Jack Horton Gilbert

Jack Horton Gilbert is an New York based, Ohio born playwright and producer. Former Co-Producer for Serials @ The Flea - a weekly, late night play competition - a founding member of the artistic collective Decent Company, a company member with The Navigator Theater Company, as well as the Producing Director for Read As Written, a theatrical team focused on the development of impossible theater. Jack’s writing focuses on the absurd, the magical, the human, and the spaces between. His plays have been produced and developed in NYC, Chicago, and Ohio, including The American Theatre of Actors, The Tank, The Flea, Other World Theater, Standard Toykraft, and Stage Left Studio. His full-length piece APOLOGIA was recently published in the Adirondack Plays: Anthology Of New Plays.

Jack Horton Gilbert is an New York based, Ohio born playwright and producer. Former Co-Producer for Serials @ The Flea - a weekly, late night play competition - a founding member of the artistic collective Decent Company, a company member with The Navigator Theater Company, as well as the Producing Director for Read As Written, a theatrical team focused on the development of impossible theater. Jack’s writing focuses on the absurd, the magical, the human, and the spaces between. His plays have been produced and developed in NYC, Chicago, and Ohio, including The American Theatre of Actors, The Tank, The Flea, Other World Theater, Standard Toykraft, and Stage Left Studio. His full-length piece APOLOGIA was recently published in the Adirondack Plays: Anthology Of New Plays.

Scripts

Phantasmagoria

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

Halloween night: six teens gather to confront the evil that's haunted their town for generations. But as everything goes wrong they're each forced to choose: save themselves or save each other? Phantasmagoria uses fear, friendship, and the supernatural to push the boundaries of traditional theater.

Halloween night: six teens gather to confront the evil that's haunted their town for generations. But as everything goes wrong they're each forced to choose: save themselves or save each other? Phantasmagoria uses fear, friendship, and the supernatural to push the boundaries of traditional theater.

Attrition

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

The Prisoner doesn't know where he is or why he's there; he's been kidnapped, hooded, and handcuffed and there are people who want answers from him. Answers to questions he doesn't understand. As the interrogation draws on and the situation becomes increasingly bizarre The Prisoner begins to call into question everything they've assumed and believed.

The Prisoner doesn't know where he is or why he's there; he's been kidnapped, hooded, and handcuffed and there are people who want answers from him. Answers to questions he doesn't understand. As the interrogation draws on and the situation becomes increasingly bizarre The Prisoner begins to call into question everything they've assumed and believed.

Shelter

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

The world has ended. The last woman on Earth sits in an underground shelter and broadcasts a radio show to no one in an attempt to pass the time and keep her sanity. She's done this for years, but today, she's run out of food. With the help of her ever-faithful robot companion iZak and a disembodied AI named MOM, Isabel Hicks gears up for her final show, and means to make it one to remember. Answering the age...

The world has ended. The last woman on Earth sits in an underground shelter and broadcasts a radio show to no one in an attempt to pass the time and keep her sanity. She's done this for years, but today, she's run out of food. With the help of her ever-faithful robot companion iZak and a disembodied AI named MOM, Isabel Hicks gears up for her final show, and means to make it one to remember. Answering the age-old question; if you broadcast a radio-show, and no one's alive to hear it, does it still rock 'n' roll? SHELTER explores our deeply human need to find meaning in the meaningless and the tenacity of hope in a hopeless world.

Severance

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

The Earth has stopped spinning. Life below has ended, and six astronauts are trapped orbiting above. With nothing left to them but time and no hope of rescue, they must decide how to move forward as the pressure begins to mount and one by one they succumb to the boredom and the monotony and the voices in their minds. A horror piece as much a story of hope, SEVERANCE explores isolation, guilt, loss, and the awful...

The Earth has stopped spinning. Life below has ended, and six astronauts are trapped orbiting above. With nothing left to them but time and no hope of rescue, they must decide how to move forward as the pressure begins to mount and one by one they succumb to the boredom and the monotony and the voices in their minds. A horror piece as much a story of hope, SEVERANCE explores isolation, guilt, loss, and the awful lengths we’ll go to find our way back home.

