Renee and Peter after nine years of marriage have decided to end their union, having simply come to different places in their lives and have "grown apart." They look to avoid some messy parting and have a “happy divorce.” Dissolving their partnership, uncoupling with dignity and love and respect. And maybe a little goodbye sex for true closure. But Peter has other ideas for the weekend as he has decided to resurrect the marriage. DIVORCE HONEYMOON starts out as a frothy souffle that soon turns into a royal battle of the sexes, examining the politics of modern love and sex, contemporary male and female roles and the eternal struggle between the need for intimacy and the need for independence and what it takes to sustain a lifelong union.

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PUBLIC STAGED READING - THE ROAD THEATRE COMPANY - 2023

SOCIAL CREATURES is a comedic drama of conspiracy theory-mad America caught in the dark web of misinformation and anonymous social media chat sites, set in the years 2018-2019 where American conspiracy theories and believers have blasted into the American mainstream turning America into a post-truth land where no one is quite sure whom or what to trust. The action on stage will rotate between one married couple fracturing and their virtual interactions with the various anonymous pontificators on social media represented by screens mounted upstage lighting up with catchy user names and their paranoid wisdom and conspiracies, broadcast visually and aurally.

LINDA tolerates and endures her husband DANIEL’S increasing detachment from reality as he spirals down the dark rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and alternative narratives, capturing LINDA’S parents in it, antagonizing and losing long-time friends and becoming outcasts in their social network. When an increasingly paranoid and end-of-days DANIEL starts stockpiling survival equipment and materials and weaponry, AR-15s and Glocks, in their house, it is the end for LINDA. DANIEL finds himself locked out of his house and then after attempting to break back in, is arrested, receives a restraining order, unable to see his own children and loses his job. At rock bottom, DANIEL reluctantly agrees to see a counselor. Still feeling violated and unfairly targeted and maligned, the counselor slowly disarms DANIEL, pulls the curtain back on this confident conspiratorial believer to reveal how he arrived at his present state, a series of unhealed personal wounds driving his anger and distrust far deeper than any politics, but now manifested against "the system" and the federal government. As DANIEL, so easily dismissed as conspiracy theory crazy, we witness the unearthing of the roots of one conspiracy theory follower, forced to confront his personal ghosts and disappointments and true source of his anger, disillusion and distrust as he attempts to recover his marriage and his family.

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SEMIFINALIST EUGENE O'NEILL 2020 NATIONAL PLAY CONFERENCE

SEMIFINALIST PLAYPENN 2020

WEALTH is a full-length play dramatizing just how inter-connected and dependent American rich and poor may be on each other beyond wealth and class. Where income inequality meets the blood ties that bind even the most disconnected of Americans.

JIMMY and TAMMI, American poor, fight to dig themselves out of their economic hole, but all seems lost and hopeless after their children are removed from their care by Children’s Protective Services for suspected parental neglect due to their children’s state of chronic hunger and unsafe living conditions.

ROGER BANCROFT, Hedge Fund King of America and multi-billionaire, suffering end stage kidney disease and facing premature death as he languishes far down on the national kidney transplant waitlist, must decide how much longer he will play by the government’s waitlist rules of no special privilege or assert his power to do whatever it takes to ensure his survival.

WEALTH asks how far will rich and poor alike go to hold onto those things that money cannot always buy: life, love, family.

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THREE-PERFORMANCE ENHANCED PUBLIC STAGED READING - BRAVE NEW PRODUCTIONS, Montreal, CA

HAIL TO THE CHIEF is a political satire/comedy set primarily in Washington, D.C. in the foreseeable future.

It is the tale of the outing of the first gay conservative, religious right President of the United States and his attempts to survive his re-election bid, and even more so, his own party's plot to unseat him. HAIL TO THE CHIEF is an intimate, personal story, following the journey of one man struggling to become honest and accepting of his true self, while trying to hold onto his family, friends, and remain the most powerful person in the world. Forced to confront his decades-long deception, the President starts to transform into the most dangerous person and greatest liability that his party can have: a President who starts to grow a heart. President Barber is faced with two choices: continue to hide in the closet to hang onto his presidency or throw it all away to embrace his true nature. Or is there a third way to have it all? Become so honest and bold, he may become what America is looking for: an authentic radical, radically honest, truly bi-partisan, half -Democrat, half-Republican, same-sex man of the people.

The year: 2020. The year of the Invisible Enemy. The tale of two viruses ravaging and transforming American life forever: COVID-19 and TRUVID-20. TRUVID-20? Truth Virus 2020: the selective choosing of one’s own truth and facts, regardless of the veracity, ramifications and deadly consequences to others.

INVISIBLE is the just as much the story of the Visible Enemy, those public figures sworn to protect us and their countless Invisible followers holding competing truths and facts as they battle their fellow American Invisible in a real life mortal combat when truth meets power. INVISIBLE is about the hall-of-mirrors challenge of who to believe, what to believe, facts changing, science changing, misinformation and disinformation multiplying, the line between true and false disappearing, with no vaccine or emergency use authorization coming to the rescue to battle TRUVID-20.

INVISIBLE is part journalistic theatre, story theatre, documentary theatre, reality theatre, breaking the Fourth Wall theatre, told in live time. A Cast of Players (8) -- with a number of gender/color blind roles -- led by a Narrator, assisted by a professional Fact Checker, and the Players (assuming multiple roles and speaking parts), invite the audience on a journalistic search, utilizing the Fair Use doctrine and public record, to re-enact the story of America’s 2020 nightmare through government officials’ words, speeches, press releases, postings, etc., to learn how America divided at a time they most needed to be united.

