Stephen Kaplan

FINALIST: ScreenCraft Stage Play Contest, B Street New Comedies Festival, Trustus Playwrights Festival; SEMI-FINALIST: Bay Area Playwrights Festival; WINNER: Southeast Texas Festival of New Plays, Chameleon Theatre New Play Festival - Tracy Jones has rented out the back "party room" of Jones Street Bar and Grill: the Place for Wings and Things, a typical chain restaurant. Tracy Jones is throwing a party to which she's invited every woman in the world who is also named Tracy Jones. Tracy Jones has been sitting for over an hour alone, nursing her Diet Coke, waiting for any other Tracy Joneses to show up. Tracy Jones' epic loneliness is about to be tested beyond anything she ever imagined.

A modern day golem story about a recently widowed single mother who makes a clay man who comes to life, consoles her, and serves as a Bar Mitzvah and Spanish tutor for her 12-year-old son.

SEMI-FINALIST: O’Neill - Branwell Brontë has always been desperate to keep up with his brilliant sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. On his deathbed, the sisters use the magic of worlds created when they were children to keep them all distracted from the harsh reality of not only Branwell’s impending death, but the sisters’ recent literary successes – each has had a novel published. But the family discovers that the thing they love best and are best at, creating stories, is sometimes the very thing that causes the greatest destruction.

Though set in the past, Branwell (and the other Brontës): an autobiography edited by Charlotte Brontë is about how, throughout time, we tell and use stories and fantasy to deal with our realities. It explores the pain and necessity of creation when encountering grief and loss.

FINALIST: Seven Devils; Road Less Traveled National Residency, SEMI-FINALIST: Premiere Stages, March Forth Productions, SELECTION: Caleb Reese Festival of New Plays and Musicals - Christopher Marshall has just been cast as George in Mt. Laurel Community Players' production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He invites Zach, the young, Black actor who's been cast as Nick, over for a drink to give him some actorly advice - and possibly to kill him. Whatever works. When the production's Martha and Honey show up uninvited, they find themselves caught in this play about a play (within a play?) tackling deadly issues like race and, perhaps even more dauntingly, community theatre. This ferocious comedy asks questions about how we view stories about race and the not-just-color blindness that many have when trying to talk about it.

* Semi-Finalist - Premiere Stages Play Festival

PRODUCTIONS: Jewish Repertory Theatre, Theatre Ariel, Dezart Performs, Project Rushmore; WINNER: NJ Playwrights Contest, Across the Generations New Jewish Play Festival, FINALIST: Woodward/Newman Award, SEMI-FINALIST: Seven Devils.
All parents think their children are great. Alan Zuckerman just happens to think his 3-year-old son, David, is the Messiah. Thirty years ago, Alan and his wife, Laura, visit their rabbi to verify David’s possible divine nature. Thirty years later, everyone older and wiser, it appears that Dad might have been onto something.

PRODUCTIONS: 59E59, Last Act Theater, This Is Water Theatre; SEMI-FINALIST: PlayPenn, Ashland New Play Festival, Dayton Playhouse FutureFest and MTWorks’ Newborn Festival.
Mary Ann and Peter Myers, both puppets, differ on how to best raise their kindergarten-bound human son, Max. When Max starts growing strings his human kindergarten teacher, Miss Terry, decides to take over as his parent to ensure he stays a real boy, igniting the Myers’ own sets of parenting beliefs and what is really best for Max.

If only Rosaline had gone to the party, Romeo and Juliet would never have met and all would be OK in Verona. In this modern-day sequel to Romeo and Juliet, Rosaline is blamed for everything that went down and fights to clear her name and place the blame where she feels it belongs - anywhere but on her.

Available as both a full-length and one-act competition version.

SEMI-FINALIST: Ronald M Ruble New Play Festival
A Curse. A Kingdom without laughter. A Princess who likes to run. And a Prince who likes to read as well as may like other princes. In this fractured fairy tale for all ages, no one is happy in the Kingdom of Eastphalia and only the seventh son of the seventh son can make things right. But will he come in time? Play is available in two versions for 14 actors or for 22+.

FINALIST: Landing Theatre’s New American Voices Reading Series, Route 66 Theatre’s New Play Development Program, Rorschach's Magic in Rough Spaces
The Schwartz Family were Russian Jews who lived in a house in Barrio Logan in San Diego, CA in 1940. The Flores family moved from Mexico and lived in the same house in 1960. In 2014, D.J. Schwartz knocks on the door to meet the house’s current inhabitants. He discovers that no one has really left the house…Ever.

When the parents of The John Wilkes Booth High School for the Performing Arts threaten to remove the theatre program because they realize that all theatre is offensive, the scrappy students of JWB and their drama teacher race to save their beloved department by producing the most inclusive and least offensive play ever.

On the last night of Hanukkah, a young woman must decide whether to finally open a special gift from her mother.

Tim is a private eye with short-term memory. Laura is the leggy femme fatale that comes to him with a mysterious case. If only Tim can remember why she's there. And what she wants. And why she's there.

(1 minute) A father buys a dress for his son.

A crossed telephone line links two friends to versions of their past and future selves and reveals how crucial human connection is, especially in our current times.

Mary and Joseph are a pair of 5-year-olds playing with a doll. But before they can start, they’ll need to debate gender stereotypes, the relative merits of Christmas versus Hanukkah, the nature of God, and what it means to have two dads.

Jack is Jill's naive paramour who lets himself be talked into a murder scheme that causes him to come tumbling after her. The nursery rhyme will never be quite the same.

10-year-old Tim would much rather be watching "Damn Yankees" than playing right field in his Little League game. A visit from an unexpected guest helps Tim reveal his true feelings to his coach.

Jacob Ritter teaches fifth grade. When Mrs. Baker, his fifth grade teacher, arrives unexpectedly at his classroom, she is stunned to see that it is an exact replica of hers, down to the ditto machine he purchased on E-bay to do his handouts. He has modeled everything he does and teaches on what he recalls from Mrs. Baker. Everything. The only thing missing from his perfect classroom is Mrs. Baker herself.

A parent confronts a McDonalds cashier about the gender appropriateness of a Happy Meal.

An allegorical drama in which Evelyn, an elderly woman, meets up with David, a young man, at a deserted bus stop on a rainy night. The play deals with issues of mortality, the will to live, and companionship.

Two giants face off over the nature of art. Included in Smith & Krause's 105 FIVE-MINUTE PLAYS.

Zazel and Airabella, two circus aerialists from different eras, find themselves trapped in a waiting room as they await their fate which depends on someone knowing their real names.

A new father surprises a grocery store cashier.

Two friends argue about the meaning of Gay Pride.

A one-minute play addressing the sad nonchalance of active shooter drills in schools.