Louise Schwarz

It's time for an open call, and Gretchen, Payton, and Quinn aren't ready for the exhausting day of auditions ahead of them. Where did these actors come from? Why are they like this?? And where is Glory, the one actress they've been promised will blow them away?

A one-act comedy. (35 minutes)

In this tragicomic play, grieving widow Vanessa is trying to kick her late wife's nightmare-ish burden of a sister out of her apartment. When an easy way out presents itself through one of her therapy clients, she has a difficult decision to make between her own well-being and that of her patient.

Full-length.

Sensitive parents Dina and Will dread breaking heartbreaking news to their 19-year-old daughter, only to find themselves desperate for any reaction at all.

10-minute tragicomedy

Georgia is facing middle age with some comforting sitcom marathons, her own best-selling book of dating advice for men, and a penchant for booze-soaked oblivion. When her partner walks out leaving her devastated, she needs to figure out how she can keep her “respectable” career as a relationship coach legitimate. Will her new intern keep her from falling apart or will she make some shady moves and alienate the last remaining holdouts in her life?

Full-length.

What happened to Rosalie Wells after the events of Lillian Hellman's 1935 drama The Children's Hour?

A ten-minute play.

Two fanatics and their unwitting accomplices board a cross-country train with a mission of grave social and cultural import. How far would you go to save your favorite soap?

Full-length comedy.

10-minute play

In this short comedy, Nora runs into her best friend in the most awkward of places. Will either of them tell the truth about their reason for being there?

A group of high school students spend their summer working at Golden Olden Adventure Towne, a theme park outside a major American city in the southeast. G.O.A.T is having trouble adapting to a changing world where the theme park's old colonial themes don't quite work the way they used to. Just as the season is getting underway, some employees' personal items start to go missing. They quickly suspect the thief is among them.

A short but full-length comedy, that can also be adjusted into a one-act by removing some or all of the interstitial scenes.

A group of young women arrive at a theater to participate in a county beauty pageant. As the other contestants start to go missing and horrifying discoveries are made, the pageant host decides that the show must go on. How much blood and terror can these women withstand in order to win that prized crown? (Hint: it's a lot.)

Special Note: this play does contain a few performed songs and dances. Sheet music and recordings are available upon request, but other music can be used. It has also been adapted to be locale-specific if desired (e.g., the original NJ production's pageant was "Miss Glassboro," but became "Miss Middletown" in a CT production).

At a sleep-away summer camp in New Jersey in 1997, teenage Livvie and her friends struggle with coming of age, and face what happens when deeply troubled kids clash with deeply troubled adults.

Full-length dramedy.

Bess has returned to the city where she grew up to work a thankless temp job at a bank while helping her elderly mother Donna recover from knee surgery, when the man who crushed her now middle-aged and hardened heart as a young woman turns up dead. First assumed to be an accident, the death quickly becomes a preoccupation of a group of Bess's former high school friends.

Full-length tragicomic mystery.

Lyle has been exonerated after over a decade languishing on Pennsylvania's death row for a crime he didn't commit. He's grateful for his freedom, but has much to learn about the how the world has changed in his time away. More than anything, Lyle wants a nice girl to settle down with -- no easy task for someone with such an infamous background.

Full length dramedy.

In 1999, a reporter from a popular New York women’s magazine visits a small town in Alabama to interview the proprietors of a controversial abortion clinic. As she arrives, the town is preparing to unveil a statue of two young children, one white and one Black, who were recently killed in a tragic accident. What she uncovers is a community torn apart by racial and religious tensions.

Full-length dramedy.

Angie and her friend Josephine go to buy her a pregnancy test after getting a little liquid courage, much to the extreme discomfort of an innocent drugstore clerk.

10-minute comedy. Fun for accent work (midwestern/Minnesota).

Sammy, the former rhythm guitarist of the once-legendary rock band Snake Train, has gotten sober and is trying to get the band back together decades later. Trouble is, their new lead guitarist Decker is much younger and hasn’t quite gotten the hedonism and decadence of rock n’ roll out of his system. Sammy and his bandmates enlist the help of Betsy, his childhood best friend, to house them in her mountain home in an effort to get Decker clean and to make the old magic happen again.

Full-length dramedy.

Prudence, a struggling NYC actress who has been cut off by her wealthy father on her 35th birthday, uses her considerable acting talents to obtain money in increasingly damaging and unethical ways.

Full-length comedy.

Monologue: A girl at various ages from 5 to 18 makes her stump speech running for student government. Great comic solo piece to show very wide range.

(The spacing looks weird but it doubles as a prop -- you'll see!)

Ten-minute play. The residents of Sunrise Villas Graduated Assisted Living Facility are discovering how little their dining room dynamics differ from that of the school cafeteria. We must avoid Betsy AT ALL COSTS!

4 women, seniors but it's also fun when the characters are played by children

Three young women decide to start a feminist revolution from the inside of a strip club.

Full-length comedy.

Cinderella is trying to hang on to her perfect image and her perfect hair and her perfect marriage. Abuse and addiction tell another story.

Dark comic monologue.

A ten-minute absurdist play. Old King Cole is having an existential crisis as two of his trio of fiddlers have gone to the other side and one is losing his hearing. It's also always daylight in his kingdom and it's starting to drive him mad.

A monologue in which a local news reporter has a bit of an onscreen meltdown while delivering the verdict in a murder trial. Great bizarro piece that an actress can really play around with and show her range in an audition.

Future rock star Sammy doesn't want to be at the junior high dance in 1980, but Greg (the drummer, of course) thinks it's the perfect time to put the moves on early bloomer Betsy. But can the spark ever be rekindled after she says something less than kind about Led Zeppelin?

Ten-minute comedy.

Adam and Eve are bored out of their minds, hoping someone else will show up and liven things up a bit. Is Lucy too good to be true?

Ten-minute play about faith, sexuality, and boredom.

Growing up is a funny thing. In the wake of his divorce, Will wants to turn back the clock and hopes that Farrah will help him recapture the old days. Can shame re-shape a memory?

Ten-minute play.

Marge, Simon, and Aaron visit the filming site of their favorite horror film, A Nightmare on Elm Street, to recreate an iconic scene, but some even scarier things are revealed in the re-enactment.

Ten-minute comedy.

Monologue about an attorney who prepares for trial after a long time away from practicing law. A long, long time during which she watched way too much television. Good, big comic audition piece!