FINALIST FOR THE NICK DARKE AWARD (London) Top 8 out over 1000 script!

Maggie and Raymond have just flunked their hostile workplace training seminar. The only way they can keep their jobs is to put their microaggressions aside and attend the birthday party for the employee they bully the most, Karl, the office nerd. What they don’t know is that Karl is the only person on earth who can save humanity from destruction. That’s right, the world is ending and Karl is the savior. Or is Karl just an evil genius who has staged the evening in order to seek revenge? Karl, The Magnificent is an absurd farce that asks the question, “If we had to start the human race over with only four highly flawed individuals would we be up to the task?” Or are Homo sapiens a lost cause, an evolutionary mistake, a dud?

Winner of a Rolling Premiere from the National New Play Network

PUBLISHED BY PLAYSCRIPTS!

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

Optioned for production 2021 - A new comedy inspired by Ivanka Trump's line, "Perception is more important than reality." Sylvia, a divorced Hollywood screenwriter is losing her grip as her career slides into middle-aged female oblivion. Desperate for work she takes a job writing a movie “based on a true story” only to learn that Ivanka was right, “If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true."

Optioned for production until Summer of 2021

Winner of a Rolling Premiere from the National New Play Network .

PUBLISHED BY SAMUEL FRENCH

Untenured professor Dr. Dick Fig has found that a PhD on Bertolt Brecht isn’t worth much – He’s being pink-slipped. The last thing he needs to do before he hits the slow-moving unemployment line is attend the University’s required exit interview. Eunice, the interviewer, is not a good match for Dick, she finds comfort in self-help books like book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, while Dick hates small talk and is a vocal freethinker.

When a despondent student begins shooting up Ronald Reagan Hall (next door to the action), Dick and Eunice are forced to take cover as they confront the great existential questions of life: What is its meaning? What is the relationship between religion and science? And why does God hate amputees? (Dick had his foot amputated in a tragic moose accident – it was reattached).

The Exit interview is not realism - A chorus of actors play nearly two dozen roles that interrupt the main action to tell the story of Dick’s failed relationships, his fallout with small minded people, and his relationship with the moose. When things get too intense, the chorus stops the action of the play to stage commercial interruptions and ten-minute plays with other story lines in order to remind the audience that they are in a theatre and need to keep thinking.

"The Exit Interview" may be one of the most up-front, honest plays you ever sit down to watch. – The Salt Lake Tribune

“Bertolt Brecht would be proud.” - Orlando Sentinel

“A gleefully boundary-flouting riff on religion, piety and the limits of belief” - San Diego Union Tribune

PUBLISHED BY PLAYSCRIPTS

MR. PERFECT is not what you expect in a love story. It is a romantic comedy about a quirky flight attendant who is a romance novel junkie. When she meets Mr. Perfect she attempts to make love with him in the bathroom of an Airbus 32,000 feet over Dayton, Ohio. When it doesn’t work out she sets out on a personal search to find the purpose of life by connecting the random chance events that make up existence.

Her search leads her to find solace in the arms of a PhD student whose thesis is about human beings' feeble attempt to find meaning where no meaning exists. Mr. Perfect finds comfort in the arms of a nationally known self-help guru and author of such famous books as Ten Days to Self-Esteem and On a Wing and a Prayer: A Twelve-Step Crash Course on Conquering Your Fear of Flying.

But when the self-help guru goes down on an airliner and the PhD is charged with plagiarism, the lovers by chance find each other again and set out to create their own through-line, narrative and meaning.

Now a full-length play, the original one-act version was produced at the New York City Fringe Festival a few years ago. The play was cancelled after one performance when Hurricane Irene hit, but the short version did get one review from New York Theatre.com, “Hysterical! If you're going to see a play as a sort of escape you will get more than you bargained for here.”

"...Downs flexes his considerable wit in asking if our ability to live in the present has been quashed by our need for familiar outcomes. If that sounds like a lot to get your mind around, fear not, for Downs brings this down to earth in the person of Zooey, an audio-book junkie, who wants her life to be the incarnation of her favorite taped stories." - Denver Post

"Probably the wittiest new play in the last few seasons, Mr. Perfect is also very wise. In this case Mr. Downs' laser sharp pen skewers our need to have lives reflective of the romantic visions of authors of the past who floridly illustrate the way relationships should begin love at first page and end happily ever after." - Colorado Critic Corner

"Hysterical! If you're going to see a play as a sort of escape you will get more than you bargained for here." - nytheatre.com

PUBLISHED BY SAMUEL FRENCH

Phil was a philosophy major in college. As if that’s not enough of a turn off to women, he is also rather average. All of this wouldn’t be a problem if Phil weren’t madly in love with Sophia, the boss’s beautiful secretary. He tries to introduce himself but she looks right through him. Phil’s best friend, Norman tells the humiliated Phil that the rumor around the office is that Sophia has a glass eye. This news thrills Phil because this tiny imperfection makes Sophia attainable. But more, Phil was standing to her left - perhaps she never saw him! Phil begs Norman to make a formal introduction. However, this second attempt ends in utter failure when Sophia looks right through Phil - again.

