Holly Arsenault

It’s Seattle. It’s winter. It’s raining. Christmas is 25 days away. Noor, a college professor working nights as a nativity scene security guard, develops a fascination with Lucy, a woman who visits the nativity scene a lot. Like a lot a lot. So much that his co-worker Eileen suspects that she is the one who will steal the baby Jesus, though she really doesn’t fit the profile.

Across the street, Noor’s wife Orli and her business partner Nell are trying to find a niche for their Jewish bakery amidst the holiday hullabaloo, an effort that is about to be complicated by the surprise arrival of Nell’s estranged father, Apollo (dressed as Santa, of course).

Meanwhile, Pastor Luke is facing down his first Christmas sermon under the weight of a huge secret he’s been hiding from his congregation (it’s not that he’s gay—they already know that) and hosting his little sister who has run away from home and, oh yeah, also believes she is the messiah.

Advent is a romantic dramedy for an ensemble cast that reminds us that, even in the darkest part of the year, even in the the most confounding moments in our lives, we are not alone.

Three siblings gather at their childhood home after the death of their father, only to discover that dad is not, in fact, dead. He is something else. Something a little (okay, a lot) stranger. This is a bizarro slapstick comedy about the aftermath of the pandemic.

Marle and Rosanna are not best friends. Actually, they barely know each other. But, over the course of one evening in Rosanna’s attic bedroom, they’ll forge a bond in the flame of Rosanna’s very big problem: going to court to testify in her own custody hearing. This is a story about two very ordinary, weird girls just dealing with how incredibly ordinary and weird it is to be thirteen.

After learning that she has been diagnosed with a devastating, terminal illness, a woman and her partner enter into a pact that is either heroic or abhorrent. The Cut is a story about loving and dying that asks us to consider how far we would go to save the person we most cherish from suffering.

UNDO is the recipient of the 2013 Theatre Puget Sound Gregory Award for Outstanding New Play and the 2013 Seattle Theatre Writers' Award for Excellence in Local Playwriting. It was nominated for the 2013 American Theatre Critics Association New Play Awards and was a semi-finalist for the 2014 Princess Grace Award.

"The premise is so simple and brilliant—what if a divorce were a public event precisely like your wedding, with guests and presents and an officiant and tons of booze?—that it threatens to overpower the show itself. But Arsenault’s sharp wit and ear for honest dialogue, which focuses on realistically mundane details and then telescopes to huge family drama, makes the concept work beautifully. Bring someone to talk it over with after; you’ll surely want to." - THE STRANGER

UNDO takes place in a universe that is exactly like our own with one important difference: in order to get a divorce, you must go through a backwards version of your own wedding ceremony.

We meet Rachel, the "bride," and Joe, the "groom," on the morning of their undoing. As their families gather, it becomes clear that the burden of the occasion is weighing on them all, drawing old wounds and secrets to the surface. A religious proscription that, though alcohol is allowed, food is not, further fuels the group unraveling. While Joe resorts to extreme measures to halt the proceedings and Rachel doubles down on questionable choices, the matriarch enlists the best man as her reluctant confessor, a long-deferred romance is rekindled, and the youngest sister emerges as the family’s moral backbone.

The year is 1932. Kai and Gertie are best friends who've grown up together in a traveling circus. Gertie's mom is the famous trapeze artist Lula Lane, Kai is the famous Boy Wonder, whose angelic voice is said to heal any ailment, and Gertie is...not famous. Kai and Gertie both live in terror of the evil boss lady, Ms. Maudie Blackmore, who keeps Kai--an orphan--in indentured servitude, forcing him to eat table scraps and sleep with the pigs.

One morning when Gertie goes to find Kai, he is gone. And Gertie's in for another shock: Kai's bunk mate, Sal the Educated Pig, can talk--and so can all the other animals in the circus. Sal believes that Kai has been kidnapped, but he knows that there's only one person in the circus who can find out for sure: Goleta the Snake Charmer. Scared, but determined to help Kai, Gertie and Sal visit Goleta, who sends her snakes out to search the vast snake network for information on Kai's disappearance. After a long night of waiting, Virgil the Snake returns with the news that Kai has, indeed, been taken, and by none other than the world's most nefarious sorceress: The Snow Queen.

Gertie and Sal go on a quest to rescue Kai. Along the way, they are captured (and then befriended) by Lou, the robber kid, who helps them talk their way into another circus where they plan to put Gertie up as a magic kid in an effort to tempt The Snow Queen's henchmen into kidnapping her, too.

But here, things go a little sideways. The henchman does show up, but in a surprising form, and Gertie does make it to The Snow Queen's camp, but she finds something very different there than what she was expecting.

In the end, Gertie learns that there's more than one way to be special and that even the most "unmagical" of us can make a difference in the world.

Note: MARVELOUS is based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen". This version was written to be performed by young actors. I am currently at work on adapting MARVELOUS for adult performers.

Freddy is a fast-talking, hard-hearted, gum smacking bookmaker whose only use for love is betting against it—literally. Flip is a wide-eyed rookie with a soft spot for sad sacks and romantics. Obviously, these two could never fall in love.

A fish and a bear find themselves in death's waiting room: she ate him, he poisoned her. Can they work it out and patch things up?

Crunched is a play about sex, coercion, Christianity, toxic masculinity, and keeping up appearances, inspired by the hashtag #blessed.

***This play is currently under development***

Nominee, 2019 Theatre Puget Sound Gregory Award for Outstanding New Play

2050. Somewhere on the West Coast of the United States. A scrappy group of historical re-enactors—orphans of our next civil war—have formed a chosen family. Abandoned by a government that no longer pretends to serve any but the rich, their survival gig is helping to whitewash some of the worst atrocities in American history for audiences of wealthy schoolchildren.

When an unexpected visitor starts camping out in their dioramas, portending a new and growing danger, they’re forced to face their own histories, and contend with the revelation that the woman they all work for is much more than just their boss.

In 2019, Seattle was (and remains) in the midst of one the worst homelessness crises in the nation, with over 11,000 people experiencing homelessness and nearly half of that population unsheltered. This play uses the stories of eight Seattleites whose lives overlap, graze, or bump on each other to humanize and complicate the stories of how people come to be unhoused, how people experience houselessness, and how the well-meaning discourse of those who look at houselessness from the outside (including artists) can sometimes do more harm than good.

This play was commissioned by Mirror Stage in 2019 for their series Expand Upon: Homelessness.

Someone, or several someones, prepare to eulogize the royal children, who were actually adults before they died in a plane crash, which was tragic. A play about power and legacy and human responsibility. Not necessarily a play about anyone we know. Not necessarily not that, either.

This play was commissioned by and published in the second issue of Caffe Cino Magazine.