Johnna Adams

Over the course of a 90-minute parent/teacher conference, a grieving mother and an emotionally overwhelmed primary school teacher have a fraught conversation about the tragic suicide of the mother’s son, the teacher’s student, Gidion. Gidion may have been bullied severely-- or he may have been an abuser. As his story is slowly uncovered, the women try to reconstruct a satisfying explanation for Gidion’s act and come to terms with excruciating feelings of culpability.

Unproduced, two-person, dark romantic comedy.

Max and Whitney are patients in a clinical drug trial. The pills they are testing will rid them of elaborate fantasy worlds they have constructed as part of schizoid personality disorders. As the pills start to work, they fall in love. But is loving one person really work destroying two entire worlds?

Cheryl and Doug meet backstage at a dance recital where their two daughters are performing—except that Cheryl’s daughter is hiding under the stage, weeping and mewling in terror, and Doug’s daughter Suzy starts a violent fight on stage during the waltz of the flowers. Cheryl and Doug are immediately not attracted to one another. However, Doug is unbelievably needy and Cheryl is deeply depressed and largely indifferent-- so a desperate, doomed courtship begins. Their dysfunctional relationship confronts Doug’s grave-robbing past, Cheryl’s inability to mother and the increasing fear inspired by an at-large child serial killer.

A small town legend about living skinless people inspires a graduate student, Emmi (20s), to write her women’s studies thesis on Zinnia Welles (30s), an obscure pulp horror writer from the 1950s. Zinnia’s isolated farm life with her three sisters and their abusive mother resulted in a small canon of darkly beautiful horror stories that fascinate Emmi. Graduate advisor, Sylvia (50s), is passionately opposed to Emmi’s topic and tries to convince her student that Zinnia and her tormented visions are anti-woman, igniting a vicious debate about the purpose and personal cost of uncompromising feminism. As Emmi fights to write Zinnia’s story, we see the Welles’ sisters struggle with Zinnia’s delusions about the skinless and with the frightening prospect that they may not be delusions at all.

An unproduced play that I would love to find development opportunities for. This is a play for four women. Layne Michaels is a successful novelist who joins her dear friend, Sybil Morne, a visual artist for an informal artists' retreat at Sybil's house and studio in Woodstock, NY. Sybil's two daughters, Delphine, the only non-artist in the household, and Tamblyn, an autistic would-be writer are also in attendance. And Tamblyn is hoping that Layne will give her advice on her first novel. The story follows the relationships between the women, the course of an old friendship, the artistic price of motherhood, mentorship challenges, and the price of mother-daughter relationships. The play has a wonderful challenge for costumers with four large fertility goddess costumes that Sybil is creating, and we get to hear excerpts from Layne's new science fiction novel. So art is everywhere.

Set in the 1930s during the Oklahoma dustbowl. A young girl who speaks to angels with the voices of birds. A mother who hires a pair of con men to resurrect her dead husband. An unlikely love affair between a desperately pregnant woman and a despicably charming carnival barker. A false resurrection boy who is chained by the neck to the house of a family cursed with a genuine power to raise the dead. A body that is transformed against its will into a dark weapon of dread by the first angel eater!

Set in the 1970s, Oklahoma. A snake wrangler kidnaps a preacher, suspending a cage of live rattlers over his head, for a woman willing to sell her soul in exchange for her sister dead sister. A mother who lives for revenge. An alcoholic oil pipe layer with flashes of unwelcome clairvoyance. An undertaker who weeps for the woman he embalms. And one innocent boy surrounded by people with hearts like rattlers.

Set in 2048, Los Angeles. The final generation of angel eaters in a futuristic Los Angeles. A paranoid drifter trying to escape visions of gold horns and Armageddon. The inheritor of a fearful curse thrust into a nightmare landscape of vicious angels and unwanted inheritance. A freebreeding woman pregnant with eight clone children has ambitious needs reaching far beyond the vat of amniotic fluid she is suspended in. A private investigator trying to find her clone sister’s killer. Fallen angels and inmates roaming a private prison built beneath Disneyland theme park attractions. And eight little antichrists who can’t wait to destroy the world.

