Community Theatre Full Length

80 pages

6 m, 5 w, 1 girl

It is 1917, and three years into the worst war anyone has ever seen.  Kate, a young American woman, is approached by an elderly dowager, Mrs. Lillian Merriweather, as they board a transcontinental train from Venice, Italy to Zurich, Switzerland.  Mrs. Merriweather insists she knows of a sinister plot—with vast international repercussions— involving the other passengers. She tasks Kate with ensuring the authorities receive a secret message if she is unable to deliver it herself. When she promptly disappears, Kate teams up with Ida, a young war orphan. Together...

74 pages

3 m, 2 w

In this award-winning farce, famed philosopher (and very self-important!) Voltaire has fled from the court of Frederick II, King of Prussia, with a stolen and highly sensitive manuscript of the King's poems. Determined to embarrass the monarch before the world, Voltaire finds his journey to France halted in the city of Frankfurt by Baron von Freytag, representative of the Prussian King. Before too long, the Baron’s over-eagerness to obey his master’s wishes and the enormity of Voltaire’s ego combine to create utter chaos, which becomes...

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...

67 pages

10 m (doubling possible), 6 w

Elaine has had enough. Ralph, her exasperating, risk-taking husband, has got to go. With the help of Pookie, her younger sister; Anthony “Prettyboy” Ferrari, her father; and Rudy Gambruzzo, her father’s personal assistant, Elaine sets out to stage an accident that will rid her of marital stress. In the space of one morning, Elaine accidentally gets the pool guy and the mailman killed before finally clobbering Ralph. Then she learns that Ralph must be alive that afternoon to sign a vital contract or she will be not only happily widowed, but unhappily bankrupt....

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.

54 pages

4 m, 3 w

Hailed by George Orwell as “the wittiest play” G.B. Shaw ever wrote, Arms and the Man is a true classic in the history of theater, blending social commentary, romantic comedy, fun and lively characters, and crackling dialogue that leaps off the page! We are in the 1880s, and Raina Petkoff is a young Bulgarian woman, worried about the war her father and fiancé are currently fighting. No sooner is she warned that enemy soldiers may be nearby, than Captain Bluntschli, a war-weary enemy, breaks in and holds her hostage. To their surprise, and the audienc...