Community

31 pages

2 m, 2 w, 5 flexible

Leaping llamas! "The Fourth Wall," a play within a play, begins as a murder mystery, but the murder victim won't keel over. The playwright forgot to give the characters names, and a rude audience member keeps interrupting the show. Even the ending of the play stinks! Everyone is supposed to die and then the character Death is supposed to do an interpretive dance. Thankfully, the audience's agony is cut short halfway through when the actors break character because Death accidentally kills the Host and then leaves the set to move his car. Without Death, how can...

53 pages

Flexible cast of 10 to 34

Meet a theatre troupe whose Christmas spirit sparkles far more than their acting talent! In this two-act collection of comedy scenes, amateur thespians are preparing a Christmas Eve production at the community center, but nothing is working right. Meet Jordan, who demands fresh flowers in his dressing room (the broom closet); Nicky, whose Christmas monologue is "enhanced" with all the wrong sound effects; and Red who's more than a little worried that Marley's ghost haunts the backstage. Boss, the director, is about to lose his mind! And it doesn't help that L...

72 pages

5 m, 4 w, 1 girl, 1 male voice-over

KOLD Radio is located in a corner of Carl and Lena's Place for Beer in a small Minnesota town near the Canadian border. Lars Knudsen is the host of a radio show called "Crappie Talk," devoted entirely to ice fishing for crappies. Because it is a somewhat narrow subject, Lars has no listeners, so he loses his only advertiser, Ole's Bait Mart and Deer Petting Farm. Martha Bjorklund, Lars' unrequited love interest, hosts "Book Beat." She has all the listeners, and all the advertisers. Lars has issues with Martha ever since she beat him in the 50-yard dash in 6th...

34 pages

Flexible cast from 18 (with doubling)

The stage comes alive with passengers and crew of the Titanic, speaking to us directly about the disaster. We see the magnificent vessel through the eyes of both the first class passengers and the third class. When Frederick Fleet spots the iceberg, all the officers are called upon to carry out the most dreaded command Capt. Smith ever had to issue: "Get the lifeboats ready!" The ending is an emotional powerhouse as the cast recites name after name of those who survived à and those who did not. Representational sets. (Excerpted from the full-length play, "Tit...

62 pages

4 -5 m, 4 w

“The Importance of Being Earnest” is Oscar Wilde's most perfect, and most popular, play. Since its premiere in 1895, it has given joy to generations of theatergoers. The play is often called a "comedy of manners," because in the world Wilde knew and wrote about, late 19th century British high society, manners were everything. In this play, young Jack Worthing and his good friend Algernon find themselves in a ridiculous situation after their fiancées learn they are coincidentally engaged to the same man. A glorious rendition of mistaken identity, Wilde's play ...

52 pages

4 m, 4 w

Waiting in line? Waiting your turn? You don’t have time! Here’s a comedy in six scenes for those who are time-challenged. In the first scene a desperate woman has only 20 minutes to get to the airport to catch her flight and no matter what her beleaguered taxi driver says or does, they remain stuck in a traffic jam. In a different scene, things start to get physical at a restaurant when a couple with dinner reservations (and theatre tickets!) see others entering and being seated before them. In another scene, a jumpy hypochondriac is forced to wait in a docto...

75 pages

2 - 3 m, 4 w

If you've ever had a job, or wished you hadn't, this office comedy is for you. Even on a good day, tensions run high in the customer service department of The Treasure Chest because of two female coworkers who can't stand each other, and a third who is constantly stuck in the middle. But when a chance for a promotion suddenly appears, all three women find themselves fighting for the job, although they don't all fight fair. Will the promotion go to daydreamer Hope, saintly Bonnie, or snarky Louise? A madhouse free-for-all of schemes, sabotage and unlikely alli...

