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

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

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?

You Can't Say That is a comedy about the labels we attach to each other as if those labels capture the sum total of who we or they are.

The story centers around Chris, a white newly hired adjunct professor in a diverse English department, who is assigned Dorothy, a transwoman as his TA. Chris attempts to act ‘woke,” but his ultra-conservative childhood haunts him. The University’s poorly produced diversity and inclusion training webinar “You Can’t Say That” only complicates things. The department decides that all faculty and students are to wear name tags which label their personal nouns and pronouns. But Chris, doesn’t know who he really is, or which labels define him. He’s trapped in a society that forces us to clip the edges of our identity to fit ready-made social expectations. Then he discovers that his politically incorrect gaffes and personal struggles with his sexuality are going public and that he must stop hitting the "accept" button on his or others’ identities without first reading the terms and conditions - in other words, without understanding who he or they really are.

Our purpose in writing this comedy is to draw people out of their bubbles. When you laugh at something, you never look at it again the same way. Laughter can open our minds to new perceptions, which is the beginning of change.

This quick-moving comedy features a diverse cast and is filled with ridiculous webinars and student-written absurdist plays-within-the-plays that demand an after-performance talkback.

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

FINALIST AT THE 2013 EUGENE O'NEILL - PUBLISHED BY PLAYSCRIPTS

Also available in Spanish "Fuera de órbita"

Winner of the 2013 Reva Shiner Comedy Award from the Bloomington Playwrights Project. “For a wildly different evening of fun theater.” - Bloomington Herald times

Mad Gravity is a comedy about Archie and Eudora, two Dada performance artists who have built a theatre in their living room. Every night before a live audience they act out their lives. You’ve heard of reality television; think of it as reality theatre. They want to build a second experimental space in their kitchen but they just cannot take any more kitchen sink realism. Artaud would be proud of them.

Tonight’s Theatre of Cruelty performance concerns their teenage daughter who wants to marry the son of Joe and Mary. All the parties involved have been invited to the house/theatre. But when the kids forget to tell Joe and Mary about the live audience all hell breaks lose.

Things go from bad to worse when they discover that a comet has been spotted in the night sky. There is a 50/50 chance it will hit the earth. Everyone, including the audience, may have only an hour to live. This forces the parents to stop arguing about insignificant things like marriage and start arguing about great philosophical questions of life: Is the comet a sign from God or is it just gravity? And what the hell is performance art?

The one page second act (that’s right the second act is one page long) does something no play has ever attempted in the history of theatre - it lets the audience in on the meaning of life.

PUBLISHED BY HEUER PUBLISHING

Headset, a view from the light booth is a comedy about the technical side of theatre. The entire play takes place in the Light Booth of the Chicago-Ensemble-Repertory-Group-Theatre-Project, on the final night of the Company’s questionable production of Hamlet. Everything that can go wrong does.

The Los Angeles Times called it “A delightfully funny play." While Kevin Fox of the Company of Lost Souls wrote, "Headset is that rare sort of play that gives audiences a look at the chaos that often happens behind the scenes of theatrical productions… very, very funny."

PUBLISHED BY PLAYSCRIPTS

Semi-Finalist @ The Eugene O’Neill

Dead White Males is a contemporary, issue-oriented, dark-comedy about the religious right, our schools, and the politics of teaching.

The play uses epic theatre staging techniques to tell the story of Janet Greenberg, a young, idealistic, first year teacher who struggles against a school board dominated by the religious right. They wants to ban sex education, Holden Caulfield and evolution from the classroom.

Janet learns how to write a "proper" self evaluation, how to censor musicals so that they are fit for "young minds", how to deal with countless new mandates, endless curriculum changes, petty political games, all the while learning how to cover her ass in a world dominated by constant accountability.

When Doris, Janet's best friend, has a nervous breakdown (while being forced to teach creationism in her science class) Janet is called to testify against her. She must name names or lose her own job.

In the end, Janet learns why there aren't a lot of risk-takers in teaching.

PUBLISHED BY NEXT STAGE PRESS

Arlen Wienberg, a Jewish anthropologist, is called to be an expert witness in a murder trial. The accused: a white police officer. His alleged crime: murdering a black man twenty years ago and burying the bones in the dirt floor beneath his brownstone. When Arlen arrives, he is shocked to discover that the defense lawyer is black.

Ira Altridge the black lawyer isn't having a good day. His first expert witness has suddenly resigned giving him only one thin lunch hour to get his new anthropologist up to speed.

Soon the two men discover that they know each other. They both grew up in the same suburb of Chicago. Ira called it Lawndale. Arlen, Judenstrasse. Some thirty years ago the suburb was a Jewish neighborhood, but now it's all black. Ira and Arlen grew up together during the neighborhood's rocky transition. In fact Arlen’s father was Ira’s landlord.

Arlen begins to suspect that he is being set up. He wonders if Ira really wants to defend officer McDill or if he has another agenda. Race and political correctness are at the center of this compact two hander.

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.

Short comedy about etiquette and manners, forgetting to flush.

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?