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 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

Returning from the theatre George and Martha, two multitasking I-phone junkies, decide to post an abusive review about the play on YouTube. With more than a million hits their antics go viral. So the playwright searches them out, holds them hostage, and forces them to mono-task by having a face-to-face conversation as if they’re in a play. Soon this comedy spirals into itself, as the actors set out to save the theatre by using Twitter and algorithms to create a new “ism” for neurotic A.D.D. Americans. Although this is a comedy it deals with a serious subject.

Angry Psycho Princesses is a new musical comedy about William and Kate Fankhousers of St. Paul Minnesota. To save their collapsing marriage they take their daughter Cindy on vacation to Pretty Princess Park, a rip-off theme park across from Disneyland.

Their daughter marvels at the animatronic “Hall of Princesses.” Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, all the princesses are there in robot form (at least the ones in public domain). But William and Kate aren’t enjoying themselves. She’s a businesswoman with a bladder infection; he’s an unemployed car salesman. While arguing they miss the recorded announcement, the park is closing; they find themselves locked in overnight.

After hours, the android princesses magically come to life. William and Kate are terrified, Cindy thrilled. Off the clock the bitter, jaded human princesses try to drink booze and do Peyote. When they see little Cindy they warn her that she must get the hell out for they were also once-upon-a-time trapped in Pretty Princess Park afterhours and were made captive robots by the Evil Queen.

That’s right, Pretty Princess Park is in fact a front for a villainous cult of war rats ruled over by the malicious Queen Badassery.

Badassery was also a sweet little girl once, but then her mother took her to see Disney’s Bambi. The sight of Bambi’s mother dying was just too much for her little brain; she came down with Bambi Syndrome, which causes severe adult onset wickedness. Badassery puts a spell on little Cindy, when the sun comes up she too will become a robot princess.

William and Kate Fankhousers must save their daughter, but they are immediately sidetracked when Kate falls in lust for the enchanting Charming Prince; he’s everything she’s ever wanted in a man and he doesn’t sell cars. Then William tries to spawn with the Little Mermaid, a sexy Fukushima victim, half-woman, half-Mackerel.

When they come to their senses, Kate, William and the angry princesses lead a rebellion against the evil Queen in an attempt to stop her before she makes more little girls believe in princesses.

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

Beverly Hills Theatre Guild’s Julie Harris Playwriting Award

A Ph.D. in English lit isn’t worth shit - just ask Dr. Helen Hand. Desperate for a job, she drunkenly agrees to teach at a conservative Bible college in the middle-of-nowhere-Kansas. The problem - she’s a skeptic, a liberal and gluten intolerant. She enters a world of rigid moral rules: no smoking, no alcohol, no doubting. Working undercover she sets out to enlighten the fundamentalist students but it quickly goes to hell. This small cast comedy looks at our need for faith and reason.

PUBLISHED BY SAMUEL FRENCH

Kosher Lutherans is a curveball comedy about an infertile Jewish couple and their desperate attempts to have a baby. One day their dreams come true - they meet a young, naïve, pregnant girl from Iowa who is willing to let them adopt her out-of-wedlock baby. The only problem is the girl doesn’t know they’re Jewish. All she knows about Jews is what her farmer father told her, “They control Hollywood and killed Jesus.” In an attempt not to blow the deal the couple decides to pose as Lutherans, leading to hysterical twists and turns and a perfect play for the holiday season.

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.

Fuera De Orbita es una comedia sobre dos artistas de performance Dada que han construido un teatro en su sala de estar. Cada noche antes de una audiencia en vivo actúan sus vidas. Usted ha oído hablar de la televisión de la realidad; pensar en ello como teatro de la realidad. Artaud estaría orgulloso de ellos.

Las cosas van de mal en peor cuando descubren que un cometa ha sido detectado en el cielo nocturno. Hay una posibilidad de 50/50 que golpeará la tierra. Todo el mundo, incluido el público, puede tener sólo una hora para vivir. Esto obliga a los padres a dejar de discutir sobre cosas insignificantes como el matrimonio y empezar a discutir sobre grandes cuestiones filosóficas de la vida: ¿Es el cometa un signo de Dios o es sólo la gravedad? ¿Y qué diablos es arte de performance?