FULL-LENGTH (80-85 minutes, no intermission).
David Lindenbaum, a freshman Jewish piano major, finds himself in a conflicted relationship with Elena Guerriero, the beautiful but volatile Italian-American violinist with whom he has been chosen to perform Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata and who is unwilling to take his religious beliefs seriously. Along the way he must also deal with a lovable but crass roommate, his no-nonsense piano teacher, his doctrinaire mother, and his apparently cold and distant father. Can this Orthodox Jewish student find a way to survive in the modern secular world?

ONE-ACT (About 70 minutes, no intermission.)
Max decides his condo needs painting and hires Dexter, the handyman for his apartment complex. Little does he suspect that Dexter is not only an excellent house painter but also a clever con man who is out to fleece Max for all he has, and that his attractive teenaged nephew and assistant Alex is already a practiced gay hustler. After Max has a total meltdown where he ruins Dexter’s beautiful paint job, can he ever extricate himself from the painter’s clutches?

c. 12 minutes.
A nerdish teen finds an unexpected connection with the baseball-playing jock he has worshipped from afar.

10-12 minutes.
Hoping to track down one of the only copies of an MA dissertation of poetry written by his deceased high-school crush, an elderly man travels to São Paulo, Brazil, only to find the library is about to close. But with the help of a somewhat ironic ghost, he finds he might have achieved his ends and then some.

Disclaimer: This play was inspired by my memory of a high school classmate who took an MA in creative writing from Stanford University, and the only copy of whose thesis outside Stanford is held by the library of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

At the time this play was written, I had learned that Brian was living in San Francisco during the mid-1980s and died around that time, though I did not know if he was gay or died from AIDS. I have subsequently learned definitively that my conjectures were more or less correct. Other than the above, the events and characterizations in this play are entirely fictional.

12 minutes.
Three co-workers are out for Chinese lunch, always the same place, the same day, the same time, the same food — except that one wants to try something new, but his picky co-worker hates green food and won't go anywhere that serves peas in the fried rice. All hell breaks loose when the owner of their regular eatery starts adding peas to the fried rice herself.

10 minutes.
Getting ready for their big on-air trial for a Siskel-Ebert type of TV film reviewing show, an over-zealous applicant tries a little too hard to get the "thumbs up, thumbs down" routine just right.

10 minutes.
A struggling would-be artist (who drives a hearse for a living) makes a desperate effort to sell "just one" painting to an exclusive art gallery, and finds to her/his astonishment that one of the most prestigious elderly collectors in the country offers a staggering sum to acquire a piece the gallery owner considers trash. But does the wealthy buyer truly love the painting, or is she buying it only to save a miserable soul from despair?

10 minutes.
Not understanding why his expensive piano won't make any sounds for him, Jake the amateur pianist calls on the great Vladimir Horowitz (who is dead but no matter). Turns out the piano has a mind of its own.

10 minutes.
Having acquired a rare old LP of the only recording that in his opinion plays the ending of the slow movement of the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto correctly, a collector brings the disc to an expert for restoration and transfer to CD. Consternation occurs when the LP is damaged beyond repair at precisely the crucial moment.

15 minutes.
Celebrating his bar mitzvah at Pesach-time with family, newly pious (and first-born) Robbie Rosenberg gets the surprise of his life when guess who is the pièce de resistance in the final course of a dinner devoted to the Ten Plagues of Egypt.

10-12 minutes.
Home from college, Monica's insistence on being called by gender-blind pronouns confuses her mother Dolores and angers her father George.

12-15 minutes. May be produced independently, or as part of the full-length "Canterbury Sextet."
In a college town lived a carpenter, a simple, beefy, burly man named John.
The love of his life was his charming young wife, a nubile girl by name of Alison.
But this being college, which is full of that species called the clever and amorous young male,
It appears with the help of a flood and a fart that all John’s hopes of protecting his wife are doomed to fail.

15 minutes. May be produced independently, or as part of the full-length "Canterbury Sextet."
A college boy convicted of rape could be sentenced to death or life in prison.
Queen Guinevere however will spare his life, but only on one condition.
He’s given a year to journey the world and of every woman he meets to inquire
The answer to the simplest of questions: “What do women most desire?”

4-5 minutes, monologue.
Tiresias, the blind prophet from ancient Greece, recounts his experience of having been transformed from man to woman for seven years after offending the goddess Hera.

5 minutes, monologue.
A very small woman falls deeply in love with a very large woman, mainly because there's so much of her.

10 minutes, monologue.
Castrated at a young age by his opera-loving surgeon father, a boy grows up to be the reincarnation of the most legendary race of heroic male operatic sopranos: the castrati. But how is he to succeed without the support of the great Contessa del Franco-Frescobaldi e Pupa?

30 minutes.
With the help of his cousin Sandy, Jeff Glazer has been hired as a product trainer for Applied Software Solutions. On his first day, Jeff finds himself in the middle of a company reorganization where Sandy is fired and he is assigned by the dreaded vice-president Glenn Bartunik to take over her position. Will Jeff survive in the corporate world?

1-minute.
Mom thinks she knows all about diabetes. Mom knows squat.

1 minute.
Life on earth (and perhaps the end of it) in just one minute as seen through the eyes of two young people.

1 minute.
The speaker contemplates how bread, once considered the staff of life, has lost all flavor and nutritional value in our modern times, and how only baking for one's self will recapture the loaves consumed by peasants in medieval times. But isn't it also true that those peasants' life expectancies were vastly shorter than our own?

1 minute (maybe 1.5 if you take slow tempos).
In just one minute, the characters present the story of Richard Wagner’s 15-hour, 4-opera cycle "The Ring of the Nibelung."

1 minute.
Two friends reacting very differently during the corona virus pandemic. And one wants more than the other is prepared to give.
Note: The original version of this play was written in early 2020, when Covid seemed far less insidious than it does in early 2021. The play has been updated to reflect our current situation.