Comedies

The Frost Mountain Workshop
On the way to a “male-bonding” moose hunting trip in New Hampshire, Kasey Kallahan, a tough New Jersey cop, informs his life-long buddies from Asbury Park – Ricky Rhodes, a rock guitarist, and Tony Torasco, a mob boss’s son just released from jail – that he’s actually enrolled them in the Frost Mountain Poetry Workshop. Kasey claims that he wants to investigate a missing person’s case that took place at the workshop last summer, but he’s also forced to admit that he’s pursuing a young woman, Jennifer Reynolds.

At the poetry workshop, the wiseguy New Jersey buddies encounter a curious menagerie of “poets”: a white rapper from California; a dreamy surrealist; a Goth/Feminist/Deconstructionist from Newark; a sophisticated Caribbean poet; and, of course, Jennifer Reynolds, who’s a Princeton graduate student. Immediately, all kinds of attractions and revulsions take place, leading to Tony’s disappearance and the arrival of his father, mob boss Don Torasco, pretending to be a guest poet. When things have finally spiraled out of control, Kasey reveals that he’s a cop, steps forward, and solves all the mysteries: last year’s murder, the author of the poison pen letters, a secret pregnancy, various bogus identities, a secret marriage, an inheritance, a religious conversion, and an undercover CIA operative.

Ten-Minute Plays

Morons
Edward and John are idiot savant twins living in a sanitarium. They’re both mathematical geniuses, and they’ve established a highly-accurate system, using statistical probabilities, of picking horse race winners. When their unscrupulous doctor tries to manipulate the twins’ abilities for his own benefit, they manage to turn the tables.

Best in Festival: Camino Real Playhouse, San Juan Capistrano, CA, nine performances
Staged Reading: Emerging Artists Theatre, NYC
Staged Reading: Chicago Dramatists, Chicago, IL
Staged Reading: Eight Tens @ Eight Festival, Actors’ Theatre, Santa Cruz, CA
Staged Reading: ATHE Conference, Washington, DC

Cockpit (a new play)
On a cross-country passenger flight, Captain Keith Mitchell and Flight Attendant Kay Campbell have to face the inexplicable fact that their universe has altered, and there’s no place to land the plane.

Staged Reading: Theatre Limina, St. Paul, MN
Staged Reading: International Festival of New Short Plays, Masker’s Theater, The Newburyport Players, ME

Casino
In the eye-in-the-sky room at a Las Vegas casino, Ricky, a surveillance technician, and his supervisor, Renée, observe a customer past-posting at one of the tables. After Ricky refuses to alert the security staff about the cheater, he and Renée come to an agreement about how to deal with the situation.

Déjà Vu
Melissa Naxos, an art authenticator from Athens, is sitting in the gardens of the old Getty Museum in Malibu, California. Unexpectedly, she runs into David Graham, an L.A. District Attorney, who was once her lover. They haven’t seen each other in twenty years, and their meeting isn’t a coincidence.

Staged Reading: Driftwood Players Festival of Shorts, Edmonds, WA

The Judge
On the night of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Judge David Sanders is sitting at a café on the Boston harbor when he’s approached by a publishing executive and his wife. The couple wants legal advice about a case of literary fraud. But who’s really deceiving whom?

Stage Reading: Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD
Staged Reading: Lakeshore Players, White Bear Lake, MN

Audition (a new play)
During her audition for a role in an up-coming production of Othello, Emily Morris performs a short piece that she’s written herself. In doing so, she make serious accusations about the past behavior of the play’s acclaimed director, David Lawrence, who comes up to the stage to deal with the problem.