Josh Drimmer

--Grand Prize Winner, 2023 Risk Theater Modern Theatre Competition

Fresh from five years...away...over a little bit of ATM robbery, Mason Wright has reasonable goals (or so he believes): make a mint playing poker, and get his estranged wife Maya back. But is he as good a card player as he thinks? Was Maya trying to tell him something by never visiting or writing? Will his charm run out before his old friends remember the way things usually go with Mason?

There will be damages from Mason's many avoidable mistakes; his daughter, Lex, already has her scars. But whether Mason's going down this time all depends on when he gets out of town.

Isla, Nick, and 14-year-old Violet are a makeshift family living in a subterranean home in a planet that is no longer inhabitable. Their pursuits are normal enough: Nick scavenges the outside world, Isla feeds her thoughts into an artificial consciousness, while Violet gets visitors in the form of ghosts from multiple eras. (Isla and Nick do too, but they're slightly better at compartmentalizing and lying to themselves.)

When the world has run down and no future lies ahead, you take what you can get, and the ghosts do at least make for pleasant company. That is, if they are ghosts at all.

--Winner of Sanguine Theatre Company's Project Playwright 2015
--World Premiere produced by Sanguine Theatre Company at the Chain Theater, Queens, NY, April-May 2015, dir. Logan Reed

Two 16-year-olds meet at an artsy pre-college program, where they flirt, fight, but are unable to handle the love they’ve stumbled into. Sixteen years later, face-to-face again in a New York hotel suite, innocent nostalgia is turning into something far more difficult to handle, and they will have to discover whether half a lifetime ago is just too late.

It's August in Bridgeport, NY, a cute, not terribly expensive town in Long Island's North Fork. Over 24 hours in a curious rented house with bright walls and no locks on the door, six 30-something friends and one special guest, a 17-year-old townie picked up near the town carousel, will drink too much, take too much of too many drugs, and go through a collective, premature mid-life crisis.

Tuesday, a troubled poet, and Sky Baker, a recovering alcoholic, are brother and sister survivors of the brutal commune known as The Meadow, forced together again after Tuesday nearly overdoses on Ambien after 13 nights without sleep; ultimately, Sky cannot save Tuesday from the darkness of their past, but will Tuesday bring Sky back to The Meadow, and out of his own mind?

He’s been on an extended, barely-controlled bender ever since she left him, feeling the damage of his ways and a newfound emptiness as 30 approaches.

She’s alone upstate, not quite finding the peace she hoped for in the country, not quite free of the life she started to grow within her.

And as for his old man, well, his cancer’s in remission, but he’s not quite as content as he claims to be, drinking Mellow Corn, teaching in a Pennsylvania nowhere, mostly out of speaking terms with three ex-wives and five children.

In three interconnecting narratives with frequent interruption, these three will deal with the momentary, the eternal, and the singularity of their lives, broken and beautiful.

He’s a man of a certain age: always single, never alone, his standard expression of existential pain often mistaken for dashing. He has a story to tell, about the only woman who ever interested him as much as himself. And much as the story hurts him to tell, she’s not around to help.

--adapted from the novel White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov
--commissioned by Gorilla Rep

It's the dread winter of Our Lord 1918. The World War is over, but the battle for Ukraine has just begun, as the German puppet state flees Kyiv and the vengeance of Symon Petliura's People's Army approaches the city walls. In the midst of the chaos, the Turbin family and their friends will be betrayed, wounded, mentally scarred, and nearly frozen, mourning both the nation that could have been and the life of one of their own.

--Winner, 2021 ARTC Jerry Kaufman Award

Over the course of a bizarre and hotly contested election, Democratic operative Mark Walker has his hands full keeping The Candidate, a Connecticut senator with the force of the party but the indifference of the people, on target, as her very real despair over the very nature of what Democracy requires, as well as the tiny matter of money missing from her charity, begins to build.

The Republican candidate may do nothing but spout and stomp, but under the thoroughly ethically unbound former governor Dominic Fortunato, he does, somehow, have a chance, and his fourth press secretary, journeywoman Sarah Jane Tyler, he might even have the appearance of a cohesive message. But will Sarah Jane, or what goodness there is in her, survive the unwanted attentions of Dominic, and a campaign designed to win at any cost?

