Butch Maxwell

Fourteen years ago, Sarah Morrison traded a theatre critic's byline for a color-coded suburban life. Now, at midlife, she's auditioning for a community theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest — and discovering that Oscar Wilde's comedy about people who invent themselves cuts uncomfortably close. Opposite her is Eli, a marketing man who sold his conscience for a payday-loan paycheck. Presiding over them both is Marla Hendricks, a returning soap opera diva whose "Stella Adler paraphrasing technique" keeps mangling the script and exposing the truth. As rehearsals blur the line between performance and confession, Sarah's carefully managed marriage begins asking questions she's spent years avoiding. A dramedy about the roles we audition for, the ones we get stuck in, and what happens when someone finally sees us without the costume.

Six months after their parents died together in the hot tub of their lake cabin — a clock radio, a gust of wind — four step-siblings meet for the first time to sort the boxes, divide the estate, and drive home before dark. Then the storm closes the only road out.
Snowed in with a squirrel in the attic and a box marked "Private," Maggie, Simon, Danny, and Carol drink six-month-old beer, ruin a casserole, and unpack forty years of secrets — including one, dated Valentine's Day 1972, that rewrites Maggie's entire life. Remains is a dark comedy about the families we inherit and the questions we run out of time to ask. One set, one night, four actors, no intermission.

Five strangers check into the LegacyFlow Institute for a one-day retreat promising to align their minds with their futures. An AI called LegacyLink tracks their breathing, their handwriting pressure, their hesitations — and cheerfully announces what it finds. When a malfunction opens the phone lockbox, each participant discovers the legacy they came to imagine already exists: a protégé turning doubt into danger on cable news, a methodology for making yourself invisible now spreading through a Fortune 500 company, 3.7 million followers taught that waiting is the work. The system promised correction. It can't process what it learns. A dark comedy about the future watching back — and what happens when it doesn't like what it sees.

A tragedy about the people who write the sentences other people act on. Five weeks before a primary, a factory closes and twenty-eight hundred jobs disappear. In the war room of the candidate who promised to restore trust, four strategists watch their opponent turn the wound into a weapon — and decide to build a better one. Dr. Miranda Ashcroft, the campaign's architect and a former academic who once wrote the book on coherent rhetoric, gives grieving voters a face to blame: the CEO who signed the closure. The frame is accurate. The frame works. The numbers move. So do other things. One room, one whiteboard, thirty-five days — Firewall tracks a campaign's erosion in real time, as the language of accountability does exactly what it was designed to do, and then keeps going. A play about the people who write the sentences other people act on.

Ten years after their improv troupe went quiet, five of its members reunite for one more show. The sixth — Amanda — stays away, though her name keeps surfacing between games. Their signature bit, "Just This Once," asks a performer to agree to escalating requests; the comedy lives in the hesitation before each yes. Nobody remembers, at first, whose hesitation it was.
The play moves between the rehearsal room, where the games still work, and the parking lot behind it, where the conversations the room won't allow keep happening anyway. As the group rebuilds its old material, the bit that made them good starts refusing to be funny — and the ensemble has to face what it borrowed to build it.
The improv scenes have structure without fixed content: each production generates them fresh, and they must genuinely land, right up until they can't.

It's Christmas Eve at 114 Oak Street, and Holly Hartwell has the entire day in a binder: forty-nine laminated tabs covering dietary restrictions (confirmed, suspected, and emotionally motivated), arrival windows, and the correct dessert position of her husband Nick's fruitcake. Then the electrician returns with a follow-up question about the wiring. Then their son Chip arrives an hour early with a girlfriend and a rival fruitcake that is mostly Brazil nuts. Then come five frozen carolers, a delivery driver with an unclaimed package the size of a refrigerator, a professional Santa booked for the wrong street — and their daughter Noelle, newly divorced, still wearing her coat, arranging mugs with a precision that has nothing to do with mugs. Her ex-husband is with the carolers. As the circuits fail, the smoke alarm finds harmony with an uninvited tenor, and an electric butter churn runs off the Christmas village outlet, the binder finally meets the one variable it can't measure. A holiday farce about the people who hold Christmas together and the moment they get to put it down.

A woman sits on a park bench, filling in the last names of the Three Stooges. A man approaches — an old flame, now a private investigator, carrying a folder he wishes he weren't. Over the course of their reunion, they catch up, celebrate her engagement, and discover what's in the folder — an entire relationship's worth of joy, jealousy, heartbreak, fury, and reluctant hope, conducted entirely in a single word. Fine is a play in one word: every line of dialogue is "fine," and every "fine" means something different.