64 pages

5 m, 4 w, 3 girls

"Dear Editor, is there a Santa Claus?"- a question innocently asked by 8-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon. Christmas was coming and all was right with the world ... until her friends mischievously fill her in on the "facts" about Old Saint Nick. Who could tell her the truth? Not her father, a doctor who is always fighting against old world cures. Not her teacher, who is already fed up with Christmas even though it hadn't arrived. So Virginia writes a letter to the editor of The New York Sun, for her father always said, "If you see it in The Sun, it's so." Virginia'...

60 pages

3 m, 5 w

Six current-day ghost hunters set out to find the truth in the murder legend of Vinney Keller, a naïve teenager who was found dead in her farmhouse cellar in 1903. Historical opinion places the blame on the Keller’s hired hand: Enos Patchett, a lumbering, illiterate man in his 40s, who was with the Keller family for years. But there were other suspects as well. The ghost hunters hope to contact Vinney’s spirit to find out the real story. But for some of the hunters, truth is secondary to hyping their methods and results to increase their media popularity and ...

36 pages

2 m, 7 w, 3 boys, 2 girls, optional extras.

Two ladies in a rest home are arguing. Florence, who has never had a real family Christmas, fantasizes that a family would come along and take her in for the holiday, but of course no family would put themselves out that way. Yes, they would, says her roommate Myrna who has had years of storybook Christmases with her five children. To prove their differing viewpoints, they invent the fictitious Genevieve, a little old lady in a rest home near Myrna's children in Idaho. If one of them will agree to take “her” in, Florence will really believe in Christmas. Dram...

71 pages

4 m, 8 w, 4 flexible

At the end of the 1940s an old theatre building is about to be torn down. As the theatre’s acting troupe is packing up the props, costumes and set pieces, an old magician’s trunk is wheeled onstage. Suddenly, members of the company are turning up dead. Margaret, the director’s assistant, is the only witness to these crimes, and no one will believe her! Can she solve the mystery, or at least convince her fellow cast and crew about the sinister happenings, before the entire company is doomed? And when ghosts from the past mysteriously return, will former victim...

36 pages

4 m, 3 w

Father O'Sullivan is desperate. But who wouldn't be? The bank is about to foreclose on his church buildings and orphanage. He's got young people struggling with questions of love, developers struggling to turn the house of God into the Condos of God, a gangster struggling with the English language, and a bookkeeper who's just a struggle for everyone. Plus, he's hosting a Bingo night as a last chance to raise enough money to get himself out of this mess. So, what happens when his bookkeeper is killed and the money is stolen? It's time for Father O'Sullivan to ...

20 pages

1 m, 1 w, 1 child, 6 - 16 flexible roles

When Thomas hurriedly flushes the deceased family goldfish down the toilet to replace it with a new one while his young son, Lewis, is at school, he receives a knock on his front door. Greeting him is a golden-clad warrior claiming that he and his Viking-like associates knew and fought alongside the deceased Stanley (the goldfish). With his living room now invaded by these unusual warriors demanding to have the funeral in his house, Thomas must make them leave before Lewis and his mother come home. All just because of a dead goldfish. About 35-minute runtime....

34 pages

4 m, 10 w, 3 flexible

Holiday cheer is driving Queen Malvinia crazy! The former evil stepmother of Snow White’s story is now somewhat reformed, and rules over the kingdom of Happily Ever After. But ever since all the traditional fairy tale characters began getting along, demand for the Queen’s various potions on her website have fallen off drastically. So she’s thought of a new way to boost sales. With the help of Cinderella’s stepsisters, and Wolfgang Amadeus Toothful, alias the Big, Bad Wolf, she throws a Christmas Eve party. Though the Three Little Pigs try to keep the mood hap...

68 pages

7 m, 2 w

At the height of WWII with a frantic need to produce food, yet faced with a critical shortage of labor, American farmers were compelled to accept help in their fields from prisoners of war. While farmers’ sons fought men just like them in trenches and tanks in Europe, the presence of these POWs in rural America led to plenty of emotional conflict at home. Isabelle Hunt knows her husband Fred needs help with their beet crop, so he grudgingly allows German POWs from a camp nearby to work the family’s fields. Fred is furious over the food and privileges the POWs...