43 STAGES OF GRIEVING: A COMEDY tells the story of a pregnant, dying robot and a human who attempted to live forever. Like almost anyone who has grieved, they can both attest that the idea there are only five stages of grieving is hilarious. But with a presumably incoming infant on the way, they can’t sit around and eat cheese all day (there are of course stages of grief for both hard cheese and soft cheese). Together they try to make plans for an unknown motherhood, kind but complicated technology, and a future without them. 

This is a comedy for a grief saturated world.

• Cast Size: 3W or 3W 1M
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

An extended one act dark comedy that looks at an ill-fated romance between two teachers that evolves and dissolves over the course of a school year.

Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Cast Size: 2M 2W

Running Time: 60+ minutes 

Abigail feels like an outsider, and for good reason – she claims she is from another galaxy, here only to study humans. After her unusual behavior intensifies, her parents place her in a psychiatric facility for adolescents. Despite her best efforts to isolate herself, Abigail forms a connection with another patient which leads her on a journey of self-discovery. As she begins to listen and share, Abigail gains powerful insights about belonging and the complexities of being human. “Abigail, For Now” is a poignant and surprising exploration of mental health, identity, and the search for connection in a world that often feels unfamiliar.

• Cast Size: 3M 5W 1Any
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Cash-strapped Al is working way too many hours and his health is on the line. Chronically unemployed wife Claire is harboring a debilitating secret. Disaffected daughter Ashley is failing to launch. Meanwhile Aunt Barb is besieged by Tea Party terrorists at the abortion clinic where she works and Uncle Art – confounded by an aggressive influx of Brooklyn hipsters – threatens to pack up his landscaping business and leave town. When Barb discovers Ashley’s got an illicit side hustle, Ashley makes a shattering revelation. From the shock waves of the 2008 financial crisis to the storm surge of Election Day 2016, an American family struggles to keep their heads above water. When did it get so hard just to get by?

• Cast Size: 2M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

A romantic comedy about old friends, unrequited crushes and a Scandinavian sex curse. Charles’ third wife has just informed him she’s leaving. As he reels from the news and the reason she gives, he spends a weekend with his best friend Jack and their college friend Betsy, Betsy, who dabbled in witchcraft, reveals a secret from their college days that could be the reason for Charles’ failed relationships. Can Betsy help Charles win back his wife? Maybe, with the help of a Finnish coven.

• Cast Size: 2M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance  

Each play in Birth, Death and Bourbonis a two-hander where the characters seem to be mismatched, but ultimately give each other exactly what’s needed for their particular version of reconciliation.  In “Natural”, (definitely not identical) twin sisters Erica and Maggie are on the verge of big life changes.  Perfectionist Erica is two weeks past her due date, and Maggie – an itinerant acupuncturist and massage therapist – arrives to help her get things rolling.  In “Undiscovered Country”, long-married couple Elizabeth and Teddy have always seemed like an odd pairing, but they actually complete each other.  When Teddy passes, Elizabeth has to learn to go on alone.  And in “Red in the Morning”, Evan has gone off the grid, and no one knows why.  When their abusive father dies, Mitch – Evan’s older, tougher brother – has to track Evan down.  Mitch brings bourbon.  Both comic and poignant, these plays explore the mysteries of birth, death and a stiff drink.

Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Cast Size: 3M 3W

Running Time: 90+ minutes

Female breasts – entrancing, bothersome, nourishing, aggravating, healthy, unhealthy, hidden, flaunted! A playwright interviews diverse women and two breasts for their personal stories. A girl is furious when her parents don’t give her implants for her 16th birthday. A New Yorker doubles down at the gym when her breasts refuse to defy advancing age. Two new mothers come to grips with nursing. A mammogram is experienced from the P.O.V. of the breasts. Reconstruction after cancer surgery is experienced by a delightfully upbeat young woman. And much more. A patchwork quilt of monologues and duologues touching on the universal through the personal.