As the story is performed for what is now their umpteenth performance, the Players become severely challenged and conflicted in recreating the words, thoughts and feelings of the Visible characters, not insulated by the knowledge of performing an imagined, fictional creation, but faced with having to live through performance after performance depicting characters who become all too real and horrifying, propelling the actors to battle each other as they fight to get through the present performance.

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PUBLIC STAGED READING - VICTORY THEATRE CENTER, BURBANK, CA.
Directed By KENT MINAULT

THE HOUSE is a two-act play (3W, 4M) set in the quintessential reflection of the American Dream: the American suburban home. Staged in the most naturalistic of settings, THE HOUSE is a play of magical realism, as past family members' ghosts, split selves and spirits roam the rooms and hallways, frozen in time, stuck in the "in-between", unable to cross over until a now adult "son" of the first owners returns to his childhood home to make peace with the past, as the living and the dead and disconnected confront each other to free themselves so they all may be able to cross over.

WILLIAM TALBOT (30s) returns to the scene of his childhood, the house originally built by his parents in the later 1950's when America was filled with promise and purpose. WILLIAM, gone for 18 years, his childless marriage in crisis, has taken his wife's ultimatum to "fix whatever the hell happened in that house you grew up in" quite literally and returned to find the answer. But upon returning to be welcomed in by the present owners of the house, William finds that the ghost of his deceased mother, who died suddenly in the house, still inhabits the premises, her “crossing over” to the next world blocked, her presence unbeknownst to all the subsequent owners. William, in an effort to again be with the mother he lost at way too young an age, proposes to buy his family house back from the present homeowners, Peter and Jane, both on their second marriage, but his offer to recover his childhood family home splits the couple and their two teenage children. Peter feels he has achieved the American dream he has always sought while Jane has begun to regret their once-thought of dream home, financially burdened by the cost and pressure of it all, and the fragmented merging of a step-family, their children having to deal with the anger and disillusion they feel as the collateral damage of their parents’ messy marital pasts.

As William tries to “come home,” his mother fights to leave for good, to free herself from the dream house, while Peter and Jane must confront their previous broken vows and betrayals and infidelities. All must confront the chains of pain that have bound them up as they all try to define the true meaning of home in America.

NATIONAL PLAY CONTEST WINNER - ACME ACTING COMPANY'S THIRD ANNUAL NEW PLAY FESTIVAL
WORLD PREMIERE - ACME ACTING COMPANY at COLONY PLAYHOUSE

WEST COAST PREMIERE - THE ROAD THEATRE COMPANY

FILM - Produced by CBS PRODUCTIONS, Starring SCOTT BAKULA, AMY MADIGAN, RICHARD THOMAS

IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE is a two-act drama, set in the heart of America in one of the remaining death penalty states. It is a play that explores the American heart and what it is capable of in the face of the most unforgivable of crimes. It dramatizes the stories of two families left behind, indelibly connected, that of the survivors of the victim and the perpetrator’s family, all still dwelling in their own private hell. IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE is a story where hope seems to have vanished as the quest for justice is pitted against the possibility of true reconciliation.

J.P. Johnson has less than 24 hours to live for the murder of sixteen-year old Debbie Murphy, but he has more on his mind than his own survival, the survival of his own twelve-year old daughter, Cheryl. Johnson’s mother Maze has been raising his daughter ever since the mother of Cheryl overdosed, but she is in the late stages of a returned cancer, as the condemned Johnson is fixed on making sure his daughter’s future is not likewise condemned.

Jack and Connie Murphy, Debbie’s parents, are torn over what is to come. Connie Murphy, the founder of her own victims’ rights group, Parents for Justice, is driven to see Johnson pay the ultimate price for his act while Jack has come to feel that the execution will not free them but only leave another family suffering with loss. Jack has infuriated Connie in going so far as to consider speaking to the Governor to ask for clemency and reprieve for Johnson. Jack has requested to see Johnson in his last day to know if asking for Johnson’s life is worth the risk of angering his wife so much that he will lose her forever.

As Jack Murphy, and later Connie, face off with their daughter’s killer in a quest to find answers to that senseless night of ten years past, Johnson makes an extraordinary request of the Murphys that will further challenge their marriage and ultimate humanity. As Johnson fights for his daughter’s welfare, the Murphys are faced with pardoning the unpardonable and forgiving the impossible if they are to ever find their way back to each other.

WORLD PREMIERE - CAST THEATRE - Los Angeles

LOVE MAD is a romantic comedy, sex farce, the endless battle between the sexes. A tale of men trying to please their respective female partners, but at war with their own inner desires over the call for a monogamous existence and the women who must survive their madness and guide them through their testosterone-fueled angst, ambivalence and plain old male madness.

Spencer has finally met the woman of his dreams, the woman he wants to marry, Michelle. But Spencer's longtime bachelor best buddy, Trevor, tries to slow Spencer down until he gets through the sex-crazed first year of infatuation and hopefully come out of his state of madness, while Michael, his other best bro, newly married and still basking in the glow of the honeymoon phase, wholeheartedly coaxes Spencer to make the leap. Adding fuel to the fire is Deborah, Spencer’s ex-girl friend, still in love with Spencer, all charged up and ready to divide and conquer. Amidst forays to a polygamist’s compound in Utah and Michael’s wife turning out to have a seven-year itch turn into a seven-month itch, and Deborah and Trevor beginning a secret affair built more around angry sex and ultimate power, all five people will raise maximum mayhem and madness in their battle and quest towards freedom and connection.