Playwriting Commons^™

A Dupe Death, Bradley M. Ash

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

'A Dupe Death' is a 10-minute play written by Bradley Ash for LMU's 2026 New Works Festival. The comedy follows a young man who lies to his boss about his mom's death--he is then forced to keep his secret from the two after his boss arrives unannounced to express his heartbreak. The play is inspired by many classic sitcoms, as well as lots of modern Gen-Z-like humor; sorry in advance.

Pouring Grease Down The Sink, Mateo Tomas Hercules Gonzalez

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

Meet two half-siblings named Scab and Trash! One is the embodiment of pain and stress, and the other is the embodiment of disorder and loneliness! Follow them as they come to terms with how they feel about being half-siblings while a certain vistor is present! Fun for the whole family...!

This Play Is About Bugs, Zachary Scrima

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

A dung beetle attempts to talk a mosquito out of entering a human home. A ten-minute play that reimagines the ancient fable 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' in a contemporary context, exploring the nature of lateral violence within a marginalized community.

Egg Tarts For Evie, Hannah Ko

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

A mother and daughter struggle to connect, facing barriers such as differences in language, culture and personality, ultimately proving that love is a compromise.

Should Tomorrow Mark The Start Of Forever?, Rodrigo Zoratto Assis

LMU Theatre Arts Annual New Works Festival

Should Tomorrow Mark the Start of Forever? is a play about family, memory, love, and the strange performance of becoming yourself. The work follows characters who are trying to tell the truth, even when truth becomes painful, theatrical, funny, or impossible. At its center, the show explores how children inherit stories from their parents, and how those stories shape faith, identity, desire, and belonging. The piece moves between humor and emotional intensity, using performance itself as a way to reveal what people cannot say directly. Brazilian culture, love, spirituality, and the fear of disappointing the people we love all live …

Use Your Voice, St. Mary's University Theatre Department

Theatre

Use Your Voice is a play devised by Dr. Grace Edgar and her students in the Theatre for Change & Social Justice course at St. Mary's University during the Spring 2026 semester. Acts: Lower the Ceiling; Did You Love Him?; Dad, Let Me in; Cartel Assassination; Two Towns; Paperball of the Past; Whale Noise; The Alysa Liu Moment; Since I Was Little; Lake House; The Dow Right Now; Cobbler

The Creation And Performance Of Eulogy, Evan Anderson

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

In completion of my senior project for my theatre arts degree at the University of Minnesota Morris, I wrote, composed, and directed Eulogy, performing with myself as Mark, Olivia Emmrich as Amelia, Savana Hauck as the Reverend, and Jennie Odello as the pianist. The following will explore my artistic process: highlighting how I chose my topic, my playwriting and composing process, collaborating with my colleagues, our rehearsal process, the performance, and my reflection on my project.

Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University's performance of Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl.

Performed February 20-22, 2026 and February 27-March 1, 2026 in the Mitchell Theatre at Taylor University.

Eurydice, written by Sarah Ruhl, retells teh familiar myth of Orpheus - but this time, the story unfolds from Eurydice's perspective. That shift matters. Instead of centering heroic rescue, the play centers interior experience: grief as it is felt, memory as it flickers, love as it is complicated by loyalty, doubt, and longing. By allowing Eurydice to be the narrative voice, the play asks us to inhabit loss from the inside rather …

The Reckoning: A Mostly Lamentable Tragedy Comedy Of One Christopher Marlowe (...), Mac F. Mitchell

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

The Reckoning is a play by Mac Mitchell in completion of his MFA in Playwriting from Hollins University. It is a farce set in the Elizabethan Era inspired by the life of Christopher Marlowe and his involvement in the complex world of Elizabethan espionage. After investigating a counterfeiting plot designed to bankroll an assassination plot on Queen Elizabeth's life, he unwittingly implicates himself in the plot.

Marlowe will dropkick the fourth wall and, with a team of crackpot actors, attempt to set the record straight. He most certainly did not have anything to do with it and will prove his …

Backward, Benjamin W. Abbott

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

Backward is a solo show about a man who, when he turns forty-five, starts living backward in time. Every day he wakes up, he has traveled back to the day before the one he just lived and there's nothing he can do to stop it. As he relives his life in reverse, he must confront his failures as a husband and father. Even as he learns the lessons necessary to repair them, those relationships get left behind in the future. He continues moving backward and eventually must confront the most difficult relationship of them all: his relationship with his own …

Rainbows And Shades Of Gray, Lillian I. Savage

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

Rainbows and Shades of Gray is an original musical that explores the complexities of addiction, memory, and grief through a nonlinear, liminal narrative structure. The story follows Aaron, a deceased veteran, father, and musician forced to confront moments from his life as he grapples with the impact of his addiction on his relationships with his wife, Danielle, and daughter, Natalia. Through a series of fragmented scenes spanning past and present, the musical examines the emotional aftermath of trauma and the ways in which love persists despite harm.

