Community Theatre Full Length

66 pages

5 m, 6 w

Mickey Chigger, a nasty newspaper critic, turns up dead at the Chestnut Hollow Little Theatre’s final dress rehearsal of “The Curse of Infant Isle.” The players, desperate for a box office success, will go to any lengths to avoid a scandal. And that means, yes!, moving the critic’s body from the rest room where he died to the parking lot. That way the late Mr. Chigger will keep his dignity, even thought he doesn’t really deserve it, but even more importantly, the theatre won’t get bad press such as “The play was so bad it killed him!” But just when they think...

64 pages

5 m, 4 w, 6 children

Inspired by the short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving. Whatever became of that pale, lanky school teacher Icabod Crane after a Headless Horseman threw a pumpkin at him? Ichabod is either really angry at the way he was treated or he's dead. Or, because this is Sleepy Hollow, he may be both! This Agatha Christie-like adaptation is set in the present. The first act is a faithful retelling of the story by Washington Irving with a contemporary Ichabod living in secluded Sleepy Hollow that has not changed in three hundred years. Still consi...

52 pages

6 m, 6 w

The ill-fated Crenshaw family reunions are always such disastrous affairs that everyone wishes they were orphans. This year young Teddy takes his new wife, Susan, home to meet the clan and winds up kidnapped - along with everyone else - because no one showed up at the last reunion at Aunt Sophie's and she's ready for revenge. Teddy and Susan, the most normal of the bunch, serve as narrators and occasionally speak directly to the audience. Still, you can't help loving the other family lunatics including Teddy's brother, the non-stop salesman; the sister who is...

66 pages

3 m, 3 w

A young National Guardsman is sent to the small town of Crickwater to kick off a World Peace Day celebration, but finds the city's fathers and mothers ready for anything but peace! He quickly sees it will take more than just a banner and a sheet cake to end the conflict in this eccentric burg. The town's widowed volunteer librarian has had an adversarial relationship with her sister for so long she no longer knows how to do anything but fling sarcastic zingers at anyone who comes close to her. The mayor married the town's most eligible bachelorette, but after...

84 pages

13 m, 21 w. (With doubling 5 m, 8 w. )

TELL-TALE is loosely based on the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe. It is, in essence, Poe’s last confession. It takes place in the Baltimore hospital where he lies in a delirium before his death. Poe is forced to look at his life, his mistakes, his outrageous behaviors, and, in the end, he must try to find peace. This peace in death comes by way of the only peace he had in life -- telling a story. Poe starts his story by casting himself as the dashing, tragic hero, but as the play progresses, his own memories slip from his control, turning on him and forcin...

65 pages

8 m, 7 w, 5 flexible parts

Mrs. Moss and her ever-faithful butler, Rhett, have been struggling to keep Moss Manor open but have finally decided to sell and move on. An unusual assortment of prospective buyers arrive, including ladies from the local preservation society; a toilet paper magnet; and a colorful hillbilly trio who claim they're distant relatives of Mother Moss. As the brokering becomes more competitive, word reaches the inn of an escaped murderer possibly heading this way--none other than Dr. Charles Hoarse, a former guest Mother Moss helped send to jail years ago--though n...

80 pages

3 m, 4 w, 1 flexible, 2 boys, 1 girl

This version breathes new life into the supreme classic by Henrik Ibsen. Of course no one can improve Ibsen's original story of Nora Helmer, living an unexamined life of domestic comfort but being ruled by her husband, Torvald. The foundation of everything she has believed in is put to the test when she is unable to pay back a loan she made in secret to save her husband’s life. She has to contrive ways to pay back the money, for if a solicitor reveals her secrets, the household will be torn apart. Rather than stiff and stodgy dialogue from other translations ...