A troubled young man founds a new religion with a stack of dirty magazines. A dead woman steals souls. A televangelist is humiliated by Mike Wallace. A West Texas truck stop whore seeks enlightenment. A grieving woman with a gun. An assassination plot, weird sex, the Crystal Cathedral, a whole lotta’ money and a new cult.
Squeak kidnaps her faith healing sister, Judith Christ, at gunpoint to perform a resurrection. Judith's son Tobey is invents a new religion out of porn magazines and converts a mentally challenged young neighbor, Scooter, and his stepdaddy Brian's whore, Audry. Violence erupts when Judith is brought back and goes out to the morgue, with a fifth of Jack Daniels, to bring her daughter Margaret back to life. Mike Wallace, a puppet, comments on the action, and all is observed by Judith's pet Demon.
In the second act, the audience travels around the theater as converts to Tobey's new religion, seeing the scenes in different orders in small groups. They are married to one another in a joyous group marriage, privileged to speak with two resurrected souls about the afterlife, brought into a plot to kill Father Tobey, shown a promotional video, encourages to build a craft project with messiah Judith Christ, and are invited into the Sixty Minutes studio for Mike Wallace's final broadcast.

This is an older script written around 2004. Never produced, poor thing. The play follows the last ten years of the Oneida Community in upstate New York (roughly 1867-1877). The Oneida Community was arguably the most successful utopian experiment in United States History. The 300 member complex marriage at Oneida embraced incest, tantric sex birth control methods, free love, and initiation practices that would be considered pedophilia by today’s standards as part of their intensely Christian theology. And the industrious family still found time to establish the flatware factories that become the modern day Oneida Corporation.
We follow John Humphrey Noyes, the charismatic founder of the Oneida Community, as he attempts to launch his son, Theodore, as his successor to the position of Father of the Community. Also, we follow John Humphrey Noyes’ youngest son Pip as he is initiated into the marriage, sexually, at a young age by the elderly Harriet. John Humphrey Noyes’ niece Tirzah and her lovers Edward and James suffer under the Community’s prohibition of special love relationships (in a communal marriage, you must love all your spouses in kind and not love one spouse especially). Community members Victor and Mary struggle with their reactions to the Community’s eugenics experiments and a prohibition that is put in place against their wishes to have a child. And Community member Ann, full of cunning ambitions, sets out to win control of the Community from the Noyes family at all costs.

An older play of mine. Written in 2004-ish. Never produced, poor little wallflower. Fifty years ago, an angel crash lands in an abandoned churchyard in Juarez, Mexico. In present-day Texas, three men are out hunting in the woods. Ominous angel wings are heard overhead once again. The visitation is part of a 50-year family legacy that haunts West Texas farmer Coy. Coy committed an unspeakable crime at an abandoned church outside of Juarez in his youth, and his folly may be a catalyst for Armageddon.
Fifty years ago, Coy and his brother Buck find an abused woman, Birdie, in a Laredo bar. Birdie’s mind is damaged and the men hide her near an abandoned church, where a mysterious, wounded Winged Man crash lands trying to find her. Buck’s first wife Ranetta shows up in Mexico and announces that God has sent her to claim Birdie’s baby. Buck is surprised to learn Birdie is pregnant and is not certain that he is the father.
In the present, Buck’s son Jacob and his great nephew Matt want to put Coy in a retirement home so that Matt and his pregnant girlfriend Deanna can move into his house. Matt tells Coy that an angel told him their baby would be born to lead a host of angels in a coming war. Coy attempts to explain to Matt that the events in Mexico fifty years ago might explain the angel’s interest in this baby.
When Deanna joins the men on their hunt and tells Matt that she has spoken to God, violence erupts that will haunt the family’s past and future. The angels arrive and the hunt begins.