Full Length (1-10 Actors)

58 pages

5 m, 3 w (all play multiple roles)

On the campus of a small liberal arts college, one dormitory has served as a home to students for over a hundred years. The play opens in the present when two college freshmen, Jake and Clay, become roommates during the year before the dorm is scheduled to be torn down. Their story is interwoven with a century of college antics and hijinks, hopes and tragedies, as the previous residents act out their moments in the same dorm room. We meet the dormitory's occupants from the early days of the century, the Great Depression, the second World War, the early days o...

56 pages

3 m, 2 w (playing three roles)

Why would Hollywood soap opera star Ava Eveready check into a decrepit inn like Henry Cabot's lodge on a stormy night when the phone lines are down and the only road to town will soon wash out? Because her calculating husband Robert planned it that way so he could poison her. Also along for the ride are Ava's secretary with whom Robert is involved, and Ava's identical twin sister, Eva. But everything about Robert's well-rehearsed plan goes wrong. And bumbling Sheriff J. T. Malden, Cabot's good buddy, is right there to confuse the plot even more when he falls ...

54 pages

5 m (one non-speaking), 3 w

It's a chilly, rainy night at the Stonebridge School for Proper Young Ladies as the English teacher, the home ec. teacher, the athletic coach, the butler, the head of the alumnae and a mafia hit man break into the dean's study to kill him. The trouble is they each find him already very dead with a noose around his neck, two suicide notes in his pocket and a Japanese ceremonial dagger in his back. Now it's Detective Bliss' job to find out who did what, with what, when, and why. Meanwhile, the suspects are trying to bump each other off. And who is that mysterio...

60 pages

Flexible cast of 10 or more

This adaptation has kept alive the monsters and dragons that inhabited the original poem. However, it is told from the point of view of a Scop (Shope), a teller of tales, who had traveled and fought with Beowulf. The Scop is now a prisoner of the Saxons and while a prisoner tells this tale of courage to a priest who eventually agrees to preserve it by writing it down. The tale the Scop tells is substantially the same as the poem we know, however, the Christian ethic is removed and the tale is presented, as the playwright believes it originally was, with the g...

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...

56 pages

2 m, 7 w

Act I is a play rehearsal at the home of one of the characters, while Act II represents the high school stage with all scenery reversed so that the audience sees only what normally would be back stage. All sound effects are visible; prop table, prompters, stage braces, etc. About every problem a director has ever had is encountered. Comedy abounds as each character has his own particular problem with his part. Grammie in particular never speaks a line, but her presence is felt in more ways than one! A plot around and about high school students.

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...

62 pages

Flexible cast minimum 4 (3 m, 1 w) maximum 37 (28 m, 9 w)

Here are ten short views of turn-of-the-century New York through the eyes of O. Henry, the master of the twist ending and chronicler of everyday people from young shop girls with enormous dreams to the ne'er-do-wells with plans for the easy life. Among the people you'll come to know and almost love are: three of the dingiest and laziest musketeers you've ever seen, plotting to relieve a hard-working wife of a whole dollar she earned scrubbing clothes; a young gentleman with a sudden insurmountable problem in giving away a "mere one-thousand-dollar" inheritanc...

60 pages

2 m, 3 w

Beverly Cain has escaped to an island home to recover following a tragic car accident. She had been driving and her mother, famed Hollywood star Fiona Street, had been killed instantly. Beverly, now confined to a wheelchair, blames herself mercilessly. Unfortunately, her sanctuary is disturbed by her estranged husband who has come seeking reconciliation. Or is it for another check to cover his gambling debts? Then an old friend of her mother shows up unexpectedly, complicating what Beverly had hoped to be a quiet weekend getting to know her long-lost half bro...

61 pages

3 m, 7 w

All the ladies at the Thelma Underwood Health Resort are either trying to date Duncan, the new counselor, or plotting how to get rid of Mr. Loggins, a sinister investor with visions of turning the place into a parking lot. Well, most of the ladies are plotting. Francis is busy mugging the cab driver for his Baby Ruth. And just when Duncan makes a play for the secretary, a newspaper reporter shows up to blow the lid off the place. Ulterior motives, hidden secrets and outrageous situations boil up in this all-too-human comedy about what some people will do to l...

49 pages

4 m, 4 w, 1 flex

Failing the literature test, students Brandon, Abbey, Tyler, Hannah, Steve, Kristen, Nick and Lily decide to impress their teacher by performing "Great Expectations." Will Mrs. Eliot go for it, especially after being told by Tyler that he’d rather be at the dentist? With only eight actors, the students dash from one role to another trying to re-enact major scenes to show off their knowledge of the great work. When the plot gets too complicated for the classroom, the students stop and just explain it in their own hilarious terms. And when the action gets to be...

54 pages

3 m, 5 w, 1 flexible

Janet has come up with the excuse of a party to relieve the tensions between their two trigonometry study groups. During the party the kids play a murder game, pretending that their trigonometry teacher is the victim. The students become edgy because of the parallels between their characters and themselves. All calm is shattered when word comes that their trigonometry teacher actually has been murdered! Everyone has a theory about who killed the teacher. Amidst the finger pointing and scrambling for alibis, "evidence" shows up in bookbags, and friends become ...

68 pages

Flexible cast (40+) to a minimum of six (4 m, 2 w)

Beguiled in early childhood by his nursemaid's grim and ghoulish stories, Charles Dickens harbored all through his life a fascination with ghosts, apparitions and chilling coincidence. This play is a collection of eerie tales from the greatest storyteller of all. The stories are a lively mixture of comedy, pathos, and the supernatural and include: "The Signal-man," "The Bagman's Uncle," "The Letter From Afar," "Trial for Murder," "The Queer Chair," "Sisters From Perth," "The Portrait Painter," and "The Lawyer and the Ghost." These stories are perfect as a new...

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 ...

61 pages

7 m, 6 w, extras as desired

First came Judge Wapner, then Judge Judy. Now comes Judge Clapham. But his court is a little more, shall we say, colorful than most. People come to court to bring announcements of car washes, to hold quilting bees and to drop off their mortgage payments. And what starts out as just another lazy day suddenly changes when shyster lawyer E. Z. Miles has the Judge marry two people madly in love...only to find out that the groom is on trial for embezzlement and the only witness against him is his new bride. "A wife cannot testify against her husband, right, Judge?...