68 pages

6 m, 5 w

WHAM! The Masked Wonder leaps into the room and fights off four or five henchmen without even wrinkling his cape and then...? Then the Hollywood writers of the Majestic Film Studios have to figure out what he does next. Pop, Tiger Lil, Stu, Howard and Dena are stuck until they meet the latest addition to their writer's stable. "Like any of us are writers," says Howard, "or stable." As the new kid on the team, Freddie has a lot to prove, mostly to his overbearing mother. Does he give up and leave with Mom? No chance! Especially not with Dena around! These two ...

66 pages

2 m, 3 w, 1 flexible

Nora Marsh has lived with the burden of a father who's been branded a traitor. She has tried to keep their inn, the Cat and Mouse, running smoothly, but her father's depression and drinking after his return from the World War II European front has made life difficult. Her life begins to further unravel when a new border, Daniel Cavell, turns up missing. Kate Sherwin, the local Civil Defense warden, and Cavell's mother, Ruth, begin a search which ends when his body is found in the window seat of the inn's living room. Kate has long suspected Nora's father Harr...

63 pages

5 m, 4 w, extras

A Commedia dell'Arte troupe invades a town square on market day and performs a hilarious play. In it, two young men and their servant have come to the town to find love. And they do with two young ladies. But their father, an impoverished man, has plans to marry one to his rich, fat friend, who happens to be the father of one of the young men. The daughter would rather marry the other young man, of course. Meanwhile, a rich, widowed contessa begins to pursue the girls' father. It falls to the faithful servant to arrange all the romances, forcing him to preten...

48 pages

3-4 m, 3 w, 3 flexible, extras

Electra is a young woman who mourns—and ultimately avenges with the help of her brother Orestes—her father Agamemnon’s murder. The story is based on a lost epic of ancient Greek literature, set in a period between Homer’s Iliad and his Odyssey.

This show explores the psychological costs of resisting evil in a society bent on ignoring or even sustaining that evil. Written in blank verse, the language is conversational despite its formality. Poetry best expresses that ...

45 pages

3 Actors or 3-8 Actors

The play tells the story of Davey Herold, a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination who accompanied John Wilkes Booth during the ensuing manhunt. It asks if Davey Herold had a choice in taking part in the assassination and whether or not he actually committed a crime. It moves fluidly from his jail cell where he speaks to his lawyer, to a series of locations during the planning of the assassination, to the history-changing execution, to Davey and Booth fleeing authorities.  Approximately 70 minutes.

50 pages

5 m, 6 w (2 m, 2 w, with doubling)

These three short plays all involve crime and they feature people so rotten, you don't care if they come to a bad end.

In “What It Looks Like” (2 m, 2 w), a trio of thieves sets out to rob a place where one of them is house-sitting. They hope to get away with the theft by arranging the scene to make it tell the story they want it to tell—that somebody from outside broke in. But none of the three is trustworthy, and, it turns out, neither is the owner who hired the house-sitter. Nothing is really what it looks lik...

44 pages

7 m, 11 w. Much doubling possible.

The terrible waste of war never seemed more contemporary than in these quintessential tragedies by Euripides set before and after the siege of Troy. Far from being “historical dramas,” they speak to any generation embroiled in conflict. We see up close and firsthand that war is the most pitiful—and most poetic—of human activities. In the first play, "Iphigenia at Aulis," the Grecian army waits to embark on the conquest of Troy. The army’s commander, Agamemnon, has been forced to offer his young daughter, Iphigenia, as a martyr to ensure victory. Valiant effor...

78 pages

3 m, 3 w, 2 flexible roles

Valerie Simpson, a suburban housewife, has begun seeing visions of murders, kidnappings, suicides and even family members threatened with impending accidents. But the most incriminating vision may concern someone close to Val herself. She hesitates to go to the police because her husband works for a conservative firm ("Wall Street and psychic phenomena don't mix"), and because she has spent some time in a mental institution. Val's brother, a caring neighbor, and a psychic researcher, all offer support and understanding. But why is her husband so violently aga...