Rag Doll

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

Lin is leaving Flats, Ohio. She’s moving to New York to escape her small town and pursue her dream of becoming a writer. The plan is set and in motion until one day she wakes up and finds a…thing, in her living room. A thing that’s large, oblong, and unlike anything anyone’s ever seen. An object that defies reason and explanation, appearing seemingly from nowhere to pop up in her midwestern home. With the help...

Lin is leaving Flats, Ohio. She’s moving to New York to escape her small town and pursue her dream of becoming a writer. The plan is set and in motion until one day she wakes up and finds a…thing, in her living room. A thing that’s large, oblong, and unlike anything anyone’s ever seen. An object that defies reason and explanation, appearing seemingly from nowhere to pop up in her midwestern home. With the help of her best friend she begins a journey to get to the bottom of what this thing is and where it came from. But, as curiosity shifts to obsession, suspicions about the object's true origin cast doubt on Lin’s story, while her need for answers begins to alienate those closest to her. Exploring trauma and coping and those random events in life; the ones that wake you up at three in the morning and leave you shaken and changed; Rag Doll is the story of a woman trying to make sense of the senseless and finding that sometimes the long and difficult road towards home is in fact our home.

Apologia

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

Suicide has been legalized and bureaucratized by the state. You register, you're given a hearing, you make your case. After you speak anyone and everyone who wishes is allowed to testify. After all is said, you give your verdict.
Guy LaRonde - orphaned as a child and raised in a series of foster and group homes - at age 10 suffered abuse and tortured at the hands of Bill Monroe. Since then, not sure if what...

Suicide has been legalized and bureaucratized by the state. You register, you're given a hearing, you make your case. After you speak anyone and everyone who wishes is allowed to testify. After all is said, you give your verdict.
Guy LaRonde - orphaned as a child and raised in a series of foster and group homes - at age 10 suffered abuse and tortured at the hands of Bill Monroe. Since then, not sure if what happened to him was memory or dream, Guy's been unable to truly connect with anyone, physically or emotionally. Alone and crippled by the past he registers to take his own life but is saved during his hearing by the testimony of Nancy, a friend from his first foster home. Now, a year later, Bill Monroe - high school teacher, football coach, and seemingly model citizen - has found out that his cancer has returned. Financially drained from his first battle with it, he decides to take his own life to spare pulling his family under along side him. Guy, learning what Monroe intends to do, makes the choice to finally confront both the man and the events that nearly drove him to his death.

We Will Always Talk This Way

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

An endless conversation about six points on a very big circle

An endless conversation about six points on a very big circle

High Holidays

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

Mary brings her new boyfriend, Paul, to her family home to celebrate the holidays. Mary's dad is tripping on an impressive amount of LSD and amphetamines. A holiday play.

Mary brings her new boyfriend, Paul, to her family home to celebrate the holidays. Mary's dad is tripping on an impressive amount of LSD and amphetamines. A holiday play.

Les Liaisons Agaçant

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

A comedy about dating in the city while living with roommates. Also maybe an autobiography.

A comedy about dating in the city while living with roommates. Also maybe an autobiography.

Haunts

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

A musing on relationships - their beginnings and ends.

A musing on relationships - their beginnings and ends.

Caveat

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

After the bar closes David invites Amy up to his apartment under the guise of calling her a cab to take her home. Unfortunately for Amy, David has other plans in store for her that night. Unfortunately for David, Amy does too.

After the bar closes David invites Amy up to his apartment under the guise of calling her a cab to take her home. Unfortunately for Amy, David has other plans in store for her that night. Unfortunately for David, Amy does too.

Prospect

by Jack Horton Gilbert

Synopsis

On the plains of North Dakota, Paul, a hired hand making his way out towards the prospect of greener pastures in California; and Joe, an older cowboy beholden to the only land he's ever known; finish putting up a fence as the sun sets on their last day together.

On the plains of North Dakota, Paul, a hired hand making his way out towards the prospect of greener pastures in California; and Joe, an older cowboy beholden to the only land he's ever known; finish putting up a fence as the sun sets on their last day together.