Karen Howes

Time: 1847
Place: The Vatican Observatory in Rome and an Attic Observatory in Nantucket

Set in 1848, "Five Degrees Above Polaris" is based on the true story of American astronomer, Maria Mitchell. In this play, she travels to Rome to confront the Vatican’s official astronomer, Father Francesco De Vico, when he takes credit for her discovery of a comet. Upon arriving at the Vatican Observatory, Maria finds herself in the midst of an Italian civil uprising against Austrian rule. While trying to make her mark as a respected scientist, she is swept into a world of uppity Harvard professors, romantic Italian revolutionaries, and the weight of Catholicism. While Maria is dead-set on getting the medal that she rightly deserves, she is forced to confront obstacles and make important choices.

A bride-to-be from NYC comes to a bed and breakfast on Vancouver Island with plans to marry the perfect man. But the stars don’t shine overhead and every wedding hosted at the house has turned out disastrously. With the hope of putting an end to the misfortunes, the physics professor who runs the B&B decides to revisit the first wedding that went askew – her own. The play intertwines the real stuff of quantum mechanics with true love and nights without stars. Delving into the most contemporary and reputable research in Quantum Information Theory, the play merges the theory of non-linearity with the impact of past, present, and future on the characters’ emotional lives.

It’s 1974 in a small Mississippi town not far from where R&B got its start. It’s a town with a history of plantations and  segregation. It’s where the Devil bought souls and where Biblical scripture is part of everyday speech. But when the lights fade up on the 24 hours in which this story takes place, the war in Vietnam has been declared over, the country’s president has resigned, and most of the blues clubs around town and the railroads leading to them have been closed for several years. The town might not be aware, but it’s caught between a history rich with identity and a transformation into something vague and undefined. Like adolescence, this town should be something to get past and get through, but only a few people have that chance, and if the lights were to fade up on the next 24 hours, those left would be part of just another story.  

         As for this one — it’s about a young white woman who is inheriting a large sum of money, a few corrupt politicians, an unprincipled journalist, and a guitar player on his way to California, and each are to blame for a black man arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. This isn’t a play about race as much as it is about culture and time and being connected to a way of life that we are born into and that is part of who we are.

ROADKILL is in the style of American Western Gothic. It's dark comedy about the events surrounding the murder of a fat woman in a watermelon print dress who lies dead in the restroom of a roadside diner in the middle-of-nowhere. The play moves in reverse -- from 9 pm to 4 pm in a single evening, challenging the audience to uncover the connections between the several characters who try to jimmy open the restroom door or buy a cup of coffee -- all while planning an assassination, setting cars on fire, rehearsing a stand-up comic routine, circumventing a Native American take-over of the country, and searching for spiritual vortexes. This is an edgy, carefully constructed play with wit, humor, and the most interesting characters in contemporary theater. Politically incorrect and dramatically heightened.

Full Length. Everything at work in the play is intended to illuminate -- woman. (This is not to say that there aren't other means also at work). The story is intended to weave into one fabric the actions and specific objectives of five female characters such that in the final measure of the play, each make choices that re-define who they are and allow each to begin anew in the world.

The setting is a fading beach house on a Caribbean island at a time caught between the present and past. There are cell phones, but the adapters to charge them don’t work, and what appears to be true gives way to its opposite: For example -- The doctor is really an artist. The innocent children are savage. A person’s soul is in his feet. Even photosynthesis is a ruse that tricks us into believing the sun is necessary for life when in fact it is a carcinogen.

The plot centers on the disappearance of a famous archaeologist who has sent a valuable and legendary artifact to his wife, Sophie Borderaux. While she is unaware of the artifact that is hidden somewhere in her house, others are not - including a mysterious man who shows up to rent a room, and her husband's brother and sister who left their more "civilized" lives in the US to become a part of the "barbaric" island which has come under the influence of the Dragon Fire Night Club down the beach.

This is a full-length play set in the 1990s when cellular, satellite and broadband technologies were at the forefront. It parallels today’s world of texts, tweets and instagrams, and it is fundamentally about the lack of communication in a hi-tech world that prides itself on fast-paced information exchange. The story focuses on an ordinary American family who wields their tragic and ironic destinies through personal choices and free will. The play is ultimately about what we become when we can only rely on ourselves -- when there is no God to answer our prayers and no external circumstances to take the blame.
The story moves between a family home in Iowa and an earthquake ravaged village on Naztec Plate outside of Puquio.

"A Gentlemen’s Pact" is available as a 30-minute one act and a 90 minute intermission-less full length. The play takes a modern look at marriage, family, gender and friendship when two university professors, Bill (a young African-American English professor) and Arthur (an older white professor in the Political Science department) wrestle with how to resolve the upheaval caused by Bill's startling announcement that he wants to marry Arthur's wife, Evelyn. The two men battle wits, barter property, and eventually engage in fist-a-cuff combat until the object of their competition enters the scene and turns the tables. Evelyn, a stay-at-home soccer mom who put her PhD in Art History on hold, makes it clear that she is not something to be negotiated. She’s unhappy in her marriage with Arthur, but doesn’t agree with Bill’s assumption that they are having an affair.

