Full Length (11-20 Actors)

48 pages

14 speaking roles, extras

Here's Romeo and Juliet, along with Hamlet and Ophelia, updated as today's high school campus personalities! Written in couplets, the ferocious rhymes create much of the humor. With its nice mix of characters, the high school faculty will even want to join in the performances. The script also includes many opportunities to insert local information and take jabs at rival schools, making your performance unique to your school and magnifying the fun. Split stage and pantomime scenes help keep the play moving, and there's room for creative staging and slapstick. ...

60 pages

8 m, 12 w. (With doubling: 5 m, 9 w)

The blank page. It strikes fear into the hearts of writers everywhere, but not student Jan Clark. She thinks writing a novel is the way to an easy A in English class. After battling constant interruptions of well-meaning friends and family, Jan discovers this assignment may be more than she bargained for. All is not lost. Jan is visited by a demanding Muse, who summons a group of struggling actors to play outrageous literary genre characters. As Jan works to finish her story, the actors complain about the size of their parts, the inane dialogue written for th...

62 pages

5 m, 7 w

High school outsiders Agatha, Sebastian, Claire, and Ryder have bonded as the After-School Detectives devoted to solving crimes and misdemeanors at Yankum High School. Trouble is, they don’t get the slightest bit of recognition even though they’ve found lost lab animals, returned extorted lunch money, and stopped a blackmail plot. Head detective Agatha (named after her mom’s favorite author) figures if they could just get one Big Case, they’d make a name for themselves. It doesn’t take long! When someone breaks into janitor Willy’s office and steals petty cas...

51 pages

6 m, 5 w, 2 flexible

Life is not so cool lately for Debbie Dawn, the teen starlet whose fantastic movie career suddenly seems empty and shallow. Even her screen boyfriend, Troy, wonders why he must be a teenager in love, especially now that he's 26. The real problems, and the fun, begin when Debbie's no-good manager plots her murder to cover the fact he's lost all her money on shady business deals. An inept hit man gets himself pummeled, knifed, and shot just trying to get near Debbie. Her beach house is more like a madhouse because "TV Sock Hop" host Del Murdock arrives to broad...

59 pages

Ensemble of 7 - 20+

Ben Franklin has gathered his apprentices together to make a play that is the story of his life and how it parallels the beginning of a new country. The apprentices are inexperienced but very eager. One will get to play Ben as a boy, “Little Ben”; another will be the young and daring “Middle Ben.” And of course, “Big Ben” will be played by Ben himself, who will also take a few other juicy roles! The great moments of his life are enacted including the creation of “Silence Dogood,” a wildly popular fictional female letter-writer who mocks all of society and ste...

64 pages

7 m, 15 w, optional extras

Coco is a lovable French poodle who dies of a broken heart after being DOGNAPPED! Every pooch in doggie heaven gets one wish, and Coco’s wish is to return to school on the day of the mid-term dance. Her former owner, a teacher named Steve Ritter, taught Coco to “sing” and he planned to have her entertain. Coco was anxious to make him proud. Keeper, the basset hound in charge of such things, grants the wish but sends two other dogs to keep an eye on Coco as French poodles are inclined to be somewhat frivolous. The two other dogs are Alice, a blood-hound, and R...

76 pages

6 m, 7 w, 5 flexible

Daisy, a somewhat clumsy college student, has been hired by Rose Thornbush to sweep and clean her flower shop, Rose’s Roses. Daisy, however, only took the menial job to get closer to her real goal of floral designer. It’s frustrating because the designs Mrs. Thornbush creates are terrible, as proven by the lack of business in the shop. Daisy, along with three young customers, can design much prettier arrangements. Mr. Hoodwink and Miss Deed appear and devise a competition between Rose’s Roses and the rival Monsieur Prince’s Shop of Floral Designs. The winner ...

48 pages

18 flexible parts, doubling possible

The play takes place during a graveyard shift in a big city police booking room where alleged criminals' mug shots are taken by two cops, a hardened veteran and a rookie on her first night. Some of the "criminals" include an African-American graduate student who infiltrated a meeting of the Klan; a drunken driver who caused a fatal accident; a pistol-packing pizza delivery woman; a husband who helped his dying wife commit suicide; a raving husband obsessed with the talk-show host who has influenced his newly liberated wife; and others. Pathetically, tragicall...

43 pages

5 m, 5 w, 2 flexible, 7 optional

How far will one student go to ensure the safety of his school? Alex Baxter, the student body president, tries to implement a plan to improve the safety of his high school. When his principal refuses to support his plan, Alex stages a phony shooting to show how vulnerable his school is. Several teachers think the squirt gun he is using is real, and he is charged with fourth-degree assault. Because the crime is a misdemeanor, he is tried by a youth court. The action begins as the judge raps her gavel, and Alex's story unwinds through the skillful and often dra...

60 pages

3 m, 8 w, 1 flexible

When the high school principal asks students Dani, Jenna, and Ruby to include new student Lydia in their save-the-planet activities, they’re none too pleased. Dani thinks Lydia is out to trap her boyfriend Dante, whose best friend Gavin is completely smitten with the new girl. The four girls end up trying to clean an old ranger cabin in a nearby state park. But unknown to them, a lot more guests will be secretly visiting the cabin on the same night, all with different objectives – including Dante and Gavin, cat burglar sisters Sissy and Sassy, two bewildered ...

62 pages

2 m, 6 w, 6 flex, plus ensemble, doubling possible

When a devastating earthquake strikes Haiti, age-old fears and superstitions rise to the surface in civilized Port-au-Prince. For Alanis Ducette, the daughter of an aid worker, it brings nightmares of her dead sister and a conviction that zombies are intruding on everyday life. To exorcize her nightmares, she enters the threatening world of Haitian vodou and black magic—and uncovers a mystery no one in her family had dared reveal. About an hour.

65 pages

Approx. 5 m, 9 w, 6 flexible, extras, doubling possible.

Lulu's on a quest to marry Justin by Monday to outwit her former best friend Beth who plans to marry on Tuesday. Lulu hires a novice wedding consultant, whose office is a tiny converted bathroom, and in a frantic few days they deal with a florist who goes bankrupt, a jeweler who insists that she buy the world's ugliest wedding ring, and a wedding cake with "Happy Birthday, Vern" written on it. Even all the chapels are booked, so her ceremony will take place in a bingo hall presided over by the building's janitor. Lulu declares that her bridesmaids keep her ma...

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...

47 pages

4 m, 9 w

Competition, stress, excitement and jealously are but a few of the emotions these characters share as they all undergo the pressure of "trying out." Susan is bringing home a serious boyfriend for the first time, and her teenage daughter feels like she's trying out a new dad. Megan figures the lead in the school play is hers as a senior drama student until Tasha, a hotshot sophomore, shows up for tryouts. Brandon really wants a job at the burger joint where his best friend works, but is he ready for the rigors of a job interview? His friend Erik doesn't think ...

71 pages

7 m, 9 w, doubling possible

Based on the stories by Mark Twain. This collection provides an evening's entertainment, but individual selections can easily be performed independently. "The 1,000,000 Bank Note" (two acts for 5m/5w, 60 minutes) features two wealthy British siblings who bet whether a destitute man can survive a month in London if they give him a £1,000,000 bank note, which he can neither account for being in his possession, nor turn into cash. Two one-act plays, "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" (1m/2w, 20 minutes) and "An Encounter With an I...