Nora Douglass

Three boys have a pact to go to Vietnam together right after high school graduation, eager to “join in on the fun.” Fourteen-year-old Mud, a little sister, feels left behind and also finds herself having to care for her grandmother who is beginning to show signs of forgetfulness. Not everyone comes home and Mud's grandmother ultimately disappears into her dementia, but it will be Grammy who manages to reach beyond the grief and confusion holding the survivors back. THE GREAT BUB is a coming-of-age story about family, unlikely friendships, growing up and accepting loss.

A Comedy About Dying: A woman near the end of her life finds her voice and takes on the machinations of an absurd and indifferent medical bureaucracy with the help of an imaginary friend. Teetering between comic satire and family drama, UNBUTTONING VIRGINIA is a journey of discovery, reconnection and reconciliation for a woman who thought her life was over.
Selected for development by Theatre 33, a new play development company in Salem, Oregon; included in its 2021 3X3 Summer Festival

A forward thinking young woman is plagued by big thoughts in a little town. It is 1909 in Winlock, Washington, “The Egg Capital of the World,” and Martine Small must find a way to direct this year’s EGG DAYS pageant. It’s easy to bamboozle the town boosters and she enjoys shocking her mother’s friends. She doesn’t mind terrorizing the tableau actors who are more interested in this year’s Easter bonnets than rehearsing, but having to fly against her grandmother’s unruly chickens may be the one obstacle to her epic quest. MARTINE OUT OF TIME is a comic profile of frustrated ambition on the one hand and an exploration of small town life in the west and women's roles at the turn of the last century on the other.

Chosen for development by Theatre 33, Salem, Oregon; included in Theatre 33's 2018 3X3 Summer Festival
Other Productions: Kent Mountain View Academy, 2018; Theater Company of Lafayette, 2025

Three characters. Three unreliable narrators. A different kind of war (love) story:
Lena begrudgingly takes in Claire, a young woman ostracized from her village for fraternizing with the enemy. Claire soon has her eye on Lena’s boy, August who is sent out to work for the women in town who have lost their men to war. Secrets abound and survival tactics are held long after their benefits have expired as the two women vie for the soul of the young man. Shorn is a play about the need to find a place and the power of letting go.
Selected for development by Theatre 33, a new play development company in Salem, Oregon; included in Theatre 33's 2017 3X3 Summer Festival - a fully mounted script in hand production
Other Productions: Theater Company of Lafayette, 2019 (Regional Premiere).

A Father’s Impossible Dreams, A Mother’s Destructive Love: An Immigration Story
Johanna is a mother caught between wanting her children to get ahead and realizing that she may have to lose them to a foreign culture for them to do so. Jonas embraces all that is new and American. Johanna refuses to learn English. Their four daughters are caught between his fantastic dreams and her crippling fears. These family stories of high hopes and unfulfilled dreams are the stories of many immigrants, reflecting much about life in the west at the turn of the last century.

“Is this our Sacrifice to the new land? Our love for each other?” – Jonas, Act II

Productions: Theater Company of Lafayette; University of Washington Studio; University of Washington Mainstage; Driftwood Players
Kennedy Center ACTF Regional Playwriting Award
Winner of the David Library Award for Best Play About the American Experience

Set in a formal ballroom, this romp in eight scenes follows the comic and often painful adventures of Lucy, a stranger in a strange land growing up the awkward daughter of beautiful, charming and eternally young Cecelia and Edward, who frequent the ballroom to pick up fleeting friends and lovers. Born on stage, brought on in a red wagon, Lucy has to get her parents’ attention between dance sets. The play, which takes place during the course of one evening in the lives of Edward and Cecelia and throughout the years of Lucy’s life, is written from the point of view of a child struggling to make sense of the often incomprehensible world of adults where confusing codes of etiquette and dictates of style – decrees only they seem to understand – appear to rule over honest emotions and common sense.

Conflicting Perceptions of Truth - Vinnie accuses her father of raping her twenty years earlier, but her veracity is invalidated by her family, the legal system and eventually herself.

“A piece of choral theater about conflicting perceptions of truth…Overlapping time zones and fragmenting dialogue, Douglass has woven a haunting vignette.” – Misha Berson, The Seattle Times

Productions: ACME Theatricks and Seattle Fringe Festival

A Comedy of Manners About Hanging On for Dear Life in Middle-Class Suburbia.
Annie lives in a hole in the backyard. Today is the day she has agreed to emerge from her underground sanctuary and rejoin her former life with her family. Husband Paul has been keeping it together just for this day, and when Annie decides she’s not quite ready to come up, we see love tested and roles reversed.

