Community Theatre Full Length

60 pages

3 m, 5 w, + 2 dancers

Gracie, a singer popular on the retirement-home circuit, dreams of a farmhouse and a future with her long-time partner, George, a workaholic city dweller who takes her for granted. When she inherits a ramshackle farmhouse in Pickle Creek, Gracie leaves George behind to start a new life. She befriends her curmudgeonly neighbor Dot, who has been protecting the property from trespassing metal “detectorists” searching for a legendary horde of gold. With the help of handsome handyman Nate, Gracie begins renovating her home. When George finally follows her to the c...

60 pages

7 m, 5 w

Inspired by the screwball movie comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s, Don’t Give Up Because tells the story of Faye Burntwhistle, a cocktail waitress who is determined to marry a wealthy man. Faye falls in love with the heir to an Italian family fortune, but because he fears that women only love him for his money, she concocts a fiction that she is also an heir to an enormous family fortune. She is surprised when she gets the news that he’s coming to visit her “mansion” in Indianapolis and meet her well-to-do “family.” So Faye recruits several members of t...

60 pages

5 m, 9 w

   Clarise and Daphne Montague have just inherited the Center Stage Theatre which their uncle founded years ago. It closed three years earlier but they plan a grand reopening by restaging the first play ever performed there, a funny but cheesy melodrama. The sisters have contracted a famous acting couple for the starring roles while local talent fleshes out the cast.

   The players quickly learn the Center Stage Theatre has a reputation of being haunted by a Phantom. Most folks think it is the ghost of a young actress who ...

55 pages

3 m, 6 w, 1 flexible

It's 1986 in rural Mississippi and the ladies of Teterboro Trailer Park are in quite a jam after slacker Bobcat is served his just desserts. Meals and motives abound, and alliances with a nosy neighbor and a six-toed cowboy are forged. What follows is a nonstop madcap cover-up full of hilarious hijinks, witty retorts, a church play gone haywire, and "bunco!"

60 pages

2 m, 3 w, and offstage voices

Robert is a retired foreign correspondent and journalist who has returned to his hometown for the first time in fifty years. Mary is retired from the restaurant business, having gone blind late in life. It’s Robert’s first day at the upscale retirement center and it’s Mary’s last, as her son is taking her to live with him in Florida the next day. Over cups of spiked lemonade on the sun-drenched patio they come to the realization that they were high school sweethearts, on their way to matrimony.  Through a series of flashbacks, some touching and some searing, ...

47 pages

2 m, 3 w

Hurricane Kate is set along the Gulf Coast in 1994. The show explores generational trauma, suicide, and the constant search for belonging, with the most dysfunctional kind of family. Tinka doesn’t want to be here. After the fight she and her mother Kate had a couple Christmases ago, she swore that she would only come back to her family home to haunt the place. However, one of the many hurricanes to hit the Gulf Coast every year has come and taken her mother with it. Her three estranged siblings are here too. Ellen, the eldest, is struggling to stay c...

63 pages

5 m, 4 w

A widow, Naomi, and one of her daughters-in-law, Ruthie, have moved to Naomi’s hometown following the death of her two sons in WWII, one of whom was Ruthie’s husband. Although Ruthie is the daughter of a wealthy and prominent family in another city, she wants to stay with Naomi out of love for her late husband and Naomi herself. Naomi accepts her Cousin Julius’ offer of a place to live, and Ruthie accepts a job at his laundry and dry-cleaning shop. At her new workplace she meets Beau, a young Army veteran. Finding himself attracted to Ruthie, he tries to gent...

62 pages

6 m, 10 - 11 w, 5 - 6 flexible and extras

The Templeton family bands together to save their theatre from destruction and to stage their comeback performance of Romeo and Juliet. The chaos grows rapidly as Grandma keeps playing characters from various Shakespeare plays, three women compete for the part of Juliet, the tax accountant tries to hide the embezzlement of theatre funds, and the gangster is determined to get a loan shark’s money. Complicating things even further, the real estate agents are ready to tear down the building and local protestors are fighting to save the thea...

44 pages

1 m, 3 w, 2 flexible, 1 offstage voice

Ever wondered what life in the world’s smallest retirement home is like? Well, then it’s time to visit Harmony Heights. Add four very colorful residents and one extremely versatile (and overworked) employee, and you’ve got a peek into life at Harmony Heights. Retired Army Captain Charlene “Charlie” Freeman, innocent former middle school librarian Vivian Perkins, hippie thespian Shirley Furley, and sarcastic curmudgeon Orville Barrington join their very diverse personalities together to solve a perceived injustice. Everything from an “accidental” intoxication,...

68 pages

4 m, 6 w

"I've had trouble breaking into a house before but this is the first time I've had problems breaking OUT again!" So moans Merle to his partner, Howie. These two minor-league burglars have really met their match this time, it seems. They decided on a house only to find, after managing to get into the place, that it's up for sale and before they can leave, Conrad and Glenda, prospective buyers, show up. Merle figures they have two choices - either pretend to be real estate agents or beat it, making the buyers suspect them and call in the police. Merle begins to...

65 pages

1 m, 8 w (or 9 w)

Veronica Blather is a sweet little old lady who spends most of her time knitting and solving murders, most of which occur whenever she shows up. Understandably she has a problem finding a place to live. When her niece invites her to stay at a retirement home for old knitters, it seems ideal - until one of its members dies from drinking poisoned punch. Who did it? Was it Matilda, the president of the Crazy Quilt Club, or Lydia, who likes to die on Tuesdays? Could it be Clara, who's a compulsive liar, or the wisecracking Sarafina who doesn't trust anybody and c...

69 pages

5 to 6 m, 7 w

Wouldn't it be great fun to direct William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"? That was what Margo Daley always thought...until she is hired to do just that by the Peaceful Glen Memorial Players in their theater, a renovated funeral home. They DO have a couple of conditions, however. Margo has to make the play a melodrama, so the audience will know when to throw the popcorn. And they can't be too loud because the lady who lives under the theater bangs her cane on the stage. Oh, and Margo has to insert the sponsors' names into the play and, by the way, has to take place i...

57 pages

3 m, 6 w

You think it's easy to write a murder? Just ask the Marquis Crossing Ladies Society for the Arts. They decide to do just that, especially when they find out they have to pay royalties to do someone else's play. "Anybody can write a murder," Emma tells the others, and Opaline immediately begins to try to strangle the other members "just to figure out how to do it." The ladies soon find themselves writing an "operatic murder mystery dinner theater with possible audience participation," providing no one sells fruit to the audience. Then two actual convicts on th...

79 pages

6 m, 10 w, much doubling possible

“So you want to commit a murder.” This is the first line in a book purchased by Myron Bernhart. And here’s a guy who knows his books since he’s collected some rare ones and proud of it. That is until his nagging wife, Marge, decides to sell them. He tries to reason with her but is argued down, not only by her but the Civic Arts League, her cronies who, of course, meet constantly at their house. When all else fails, Myron realizes it’s time to take drastic action and plans it all out. Of course, his imagination tends to wander a bit--from German psychiatrists ...

67 pages

5 m, 11 w

You are invited to the most offbeat wedding of the season, where murder takes center stage and all the guests are suspects. Neither the groom's parents nor the bride's former boyfriend want the marriage to happen. The family lawyer has a little something up his sleeve and it might involve an enigmatic guest who dies mysteriously before revealing who she really is. When the lawyer is also murdered, amateur sleuth Miss Peabody conducts an investigation punctuated by the traditional wedding events in which the audience can also participate, such as throwing the ...