Andrew Heinze

Time: The Near Future -- Place: A government office outside of Washington D.C.

What if you're faced with possibly the last choice you'll ever make? And that choice is a machine that will keep you happy for the rest of your life?

Dave has hit bottom. Jobless and alone, he's in a mandatory meeting with Stoddard, a government employee who's skilled at getting people to sign "The Bliss Option." Multitudes - the poor, the ill, the unemployed - have entered The Bliss. But Dave resists. Will Stoddard persuade him to sign? Will he persuade her that she's selling suicide? Or will something else happen in this room?

Time: the year 2060. Place: the USA. Only women -- and all women -- carry firearms. This is due to the Armed and Ready Act of 2045, which ended mass shootings and high homicide rates. Perfect, right? It is for husband Lexy and wife Lee, until Lee saves Lexy from a deadly assault. After that, Lexy spirals, fast and furious, from marital gratitude to marital confusion to marital frustration to marital chaos, a chaos that gets much more chaotic with the help of the couple's non-monogamous best friends, wife Jess and husband Chelsea. Will Lexy need to leave monogamy behind and take up with Jess, or will he need a gun of his own to feel "able" in his monogamous marriage, or . . . ? A comedy.

Selected as the "New Jersey play" for the "Our Home States" festival produced by Broom Street Theater (Madison WI)

Bigfoot is doing really well. Certain that he’s the only indisputably real, hypernatural creature in human society, his only problem is an inflated ego. Then he gets a phone call from someone claiming to be the Jersey Devil.

Selected for publication: Best Ten-Minutes Plays, 2024 (Smith & Kraus)

Depleted by chronic depression, JENNY prepares to end her life, until husband JAY comes home from work unexpectedly. When she fails to persuade him to leave, he discovers her plan. She urges him to let her go, but he has a will of his own to get her to stay.

Finalist 2023 Todd McNerney Playwriting Award; Semi-Finalist 2023 O'Neill National Playwrights Conference; Chosen for Public Reading, The Road Theatre 2023 Playwrights Festival

What happens when a white Jewish family finds out that it's not? White or Jewish. And if
everyone involved, including a Black spouse and a Black best friend, ends up different from who
they were? And it all happens in three days? On Passover, with a Seder that spins out of control.

Two days before Passover, 2022. Ariel Cohen (32) discovers that his long-deceased maternal
grandmother was not a Middle Eastern Jew, as he and his siblings had been told, but a Black
American Christian. This revelation throws Ariel and everyone around him into an Identity
Crisis of comic proportions.

*Winner: "Top 6" Finalist, Dayton Playhouse 2021 FutureFest
Finalist, 2021 Todd McNerney Playwriting Award

Monologues from this play published in THE BEST MEN'S STAGE MONOLOGUES 2020, THE BEST WOMEN'S STAGE MONOLOGUES 2022 and THE BEST MEN'S STAGE MONOLOGUES 2022 (Smith & Kraus)

Will the real Shylock please stand up? Who played him? Why did Shakespeare invent him? Were there secret Jews in the background? History doesn't say. So . . . London, 1598, late June. Twenty-one-year-old Will Hatcher, Shakespeare's beloved protege, has been cast to play a Jew called Shylock. With two days till the play opens, Will struggles over this character who seems more monster than man. He pleads with Shakespeare to revise Shylock, for two reasons: as an actor, he cannot find a way to play him; as a man, he fears that playing such a role will jeopardize something he only now reveals to his mentor. He is in love with Sosannah Lopez, a converso whose family remains proud of its Jewish ancestry. Complications abound (a backstabbing best friend; a love triangle involving Shakespeare’s “Dark Lady”; a “Meet the Parents” fiasco) as comedy and drama propel us through this story of forbidden love.

*Final Round Nominee, American Association of Community Theatre 2023 New Play Competition.
A monologue from this play is published in THE BEST MEN'S STAGE MONOLOGUES, 2023 (Smith & Kraus).

Thirty-two years old and distraught that he still has no masterwork to his name, Leonardo da Vinci is in crisis – as an artist and a man. In his art, will he remain a Jack-of-All-Trades and Master of None? In his life, will he remain a charmer capable of sex but never of love? ... April 1484. We meet Leonardo in Milan, Italy, where he finds himself with a chance for an artistic breakthrough: a commission to paint an altarpiece of the Blessed Virgin and Child. But he is stymied -- something about this painting has activated a deep torment inside him. To be honest in his art, he knows he must confront what haunts him, but confronting it will take Leonardo on a perilous emotional journey – with his lover Alessandro, his model Isabella, and his critic Domenico -- into a dark abyss of love.