First Place, Drury College One Act Place Competition
Selected, Love Creek One Act Festival: Women's Voices

CHOSEN
A Dark Comedy About Survival, Guilt and Letting Go,
Dr. Ludwig, a rumpled, kind-hearted scientist at the US Army’s Rocket lab in Huntsville, Alabama and formerly, a technician in Hitler Germany’s Rocket Program struggles to let go of his beloved creations engineered to rival that scrappy little Sputnik. Brought to the United States after World War II to help launch the US space program, he struggles to embrace his new cushy lifestyle and let go of the guilt he feels over the enslaved men he left behind in Germany.
Commissioned by Theater Company of Lafayette for “The Deep Beep Beep,” a one-act festival celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sputnik.
Productions: Theater Company of Lafayette; Kent Mountain View Academy

Avid movie fan Caroline, stands in line with her best friend Erica waiting for a showing Hollywood's Golden Age classic, Desert Dreams. Disturbing the other patrons with her enthusiastic shot-by-shot re-telling of the movie, she eventually succeeds in involving all of them to reenact the movie. Caroline, as the passionate woman Egyptologist who discovers an undisturbed royal tomb, is transported back in time, falls in love with the young pharaoh and then is shot down with super-charged ray guns by her fellow greedy archeologists. Her recruits become, in turn, the greedy archeologists and the undulating cinematic elements of a beautiful Egyptian sunset. For a brief moment, they create a community, as strangers come together to tell a story and by the end of Caroline's tale no one is really interested in seeing the actual movie anymore. As Erica agrees she might be disappointed by the real thing, the two go off, Caroline regaling her friend with the plot of the even more exciting 1922 silent version.

Commissioned by Theater Company of Lafayette for “Tut Uncommon” a short play festival celebrating the centenary of the discovery King Tutankhamun's tomb on November 4, 1922.

Synopsis: A woman having to face Christmas and the loss of her
mother at the same time is descended upon by one of her mother's holiday crafts books, BETTER HOMES AND HOLIDAYS CHRISTMAS IDEAS, 1957. PERFECT CHRISTMAS is a cheery jack hammer of a book who expects Imogene to be thrilled to take over her mother's seasonal crafts and perfect hostess duties. But the world has changed, and nobody is pickling their own pigs feet anymore or boiling their own tongue for finger sandwiches. Just when Imo is about to go under by the weight of all of Perfect Christmas’s cheery suggestions, she finds some notes in the book suggesting her mother might not have been as enthusiastic a hostess as Perfect Christmas suggests.

Supply Chain Woes and New Capitalism in Santa’s Workshop. Santa has gone off with the pixies, so Mrs. Santa has had to take over. Being a more practical soul than her soft-hearted husband, she’s decided it’s time to get serious and make a profit, so she has rented out some of the elves to the Expensive Cheap Toy Company. The latest toy craze, however, sits at the bottom of the sea and the supply chain is in ruins. It’s up to the overworked elves to keep Mrs. Santa happy, save Christmas and protect Santa’s reputation.

The Day the Killer Bees arrive in Seattle
Mom is a cheery Darwin fan and advocate of tough love. She has three children – adaptive, mal-adaptive and non-adaptive – and a nice husband who knows he has already realized his evolutionary function. The play takes place in a modern TV-perfect kitchen that also serves as family bunker. Mom just hopes that with all her assault therapy and half-lethal doses of the most popular environmental poisons and carcinogens she will have prepared her children for life in this latest brave new world.

Productions: ACME Theatricks, ACME's 10th Anniversary Showcase, Edmonds College, Skagit Valley College and Theater Company of Lafayette

Published: Between the Lines, Edmonds College

Grief is a Funny Thing. Harriet likes the quiet and calm of the mortuary, but her boss thinks she needs help, so he hires free-spirit and one-day job queen Irene to help her out. Irene and frequent visitor Arthur, a narcoleptic who keeps getting shipped off to the funeral parlor by his wife, create havoc with the closed-casket cadavers until they discover they’ve made a mistake and Jack Sneep’s sister is on her way for a viewing. Commissioned for Theater of Lafayette's Jackalope Festival: Summer Tales of Strangeness - “Two plays stand out in this pantheon: Nora Douglass’ “Jack Sneepalope” and Emily Golden’s “Heirloom” manage to be creepy and funny at the same time.”
– Mike Pearson, Boulder Daily Camera

A Surrealistic Romp Through History with Dolley Madison, Betsy Ross and Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali worships Dolley Madison for her commercial success and Betsy Ross just wants to be noticed. A Daliesque meditation on the intersection of market capitalism, art and celebrity.

Commissioned for The Dali Follies One Act Festival, Theater Company of Lafayette, 2016

WHAT WOULD ABE DO?
An After School Special - Befuddled middle school teacher Mary Todd McGillicutty faces online teaching with trepidation but while learning to navigate the technological challenges with the help of the school’s new library “tech,” she also discovers a new determination to teach her “virtual” children about the truth of our tarnished history and her still beloved distant relative, Abraham Lincoln. Originally a ten-minute solo piece in commissioned for the 200th anniversary of their births, the play was expanded and re-written for Zoom in 2020.
Watch at TCL’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0gw5zGIBOk