TEN-MINUTE: One office suite. Two unnatural fiends. Because even monsters have meetings, and these taxes aren't going to file themselves.

Produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville as part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays, 2017.

Published in THE BEST TEN-MINUTE PLAYS 2018 and HUMANA FESTIVAL 2017.

TEN-MINUTE: Susan's trying as hard as she can to have fun at her class reunion, which she's attending with her husband and her baby. Her tiny baby. Her really, really, really really tiny baby. Are all these people judging the size of her tiny baby?

A lot has happened in the ten years since Amy, Paul and Richard were in grad school together. Amy and Paul got married and became academics; Richard also found a wife, a new job selling Christian merchandise, and a new life serving God. So Amy's not really looking forward to spending an awkward weekend at Richard's house. Will Richard's born-again wife object to Amy's feminism? Will Amy and Paul's daughter get brainwashed by their God-fearing hosts? And can Amy keep herself from cursing for forty-eight hours?
And things just get worse when the world ends.
It turns out that Amy and Paul's visit happens to coincide with the night of the apocalypse, and thanks to a scriptural loophole they've been swept along with the saved. Worldly cities are destroyed, fire rains from the skies, lifelong friendships are tested, awkward silences are endured. Hilarity ensues.
Thrust together into the kingdom of God, the couples grapple with some big questions. Is there any room for overlap between Christian fundamentalists and liberal humanists, between red-state and blue-state America? Can friends stay friends when they share everything in common except for the pesky matter of an underlying belief system? Is eternal life and knowledge of God's love everything it's cracked up to be? And what happens to a person's faith when it's proven right?

In scene 1 of BARRENNESS, an unlikely comedy about trauma and resilience, a youngish couple is rocked by an early miscarriage that derails their long-awaited pregnancy. In the play that briskly follows, their marriage fractures under the weight of grief. Beth's inclined to dwell on their loss; Greg wants to pretend it never happened. (Beth's also starting to talk in nonsense syllables, and Greg seems to have impure purposes for the maternity catalogs flooding their mailbox. So they've got a lot going on.) Each finds solace in an unlikely confidant: Beth connects with their nurse, an evangelical Christian who's increasingly convinced that Beth is gifted by God; and Greg pursues his wishful infatuation with their very pregnant obstetrician, who in her spare time is also a Holocaust denier.
Taking place over the course of one short week, BARRENNESS takes a comic and character-centered approach to dramatizing four different approaches to the problem of suffering.

TEN-MINUTE: A man with a business proposal arrives at the door of Charles Dickens, and together they decide to pretty much invent Christmas.

The Washington Post called it "funny," "foulmouthed," "invigorating" and "off-center."

TEN-MINUTE: The war on Christmas wasn't all mistletoe and gingerbread. A grizzled veteran of those merry Yuletide trenches tells his grandkid what life on the front lines was really like.

TEN-MINUTE: Before we discuss terminating your pregnancy, there are just a few new government rules we need to go over.

TEN-MINUTE: In fair Verona, Ramona and Juliet visit the apothecary to secure some potions, fatal and not-quite, as part of a scheme to retaliate against the local bakers and florists who refuse to supply a same-sex wedding. It's not a great plan, really, but they're young.

The government announces an exciting new program to achieve reparations for past injustices by assigning Black citizens a white slave for a year. It will fix racism and nothing could possibly go wrong.

TEN-MINUTE: High school was so long ago, and we were so free, and there were no consequences, and remember that one time with the empty house?

ONE-MINUTE: For all the miseries inflicted on the world by the COVID-19 pandemic, its one grace note has been giving some artists time to work on their art. Which is a gift. Kind of a way that big wooden horse from the Greeks was a gift.

2 Women, 14 Characters, 11 Taboos, and several dozen laughs you’ll feel guilty about tomorrow. This comic tour de force for two performers was the best-attended show at the Indianapolis Fringe Festival and an award-winner at the Midtown International Theatre Festival.