Alex has been called in for a routine assessment. Helen has a form, a pen, and a list of questions about sleep, focus, appetite, and workload. Alex has answers — all of them fine, all of them acceptable, all of them within normal range. Over the course of a single sitting, Helen's questions circle back, tighten, and cross-reference themselves until the gap between what Alex reports and what Alex is carrying becomes impossible to paper over. When the truth finally surfaces, the form has no field for it. Helen writes something conclusive. The interview ends. The coffee never gets drunk. (approximately 15 minutes)

Del Boca Vista Phase III, 2040. Semi-retired comic Gerry Signfeld just wants pudding and peace. His friends want more: Gorge needs cash for black-market brie without blemishing his Permanent Record Card, Eileen is $3,000 short of a spa rebirth in Sedona, and Skrammer has invented "Bingo-nomics," a mathematically flawless system for rigging the facility's $9,000 jackpot. Standing in their way is Nooman, the self-appointed enforcer of Del Boca Vista, who files grievances in triplicate by day and runs a gourmet cheese smuggling ring by night. When Nooman drops dead mid-monologue with contraband goat cheese in hand, every resident has a motive, and the only evidence is on a flash drive an unsuspecting audience member just swallowed with her coffee. An interactive murder mystery in three acts, built around dinner service, with audience participation roles, in-character Q&A, and prizes for the sharpest sleuths. A loving parody of a certain show about nothing, aged fifty years and still complaining.

The Corner Café has survived thirty years on patty melts, regulars, and a head chef who can't keep his hat on his head. Now Carby Burnzotto wants to serve "hand-formed bovine expression," the owner has installed a celebrity chef who once burned water, and a reality-TV restaurant consultant is renaming the place every twenty minutes. When feared food critic Saffron Sterling books a table — the same critic whose review gutted the café three years ago — the staff stakes everything on one perfect mushroom risotto. She takes a bite, declares it magnificent, and collapses. Everyone touched that plate. Everyone had a reason.
Café Rescue is a musical comedy murder mystery for five actors plus three audience participants, built for dinner theater and flexible venues. The evening includes a pre-show character mingle, an audience detective-card guessing break, and parody numbers set to well-known tunes (the show plays fully without the songs if licensing is unavailable). Script running time 60–70 minutes; a full dinner event runs about 2 hours 45 minutes.

The building where they staged their first Christmas pageant is being sold. So Charlie Braun has organized one more — sixty-one years after the original, with the same cast. Loocy has notes on everyone's blocking. Minus cannot answer a simple question simply. Schrader has made his peace with playing Joseph. And Sloopy the beagle has found a two-page document that nobody will stop long enough to read.
Then the cardboard star falls — the one Loocy said all evening was too far left — and lands on Loocy. The rehearsal becomes an investigation. Everyone was near the rigging. Everyone has something they've spent decades declining to say. And the anonymous buyer, Redwood Community Holdings, may be closer than anyone realizes.
An interactive musical comedy murder mystery for five performers and a roomful of recruited wise men, with parody carols, a fair-play solution hiding in plain sight, and the particular blend of sadness and joy that somehow feels like the same thing.

Private detective Elliot Brick can read a room in thirty seconds. He's usually wrong. When socialite Velvet Larue hires him to find missing heiress Cordelia Van Dyke, Brick works a charity gala full of suspects: a fiancé whose engagement contract pays out whether the bride shows up or doesn't, a financial adviser who prefers the term "creative redistribution," a bodyguard still guarding the spot where his client used to be, and a woman who always knows slightly more than she's willing to say. Then the heiress appears — briefly. The key to her murder is a small black notebook full of observations somebody would kill to keep unread. A fair-play interactive murder mystery built for dinner theatre, with five audience volunteer roles, three (optional) musical numbers, and a detective whose confidence outruns his conclusions until the one moment it counts

On a small Greek island, an American tour group awakens to shocking news: one of their fellow travelers has died overnight under suspicious circumstances.

The story then unfolds in reverse.

Beginning with the aftermath and moving backward through the previous evening, afternoon, and finally the group's arrival, each scene transforms everything the audience thought it understood. Casual remarks become clues. Ordinary interactions acquire unexpected weight. Relationships reveal hidden loyalties, private disappointments, and dangerous secrets. As the mystery deepens, the question shifts from who committed the crime to how every assumption about it was formed.

Blending comedy, suspense, and audience interaction, Dead Reckoning is a fair-play murder mystery that asks the audience to solve not only the crime, but the story itself.