Blending dialogue and original music, the piece uses song as a narrative device …

Know Fear: The Culture Of Fear In Community Conversations, Penelope Meredyk, Lotus Porte-Moyel, Fiona Carson, Cosley Bruno, Barrett Clement, Sophia Sproull, Morgan Davis

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

“K(no)w Fear” is an award winning piece of verbatim theater based on word-for-word interviews and collected research that's goal was to cultivate a connective and thoughtful community open to exploring what shapes us all: fear. Our GLI Capstone team gathered the resources for this theater piece by conducting interviews with a mixed demographic of people we know as well as strangers on the street, asking questions like: “How do you feel about death?” and “If fear were a place for you, where would it be?” With consent, their answers were used to build an immersive, verbatim theatre piece where actors …

Dear Vincent, James H. Stone Iv

Playwriting (MFA) Theses

Dear Vincent is a play written for J. Harvey Stone’s MFA in Playwriting from Hollins University. The play is inspired by the life of Vincent van Gogh and his letters with his brother Theodore. The artist Vincent van Gogh was an avid writer to his brother Theodore. This play is inspired by, but not dictated by, the letters Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother. Connected by hymns in Act I and by the news of the 1980s in Act II, this Vincent lives through his letters as well but ultimately has to make a decision regarding this life in …

Taking Up Space: A Love Letter To Healing, Heartbreak, And Hairspray, Hailee Amerson

Honors Program Theses

An Honors Thesis disguised as a one-woman show, "Taking Up Space: A Love Letter to Healing, Heartbreak, and Hairspray" is a cabaret revue-style performance. Through original monologues, and songs from the musical theatre canon, this cabaret takes audiences through where plus-size women fit (or do not fit) in the theatre industry. The piece takes a sociological perspective, beginning with the history of beauty and health standards, while asking audiences to confront their own views on what it means to be "fat". Interspersed through the show is my own story of growing up fat in an industry where thin is “in”, …

Dodgeballs And Dragons: Gamified Live Theatre In The Service Of Community Betterment, Teddy Mcpherson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis qualifies and documents a new genre of interdisciplinary, interactive theatre called Dodgeballs and Dragons. It covers a brief history of Dungeons and Dragons and Theatre of the Oppressed (the two foundational works for the new genre) as well as previous uses of D&D as a form of theatrical entertainment. After establishing the precedence used to create this product, the rest of the thesis breaks down how to write, lead, and play these shows on a regular basis. The document culminates in collected data providing concrete evidence for the future of the form and its many applications.

Rewriting Hell: Adaptation, Hope, And The 'American Dream' In Practice-As-Research, Karli Jean Lonnquist

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Contemporary theatrical adaptation involves deconstructing, reimagining, and rewriting historical plays for modern audiences. Adaptation appropriates theatrical conventions, changes the lens through which the audience may view the play, and offers new entry points into thinking and practice. Adaptation asks, “why this source as theatre now?” and proposes that history provides tools for engagement with contemporary issues. By employing a Practice as Research methodology, which positions creative processes such as script development, rehearsal, or play development as research methods, I investigated the art of historical adaptation. I adapted No Exit, a 1945 existentialist play by Jean-Paul Sartre, into a new play …

Shrek: The Musical, David Lindsay-Abaire, Jeanine Tesori

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University's performance of Shrek: The Musical with book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire and music by Jeanine Tesori.

Performed November 20-22, 2025 in the Mitchell Theatre at Taylor University.

Shrek is, on the surface, a whimsical fairy tale full of comedy, color, and charm. But beneath the humor lies a story about seeing and being seen—about belonging, forgiveness, and the quiet courage it takes to live authentically in a world that too easily labels and excludes. “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am …

Julieta Lanteri And Political Caricature: The Democratic Reach Of Commercial Theater And The Expansion Of The Public Sphere, Buenos Aires, Argentina, Kristen Mccleary

International Journal on Responsibility

In the early twentieth century, popular theater in Buenos Aires appealed to a diverse audience, including immigrants, men, and women from all social classes, workers, as well as the most elite members of the oligarchy. By analyzing one work in particular, La doctora de Lantera, by Armando B. Rillo and Victor Dolard, one of the most well-attended plays of 1919, this article focuses on how theater reveals the social tensions surrounding the role of women in society during an era of dramatic change. It also shows how theater provides an outlet from which to identify, negotiate, and, at times, …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University's performance of The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams.

Performed September 25-28, 2025 in the Mitchell Theatre at Taylor University.

At its heart, The Glass Menagerie is a story about the grace that vulnerability makes possible. The Wingfield family—Tom, Amanda, and Laura—are fragile, flawed, and fiercely human. Their lives are marked by disappointment and desire, yet Williams invites us to approach them with tenderness. Laura’s glass animals, so delicate and beautiful, are not just a metaphor for her own inner world but for the human spirit itself—easily broken, but capable of reflecting light in ways that …