"If comedy shows had encores, I’d still be at the theater.”
— Indiana Business Journal

“Assholes was funny. But, more than that, it was smart. Like really smart."
— Cincinnati CityBeat

A play for young audiences. Unusual things don't usually happen at Price Mart, but at this Mega Price Mart a mega-unusual thing happened once: a little girl was born. Or left. Or got lost in the aisles and her parents never found her. Whatever it was that happened, it was her destiny to be discovered between Truck Mirrors and Oil Filters by some Price Mart associates. They name her Pryce and raise her. Her first word is "affordable."

It's a good life at Price Mart, all things considered: clean, well-lit. But her discovery one day that there's a place called Lost and Found all the way on the other side of the store sparks restlessness and curiosity about where she came from. What follows is an epic journey of hilarious proportions. Armed with only her wits and a celebrity magazine, will Pryce manage to evade dangerous pitfalls like the Demanding Shopper and the Neverending Line? And even if she does find the Lost and Found counter, will she ever uncover the truth about her real family?

A comic and contemporary myth set in the recognizable world of changing rooms, free samples, and incandescent lights that never turn off, Lost and Foundling is a modern retail fairy tale about growing up, self-reliance, and big big savings.

This play is licensed by Dramatic Publishing. More information here: http://www.dramaticpublishing.com/p1823/Lost-and-Foundling/product_info.html

IN DEVELOPMENT: Griselda has never thought very much about color in general, or pink in particular—something she got from her mom, whose indifference to color borders on sublimated hostility. But when her new pink shoes catch the eye of Pinky, a girl at school, Griselda gets swept up in an all-encompassing, evangelistic pro-pink movement she never knew existed. The validation she gets from Pinky is dizzying and intoxicating, but by the time Griselda is attending a pink reeducation camp and rejecting perfectly thoughtful gifts because they’re the wrong hue, she finds she needs to make a choice: join Pinky in drowning the world in pink? Join her mother in dismissing all things colorful? Or carve out a new middle path just for herself?

All her life, Carla has kept neighbors at arm's length—especially now that her neighbors include the boorish white family next door. But now their little girl Eva has an inoperable brain tumor, and Carla increasingly finds herself sucked into their daily lives—hosting grim birthday parties, running disastrous errands, weathering egregious insults. Everyone else in the neighborhood is attracted to the seductive power of someone else's grief; only Carla wants to extricate herself from it. The clock's ticking down as Carla has to decide whether or not to play a central role at a ceremonial celebration of the little girl's life. What do parents who are losing everything have the right to demand from Carla, and what will it cost her to give them what they want?
As the neighborly relationship grows more twisted and compromising through a series of celebrity visits, blind dates, racial slurs and adulterous come-ons, it comes to expose—through awkward comedy and moments of naked ugliness—the prejudices that churn beneath the comforting lies everyone tells one another about race, class, and death.

TEN-MINUTE: During a pandemic tempers can fray, even over little things like trash day or time folding in on itself.

TEN-MINUTE: It's 2019. The Trump White House has commissioned a team of theater artists to fashion a stage play out of leaked text messages between the president's enemies. And everyone's talking like Noel Coward characters for some reason.

TEN-MINUTE: As an investment banker, Scott achieved internet fame for penning a smug manifesto defending the skills and adaptability of high-finance yahoos. Then his employer collapsed. Now he's a substitute teacher struggling mightily to convince his young charges of his importance.

ONE-ACT: Trudy's mother is in hospice. This could be a chance for them to reconcile and find closure on some of their lifelong conflicts. Or alternately I guess they could do something else.

IN DEVELOPMENT: The outrageously wealthy Missy Vanderveer is nominated to be U.S. Secretary of Education, and because of the controversy surrounding her lack of qualifications and overall out-of-touchness she decides to bring a salt-of-the-earth working-class character witness to the hearings. Ana Sofia, the hotel housekeeper she just met, seems like she'd do just fine. Little do either of them know that this impulsive partnership will lead to the most dramatic confirmation hearing in Senate history, and possibly — if things really go sideways — the violent end of the republic.

The boss wants to talk to the worker about that thing they made. And the next thing they're going to make. And about a lot of things, really, but not so much about money. Because this isn't really about money.

ONE-MINUTE: Some cities get to have the most brewpubs or whatever. Oh, well.