Ashley Naftule

90-minute romantic comedy. Selena and Judy live together, dance together, love together. The couple spend their nights going out dancing while navigating all the hazards that can trip lovers up: jealousy, secrecy, anxieties about the future & surprises from the past, living in the patriarchal now while dreading the fascist tomorrow. Following them everywhere is The Master of Ceremonies, who directs their dancing, calling out moves they must dance to. Is The Master an angel or devil? Life coach or dictator? Friend or foe? And what does this mysterious, sexually ambiguous being want with our two ladies?

Full-length (100+ mins) dark comedy. Roger and Gene are living the dream. The media ecosystem is crumbling around them, the arts are being destroyed by A.I., but they’re still holding onto their jobs as America’s most beloved film critics. There’s only one problem: they absolutely hate each other. Also, their producers keep giving them bizarre and increasingly hostile notes. Oh, and they’re starting to get a little worried about all the inexplicable aches & pains on their bodies and the frequent memory loss. And their biggest rival knows a devastating secret about them that she won’t share. Will Fate give these bickering boys two thumbs up or has their mixed review of Barbie sealed their doom?

Inspired by At The Movies, Samuel Beckett, On Cinema, and the novels of Philip K. Dick, "Roger and Gene" unleashes a torrent of profane & hilarious conversation about modern Hollywood movies, toxic male friendships, "Ghostbusters," basketball, and the inevitable (?) extinction of the human race.

Full length (2 hours) dark comedy. The town of Rosewater is afraid. Not of the raging forest fire that keeps getting closer to them, or the inexplicable increase in animal attacks, or the sinkholes opening on Main Street, or the nearby army base firing off mortars like they’re under attack. They’re worried about what’s in their tap water, and God help whoever they think is to blame for it.

Set in the modern era, the world of "Orange Skies" is populated by a cast of characters that includes drug dealers, librarians, birdwatchers, mail order brides, soldiers, and a close personal friend of Elvis Presley. "Orange Skies" is a dark comedy about conspiracy theories, mass hysteria, corporate greed, transphobia, and immortal cowgirls. It’s a play about the collapse of civilization and what comes next.

Full length science fiction/dark comedy play. Broadcasting from the Nevada desert, Delilah Peel hosts the nation’s most popular late night AM radio talk show. Fielding paranoid calls about UFOs, Bigfoots, dead pop stars, and chupacabras is all in a day’s work for Peel. But when her equipment begins picking up ominous transmissions from beyond the stars, she starts to worry that she’s turning into one of her callers. Inspired by Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM, the works of Philip K. Dick, and the strange recordings of The Conet Project, Radio Free Europa is a darkly comic exploration of one woman’s struggle to find a signal in a universe full of noise.

Full-length play (dark comedy). After giving his girlfriend his ear as an anniversary gift, a troubled man ends up in a mental hospital where his new best friend is a cannibal and his doctor is crazier than he is. To make matters even worse: he's still hearing things out of his missing ear. As for the woman who received his unfortunate gift: she's starting to hear things too. Bursts of noise, music, prophetic noises, and radio plays.... streaming out of a severed ear in a jewelry box. EAR is a dark comedy about missed connections, mental illnesses, supernatural phenomena, and the hazards of receiving therapy from a Freudian with a raging coke problem and an all-too literal Oedipal complex.

Full-length play. Set in a tavern outside space and time, "The Canterbury Tarot" puts on an occult spin on Geoffrey Chaucer's immortal classic. A group of pilgrims, waylaid by a violent storm, take refuge in a tavern and pass the time by telling stories. But rather than letting the Wife of Bath or the Miller or Knight do the talking, the pilgrims in this tavern are Major Arcana pulled from a deck of Tarot cards: Death, The Tower, The Chariot, The Empress, The Star, The Fool, Judgment, and The Wheel of Fortune.

Inspired by the works of Chaucer, Rachel Pollack, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Annie Baker, "The Canterbury Tarot" is a freewheeling journey through a strange series of stories about druidic sacrifices, haunted heiresses, radiated messiahs, and the inevitable heat death of the universe.

Sophia Islet has trouble sleeping. It isn’t insomnia or sleep apnea that troubles her: it’s her vivid nightmares of drowning and the very real underwater creatures that follow her back to her flooding apartment when she wakes up that give her grief. While Sophia struggles to cope with her impossible situation, over half a century in the past two sailors on a raft—Hans & Nikolai—try to stay afloat as sharks circle them & a mysterious siren tempts them with promises of love & immortality under the sea. Inspired by body horror, sea shanties, and the films of Terry Gilliam & Nobuhiko Obayashi, The Hidden Sea is a darkly comic tale about anxiety, cosmic synchronicities, mermaids, and lovestruck pet shop boys.

Full-length play (comedy/horror). Every day feels exactly the same for the employees at the Opera Street Bookstore: talking about pop culture, taking never-ending smoke breaks, and dealing with insane customers. Their dead end jobs turn deadly, though, when a sketchy customer sells them a strange book. Written in "the language of angels," it becomes the store's most in-demand rare book. The only problem? The people who want to get their hands on it aren’t people at all. A play about slackers & sinister forces, "The First Annual Bookburners Convention" is a dark comedy about bookworms, cosmic horror, and what you stand to lose when you keep looking at life through the rear-view mirror.