Set in the autocratic Independent Republic of Soteria (West Soteria), AURA is the story of the Telifan family: two parents, two children (down from three, due to the middle child taking “happy fire” during military service), living in a prefab box with doors that lock at curfew, and a console broadcasting state news that can never be turned off; as the need for survival and the need for something more drives them all, neither the family nor Soteria will survive.

Emily, a driven if depressive academic, and Alex, a former art mover living a “life of the mind” (unless his settlement money runs out), are not meant to be together. They even tried that, once. But a curious mix of loneliness, chemistry, and a gift from a dead man are destined to, well, not bring them together exactly, but…it's hard to explain.

It's hard times for poor Pharaoh, as the land of Egypt is, well, plagued, with all kinds of strange incidents, like a bloody Nile, frogs falling from the sky, and a nasty case of boils for all.

The leader of the Hebrews, a stutterer with a constant splitting headache named Moses, wants Egypt to let go of a good cheap labor supply, and Pharaoh’s advisor Ahmed doesn't have any easy answers. Even Pharaoh's favorite lesser wife, Meresankh, is sympathizing with the Hebrews; even worse, she's stopped wearing makeup. What's a god on earth to do when God shows up? Doesn’t God understand the concept of “sunk costs?”

Land of Frogs and Locusts is a raw, brutal dark comedy about Biblically large events, bad leadership, and the costs of living in a self-poisoned land.

The fears, jealousies, sexual confusions, mushroom-induced delusions, and problems (substance abuse-related and otherwise) of a group of Yale graduates explode as they party hard and hold tightly to their last summer in New Haven, in a modern Chekhovian comedy where every act is a different party, ticking closer to that much-delayed time: the time to let go.

Dan “Cannon” Samuels is ranked but un-reputed heavyweight, with a second-rate manager and a collapsing marriage, but a surprise shot at the title, and a new, unorthodox trainer will give him the chance to be the fighter he was always meant to be. But in winning the title, will Cannon lose control of everything else?

Loosely inspired by the rise and fall of James "Buster"Douglas, Puncher's Chance depicts what it takes to succeed, and the many ways we can come short.

Amelia, a self-serious grad student, and Jack, a painter incapable of keeping a day job, are deeply in love, but when Jack loses his apartment and moves in with Amelia, one way or another the young couple’s relationship must change, and young love makes young mistakes.

It’s 1979. Sleight of Hand are a huge successful band at last, with a hit record, and all the time in the world to record the follow-up. But perfectionism, grandiosity, break-ups, make-ups, and a seemingly unlimited amount of cocaine may tear them apart even as they’re all trapped together, in their very own studio, as 1980 winds down. (Also, the new album’s a double album now.)

At 35, Magda might not quite be where she hoped she’d be, with her days are spent in a mind-numbing, Carpal Tunnel-inducing temp job and her nights, sorta seeing an idiot drummer eleven years her junior. But when her apartment is invaded by a mysterious, constant, piercing beeping, something all the 311 calls in the world won’t get rid of, the comfort of her ramshackle life, and her sanity, is shaken.

A divorced hedge fund manager, facing the emptiness of his own life and the marriage of his rock star best friend to the only woman he almost loved, will make deception an art as he tears their love, and their lives, apart. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello, and written in modern blank verse.

Two college friends and Red Sox fans, three years removed from school and golden boys no more, find (and often lose) genuine love, employment, artistic inspiration, exceedingly cheap whiskey, Internet fame, and something close to enough to maturity, over the backdrop of the 2007 championship season.

Roxy hasn't left her Minneapolis apartment since the day her girlfriend died in a plane crash., preferring her ghost (and a water pipe) to any other company.

D is dying of an autoimmune disorder just as the most amazing beats of his career are spilling out of his mind, and he can't let his ex-wife or son get in the way. (He also somehow knows how to play keys now.)

And as for The Lost, he's already gone into the shadowland. The only question is, how does he move on?

A triptych play on three types of death, and the spaces in-between them.