Armed only with her dreams of making the world a better place and six weeks of training, Kay Josephs quits her corporate job to teach English in an urban high school. She wakes up to harsh realities: the copy machine is broken, the system is broken, and the spirits of her fellow teachers are broken. Or are they? A dark comedy of academic intrigue.

"One of the best new plays of the year...There are very few excellent plays about public education. This is one." - Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

"★★★★ This clear-eyed glimpse into the teachers' lounge makes hearty laughs part of an all too relevant lesson plan." - Kris Vire, Time Out Chicago

"Former public school teacher Joe Zarrow achieves something remarkable...an entertaining play about education that re-creates all the quirks and craziness of modern education without lapsing into either cynical hopelessness or Hollywood-style superteacher fantasies. His dialogue feels authentic, and his characters are flawed but likable human beings, not mouthpieces for this or that ideology." - Jack Helbig, Chicago Reader

"Engaging, intelligent, and important. Highly recommended." - Peter Thomas Ricci, Chicago Theater Review

Mission Purple, a Chicago nonprofit connecting urban and rural citizens, is falling apart. The Director disappeared to a retreat in Wisconsin months ago. The board fires friends Ros and Tommy. Single and unemployed, they decide to go up to Wisconsin for long weekend and to look for the Director, who happens to be Ros's mom.

In Wisconsin, the Mission Purple staff are missing, having abandoned their rental cabin. Ros and Tommy stay at an uncomfortable motel. Tommy can barely leave the room. A long weekend turns into a long winter. The local paper prints an anonymous love ode to Ros and the poet turns out to be Lando, a former coworker crush. Ros approaches him, but Lando mistakes her for a townie. Ros rolls with it.

Angry city and country lovers pile up. Mission Purple goes bankrupt, but a mysterious benefactor writes them a blank check. Wounds heal. Tommy weds a local dairy farmer. Ros reveals herself, and quits Mission Purple in order to find a new, honest place in the world. A modern update of Shakespeare's AS YOU LIKE IT and its obsession with boundary-blurring, THE RETREAT asks, why do we so often yearn to be something other than what we are? How do our personal desires overlap and conflict with our professional and political selves?

At a small town high school's active shooter drill, the backdrop of blank shots and bullet hole makeup inspires two teens and two adults to explore what is real in their world. Written for The Appetizer Plays speed playwriting festival.

RETCON is a universe-hopping comedy about geek culture, race, and keeping your story straight. An unknown African-American actress wins the lead role in the movie debut of Chronometa, a beloved comic book heroine who first appeared in the 1940s. Nerdy traditionalists, led by a mysterious blogger, think their hero must stay absolutely true to the original comics and be played by a white performer. The traditionalists pressure the studio to make some unsavory alterations to the screenplay. The actress, unhappy about this compromise, leaks the script to an idealistic young fan who publishes it on the internet. This escalates into a vicious campaign of trolling against the fan and the actress. This main plot is interwoven with the storyline of Chronometa herself, a superhero who grows with the decades. We also see the “origin stories” of the play’s real-life characters: the actress, the trolling blogger, the fan, the director, and the nebbishy continuity supervisor. The play ends on an optimistic note, jumping ten years into the future to see how comic books might continue to evolve.

When Martin's girlfriend kicks him out of their apartment for cheating, he has to find new digs quickly in Chicago's diverse, rapidly-gentrifying West Town neighborhood. To get the only existing apartment, he'll have to compete with a rabid overgrown frat boy, a Machiavellian real estate agent, a determined Polish saleslady, an embittered barista, and a flock of very angry pigeons. How far will Martin be willing to go to stay in the neighborhood he loves so much?

"Without a doubt, one can arrive unprepared for Joe Zarrow's new play, The Pigeons, produced by Walkabout Theatre, at Swim Cafe's space. It's easily the cleverest, foxiest and physically wildest farce I've seen since, well, forever."
- Paige Listerud, Chicago Theater Blog

"Very funny satire."
- Laura Molzahn, Chicago Reader (Recommended)

A professor desperate for tenure gets to share her work at a TED-esque Big Idea conference, but only after she makes a deal with someone suspect in this short comic take on the Faust myth.