As the evening progresses, a visit from Arthur’s career-focused ex-wife, and then from their teenage daughter, who yearns for connection to a tribe (literally), complicates the already stressful triumvirate. The stage is set for four of the five characters to struggle with finding agency in a world where each are marginalized and defined within the hegemony of the white male perspective. With continually shifting power structures, the characters re-constitute who is on whose side until all are reduced (and elevated) to a place of survival. By the play’s end, the family dinner is first burnt, then thrown out the living room window, and lastly devoured by a pack of small neighborhood dogs. Ultimately, it becomes clear that there is room for only one victor in what turns into the ultimate and long-awaited battle of the sexes

10 minute play. A young woman’s future is changed for the better when a strange note in the hands of a self-proclaimed superhero warns her to stay clear of the 5564 bus from Buffalo to Toronto. (Published in Smith and Kraus Best Ten Minute Plays, 2017)

There's an actual reason why things go missing then suddenly appear in the very place we looked a hundred times. Some people have a gift for finding missing things even when what's missing is a mystery.

Ten Minute. When a passionate kiss isn’t enough to re-unite two lovers, setting fire to a brand new Dodge pickup might do the trick. A modern day Romeo and Juliet in which the arbitrary rules of society attempt to keep two people from being together.

An American musical about the first wave of the women's rights movement and the personal lives and sacrifices made by the few women who had a vision to make a difference. Conflict arises over the abolitionist movement and the men and women who wove their way into and out of the 80 years that past between the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls and the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote. The play is witty and contemporary. Music composed by Elliot Sokolov.

When a girl named Anna shares her vivid imagination with the girls at a boarding school in England, she quickly learns that she doesn’t fit in with the entitled ways of her classmates. As a result, the writing is on the wall when she sees two mischievous Boggarts run off with the locket that she and her friends found in the garden. Her story about how the locket disappeared is taken as a lie.
“Unicorns and faeries don’t exist,” she’s told.
“So maybe it was you who stole the necklace,” says the most unpleasant of her friends.
A fight ensues, causing Anna to fall. She loses consciousness for what might be a few seconds or perhaps the entire length of the play. It’s an unusual predicament, for in that single moment between life and death, the three Fates must decide whether or not she should be killed before her appointed end.
“Every time a mortal comes in contact with a character that’s immortal, the fabric of time is disrupted and fate is obscured,” says Atropos.
Anna has only one chance to keep her thread from being snipped – the girls at the school must come to believe that it was Boggarts and not she who took the locket. She also needs to put everything back in place within the two worlds. It means she has to retrieve the necklace. But -- the necklace is involved in yet another story that has caused the breakup of Titania and Oberon, leaving the faery world in a mess. With both reality and imagination in disarray, it is only through the wits of Puck and the cunning of Pan, that the monsters and witches are outdone, true love comes into play, and Anna is able to circumvent fate.
Cast size is flexible 12-40
 

A film noir re-enactment of the song Love Potion Number Nine, covered by the Searchers in 1963.

The play is loosely based on the Beatles’ song “A Day in The Life” from their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. You may want to listen to the song before reading. The play is about a pregnant woman who has a plan on how she can feel attractive and desired, even though her husband seems more interested in the daily news.

A front page news story can happen anywhere -- except when it’s unexpected. A small town journalist with big plans settles for a human interest piece on Salsa dancing in the heartland. Resolved with the notion that nothing ever happens in small towns, the journalist is oblivious to a political scandal that turns into a murder just 50 yards away.

A ten minute play in which a southern-belle, pregnant with a candidate's baby, prepares for a wedding with a public relations man whom she's never met.

Why do people kill those they love? This is a ten minute dark tragedy on how three siblings, desperate to stay alive in the slums of a broken city, kill for love.

Merne and Mary discover it's not so easy to stuff a turkey when he's standing in your kitchen talking about his life's goals.

An absurdist play in verse that tells the odd story of a young girl who believes water should be conserved so that the human race and herself might continue to survive, not realizing that the extinction of the human race might be the point.

Ten Minute. Prompted by the Christmas carol "We Three Kings" -- two sisters compete over which of their kids will get the most presents from UPS, the Post Office and Federal Express

A community theater production of Mary Zimmerman's "Metamorphosis" runs into challenges when the town levies fines for literary content about climate change that has the potential to trigger stress and fear in the audience.

WarSharks is not a conventional play (though it may seem to read like one). I don't mean to say that the play is encased in subtext. Just the opposite. Its meaning palpitates on the surface and as part of the play's very action. It's a 10 minute story of A women (Chloe) who comes to an obscure island in the Caribbean to rescue her sister (Sophie) from a strange world where the incidental actions of the everyday ring more true than dramatic events.

A woman learns something of herself and the kind of love she thought she would never have, while searching for parts of a seaplane in the cold waters of the Saanich Inlet. (Published in Smith and Kraus Best Ten Minute Plays, 2018)

When a young woman decides to get back together with the schmuck of a boyfriend who cheated on her, the maid -- who cleaned-up the woman’s apartment and set her wounded life back on course -- returns to keep the breakup in tact.

A compilation of 9 award-winning and time-tested plays as a full evening of theater, featuring stories about love or the lack thereof. The scenes and characters are touching, funny, sometimes romantic, and sometimes - not.

In each play, love is at the core, often a catalyst for chaos, or a remedy for failure. With love at the foundation of what we desire most, the people in these 9 stories rise and fall. Some cross oceans, climb cliffs, set fires, become a super hero, and even marry a complete stranger – all because of love.