* “Top Ten” Finalist, Wildcard Theatre Company (London, UK) 2020 Playwriting Competition

Monologues from this play are published in: BEST WOMEN'S MONOLOGUES OF 2019 (Smith & Kraus) and THE BEST WOMEN'S MONOLOGUES FROM NEW PLAYS, 2019 (Applause Theatre & Cinema Books, 2020)

What happens when you find your life writing itself into a script? Five stage actresses, all over sixty, get the last chance of their careers. But when they show up for a private reading of the play with the author, something strange happens: the author is absent and the script starts to change – things the actresses say to each other end up as lines their characters say in the play. Spooked but intrigued, the five follow this mystery, but the more they do the more they must reveal about themselves, putting not only their careers but their lives on the line.

*Winner: Texas Nonprofit Theatres 2014 New Play Project. And Finalist: 2012 Blue Ink Playwriting Award.
Monologue from this play published in THE BEST WOMEN'S STAGE MONOLOGUES, 2015 (Smith & Kraus)

It's 1946. A cramped apartment on the Lower East Side of New York City. Meet Bessie Levin and her racially-mixed Jewish family. Bessie is stuck in the past but about to be hurled into the future. Her son Billy, an aspiring builder, is launching Levinstown, the country’s first big suburban development. But with Billy's African American wife in the mix, will the Levins be allowed to live in Levinstown? And will Bessie survive the future?

*MOSES, THE AUTHOR was chosen for the 2014 New York International Fringe Festival and also for the Fringe Encore Series

He freed his people, but can he free himself?

Moses is in trouble: he has a bad case of writer's block and he's just been informed by his literary collaborator, the Lord, that he has only one more day to live, in which he must complete the Bible. On top of this, the 120 year-old author is besieged by family problems that have been simmering for decades: a gay son (Gershy) who won't settle down and raise a family; a devoted wife (Zippy) who feels her love is unrequited; a distant mother (Yoheved), whose hypochondria is her only way to connect to the son she was forced to surrender in his infancy.

Assisted by Thusie, his extremely earnest and high-strung apprentice, Moses embarks on a journey of self-discovery -- a very rapid journey -- as an author and a man. Forced by circumstance, Moses the author breaks precedent and allows his family to read the Bible (which is all but done), hoping that their feedback will help him determine what's wrong with the book. But text quickly crashes into subtext: his loved ones raise issues about the Bible that allude to their underlying personal problems with him.

Since the family can't be direct with Moses (with his death impending), they hope he'll get the point about their personal relationships, but all the author sees is what's wrong with his book. Then Gershy does a sudden about-face. Renouncing everything about himself -- including his colorful garb and his passion for painting -- he takes a "Nazirite vow" and swears that he will marry and raise a family as his father had wanted. This abrupt reversal of identity startles and discomfits Moses; a seed is planted in the back of his mind, that he has more than his book to get right.

Now wanting to revise a text that cannot be changed, Moses petitions God for help but gets no response, leaving the prophet/author to wonder: how did he go from being God's partner and co-author, to being a man whose calls for help God ignores?

Under the pressure of diminishing time, Moses realizes that he cannot allow his son to annihilate his personality. And the women in his life, Zippy and Yoheved, find ways to tell Moses what is in their hearts. Only now, bridging the gaps that separate him from his family, can Moses bridge the gap between himself and God and find a way to fix the problems in his troubled text, by adding a Sixth Book to the Five Books of Moses.

The fate of that Sixth Book is described to us by Thusie, who is still alive (he's the great-grandson of the genetically gifted Biblical figure, Methusaleh) and whose mission in life is to present the untold story of Moses -- not Moses the leader, but Moses the author.

Published: Best Ten-Minute Plays 2011 (Smith & Kraus)
Audience Favorite, Best Play -- 16th Annual New York City 15-Minute Play Festival

An aspiring writer finds her pilot script vulgarized by the obscenity requirements of cable TV.

Winner: "Audience Favorite, Best Play" & "Judges' Choice, Best Play" 17th Annual New York City Fifteen-Minute Play Festival (2011); Finalist, 2018 National Award for Short Playwriting; Finalist, 2019 Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival

Jason Goldfarb wants a new name for his Bar Mitzvah. This is a big problem for Rabbi Deborah Silverman.

Jury Prize Winner, Best Script (of 848 submissions)-- Fusion Theatre (Albuquerque) 2012 Short Play Festival
Selected for 2013 Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival

Joseph, a lonely American Jew, has fallen in love with Masha, a Russian prostitute in Jerusalem, but when he insists that she talk openly to him, he is totally unprepared for what she has to say.

*Chosen, 2018 NJ Rep Theatre Brut Festival & 2019 Studio Players of Lexington KY. Published: When the Circus Comes to Town: A Collection of 31 Short Plays (Smith & Kraus, 2018)

Lawrence thinks he’s about to see a circus; Vanessa thinks she’s about to see a play about a circus. But before the show ever starts, his inadvertent sniffling, and her annoyed offer of a tissue, launch this pair of strangers into a main event of another kind.

*Winner - 2016 Texas NonProfit Theatres' POPS! New Play Project

A middle-aged man wants to delete from his iPhone the contact information of his father, who died four years ago. But he finds that he cannot. His inability to do this launches him on a journey of self-disclosure about his relationship with his father and brings to the surface a disturbing fact that he has hidden since the day Dad died.