His self-esteem in shambles, it soon occurs to Phil that Sophia in fact cannot see him. Perhaps he is caught in some kind of hyperspace or dualistic reality or perhaps Descartes was wrong. Phil decides there is only one logical thing to do – he moves in with the woman of his dreams – despite the fact that she’s unaware of his existence

A radical comic romp around the plutocracy that now controls the USA. Ayn Rand sings about the virtues of selfishness. Then Capitalism Jesus sings about how God wants everyone to be wealthy and how he can’t cure people if they have preexisting conditions. Top this off with songs about trickle-down economics, the Russian golden shower dancers, a socialism polka, and you have an entertaining, politically incorrect evening.

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

This darkly comic drama was inspired by the cancellation of Ayaan Hirsi Ali's commencement speech at Brandeis in 2014, the Charlie Hebdo attacks and my own personal travels through the Middle East. When an April Fool’s prank goes wrong, the Muslim students at a small liberal arts college file a complaint. Two professors deal with the problem by booking a poet from Somalia to give the college’s commencement speech. Fresh off the plane, the poet doesn’t understand the college’s political correctness, nor does the poet fit the professors’ preconceived stereotype of a Muslim woman. With the possible cancellation of the speech looming, all three are forced to confront the issues of diversity and the suppression of free speech on college campuses. Forgiving John Lennon was originally produced as a one act but is now a two act, full-length ready to be developed.

PUBLISHED BY HEUER PUBLISHING

Seagulls In A Cherry Tree is a Chekhovian comedy about Boris and Stan, two Hollywood screenwriters who have been hired by Disney to adapt Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard into a new movie for Mel Gibson. In order to finish the stalled adaptation and get away from L.A.’s smog, they trek to an isolated Arts Colony just outside Moscow, Idaho. The colony is full of navel-gazing, self-indulgent, philosophizing, chronically indecisive Chekhovian artists, actress and doctors.

All plot points in Seagulls In A Cherry come from Chekhov’s plays (The Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, Uncle Vanya and The Seagull), plus a touch of invention, all of which have been rearranged and shaped to form the first new Chekhov play in a hundred years. In the end Stan and Boris (just like many Americans today) never realize that they are in fact living in a Chekhovian world.

The Orlando Sentinel compared to Woody Allen was lampooning Bergman in A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy or Tolstoy in Love and Death.

A comedy about a women who comes home to Texas to confront the dogma of her sexist, egotistical, cowboy, philosopher father. Darla Cook has good news to tell her father. She has just been artificially inseminated and is going to have a baby. Tired of men in general and her father in particular she is going to have a child without any male contact whatsoever.

Her father is a cowboy who was divorced by Darla's mother twenty years ago when he had an affair with philosopher Ayn Rand. He's since taken Rand's followers to new levels of selfishness. Henry associates femininity and feminism with youth, as if it were something to grow out of.

Their confrontation is the core of this play about masculine and feminine ways of looking at the life, love and happiness. When stupid football player Johnny Galt arrives, it is discovered that he may be the sperm donor and Darla's day takes a turn for the worse. When she discovers that Henry's days are numbered, Darla must grow up fast. She rejects her "women who love too much" view of the world and becomes a strong feminist who doesn't need her father's approval (as much).

A new adaptation for smaller theatres

This is not Inherit the Wind, the 1955 play written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. Inherit the Wind used only a handful of lines from the original trial. Unlike Inherit the Wind this play has been drawn from the actual 1925 trial and edited into a 90 minute play. In fact, almost 99% of this play comes directly from the 1925 trial transcripts.

By being more accurate, I hope to show how little things have changed in the year since the trial. For the issues brought up by the trial (separation of church and state, academic freedom and the tensions between religion and science) are still prevalent.

This play also uses gender-neutral casting and stages the trial as if it were happening today.

This play also works as readers theatre.

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

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

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