* Finalist, Kitchen Dog Theater 2014 New Works Competition

A scene of apparent domestic harmony in an isolated bungalow: WENDY (66), TOBY (15) and JASON (14 ½) sit watching a movie. But it is soon revealed that: the boys are in leg chains; what appeared to be a cane on Wendy's lap is in fact an electric cattle prod; and Wendy is not related to either of them.

Wendy has abducted Jason and Toby in revenge for a horrible act of public humiliation to which they had subjected her. But now that she has her adolescent oppressors captive, she doesn't know what to do with them.

Wendy needs to determine if either boy is fit to return to society; Jason and Toby need to get free; and all three need something they can get only from each other.

In this dark comedy about age, sex and power -- and the strangeness of being human -- in the end no one is who -- or what -- they were in the beginning.

An outrageous comedy for outrageous times.

Out of President Dick Wonder’s romantic past comes his intersex ex-lover and former porn star, Volvita Volva . . . In one high-velocity 24-hour period, Volvita scales the heights of power to liberate Dick from the hypnotic grip of Marvin, the sociopathic childhood chum who covertly rules the country in his name. Along the way, Volvita frees the First Lady from a life of sexual frustration and introduces the President to the son he never knew he had, the very same young man whom the sixteen-year-old First Daughter plans to marry. All this, and a surprise ending – did someone say Queen? – never before seen in the annals of America.

Semi-Finalist, 2012 O'Neill, National Playwrights Conference
Finalist, 2012 T. Schreiber Studio New Works Competition

What is honor, and is honor more important than life itself? That is the question that haunts Alexander Hamilton's first-born child, Philip. A gifted nineteen-year-old, Philip is on his death-bed, having been shot in a duel to defend his father's name. Neither Philip nor the audience realizes that this is his situation when he appears out of the darkness, looking for his father, and finding himself in a strange (fever-induced) scenario. That scenario includes not only his father, mother, aunt, and oldest sister, but also us (an audience of strangers) and Aaron Burr, who seems like Fate and who directs a stage show about the Hamilton family's recent past – in particular: the events that damaged the marriage of his parents and threw Philip into a tormented relationship to his father, leading him to an early grave.

* Special selection, New American Theatre (L.A.), World Premiere 2017 -- Synopsis: In the year 2650 four young people encounter one strange, frightening, long-extinct object.

*Selection, Warner International Playwrights Festival; Finalist, Drury University One-Act Playwriting Competition; Semi-Finalist, LaBute New Theater Festival

Max wants to honor the new tombstone of the war-hero father whom he reveres too much; Mel wants to salvage her marriage to Max -- can his self-esteem and her passion survive a 1200-mile drive to Florida . . . in the middle of July?

*Semi-Finalist, 18th Annual New York City Fifteen-Minute Play Competition

Long-time friends Victor (27) and Anna (27) have their first big break, he as a film director and she as his leading lady . . . IF Victor can get Anna to do something she really, really doesn't want to do.

Finalist, Questors Theatre (London), 2020 “Powerplay” Short Play Festival

Truman Bluman needs a liver for his wife; hospital administrator Darla Collaway needs Truman. She's
ready to negotiate. Is he?

Selected, Nylon Fusion Theatre Company (NYC) "This Rounds On Us: Fate" Short Play Festival, 2019

JONATHAN is enamored of his professor, MELISSA. He's sure it's Fate. She's sure it isn't. One of them must be wrong.

*Selection, City Theatre of Independence (MO) Short Play Festival

It's 1957, the US Senate, and LBJ must do the impossible: get a Northern liberal and a Southern conservative to agree on the first Civil Rights bill of the century, a bill that violates each one's core principles. How will he do it?

A contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I.

Hallie Boeling, the computer-prodigy daughter of cybersecurity magnate Henry Boeling, has become a prodigal daughter, leading a wayward life as a hacker/gamer on the Lower East Side of New York City, where she shares an apartment with her close friend Fergus, an obese, intellectual gay slacker. Fate comes calling for Hallie when her estranged father summons her, needing her help to overcome a takeover plot against his company, Cybercore. The plot is led by James Speer, the son and nephew of Henry’s adversaries Norris and Warren Speer. James also had been Hallie’s first love ten years earlier in high school. Hallie and James square off against each other in corporate and digital battle, with dire consequences for the loser; Hallie’s ultimate victory leaves not only James as a sad casualty but also Fergus, who finds himself lost and alone, discarded by his only friend in the world.

Hannah's Jewish, Fred's black, or so they thought ... when a DNA test becomes a marital stress test. Who are we really? Are we free to choose? If we are, who will we be? And how? And if not now, when?

Selected, New Plains Review (Fall 2018)

CHRIS, a writer, makes a last desperate call to a company that caters to the suicidal. The call is taken by JORDAN, a sales rep who delivers much more than the product CHRIS had intended to buy.