• Cast Size: 2-16 actors (Flexible Casting)
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Revenge is a dish best served… period. Cold, hot, or with those little puff pastry hors d’oeuvres everybody loves… Just as long as Cheaters regret it. People don’t typically get retribution after being cheated on… until now… Now, you can call Kat Clyne to carry out her own brand of justice on adulterers. And she confesses all her steps – and hilarious missteps – in a court-ordered therapy session with Dr. Akbar. As we peel back the layers of how she became THE CHEATER EATER, we meet Cheater Zero (Cave Maverick), a blast from her past. Her mother (Mrs. Clyne) not only pits them up against each other to compete for the reins of her company, but she also forces them to work together to break a story about a local politician and his wife (Mayor & Mrs. Bowen). While working together, Cave surprises Kat in more ways than one and is the only one who sees her for who she really is. But will forgiving a former cheater make her lose more than just her heart? The Cheater Eater eats away at the question: can cheaters really change?

• Cast Size: 4M 5W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

This Christmas, treat yourself to CONVERGENCE (A Different Christmas Story), a story that serves up a dollop of mystery with your figgy pudding. Expect the unexpected when Tilly York hosts her annual Christmas gathering, facing off with her memories of happier holidays. Family tensions simmer just below the surface until they reach the boiling point. Come to Cropton, UK, population 321, where a Christmas convergence of family, strangers and secrets cross paths with synchronicity, and changes everything. 

• Cast Size: 3M 2W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

It’s 1976.  The Bicentennial.  Consciousness Raising.  The Bionic Man.  In a suburb of New York City, three women are waging their own personal revolutions. Joyce is just turning forty, and she doesn’t seem unhappy about it.  She’s got a big house, an understanding, older husband, a couple of college-age kids.  She’s charismatic, confident, a perfect hostess, and completely unfulfilled.  Nina, a decade younger than Joyce, with a small child, is new in town.  She’s overeducated and overanxious, but the valium her psychiatrist husband is prescribing for her should help with all that.  When Joyce’s welcome wagon arrives at Nina’s door, the women hit it off.  They embark on an increasingly intimate relationship.  This is nothing new for Joyce, but for Nina, it changes everything. Meanwhile, Joyce’s 18-year-old daughter – Stacia – is just starting college.  But she already knows everything, including what’s best for herself and everyone else.  Away from home for the first time, Stacia is experimenting with the power of her own sexuality, and she has nothing like the constraints her mother had at that age.  Both very funny and very serious, DAUGHTERS of the SEXUAL REVOLUTION explores the kind of courage it takes to be faithful – not just to your partner but to yourself – especially when you’ve never had a role model for that kind of thing.  

• Cast Size: 3W 3M
• Running time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

The year is 1957 in Camden, Arkansas and Maud Crawford has vanished without a trace. She was a formidable woman, the first female lawyer in Arkansas and no one can figure out what happened to her. A chorus of townspeople speculates on what could have happened. There is no shortage of suspects in the sleepy town, but the mystery remains unsolved. This play is very loosely based on true events and small-town gossip. Production History: Tyler Civic Theatre (Winner of 2017 new play festival Leon Junior High (1st place winner Middle School UIL One Act Play) Highland Park, Amarillo (Middle School UIL One Act Play Entry) Byron P. Steele High School (Alternate to Area, UIL High School One Act Play 2023) Note: Casting is very flexible

• Cast Size: 5M 5W 5NB
• Running Time: 40 Minutes
• Royalty Rate: $40 per performance

It’s 150 years in the future and only women exist. A couple (an artist and a geneticist) are pregnant with their first child and have gathered the family together to announce the good news. Just before the guests arrive, the couple learns some earth-shattering news about the baby that may change the course of history. 

• Cast Size: 7W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

It’s the Roaring 20s, and sugary sodas like root beer have been outlawed by the outrageous 18 ½ Amendment. Detective Holly Abel is short on cases, but when she reads about a suspected ring of soda smugglers operating in town, her toes begin to tingle. Then, a group of strangers whose stories sound very familiar barge into her office, begging her to find their lost mothers, and she knows her time has come to earn some clams! Is it a lot of phonus balonus, or are the Brothers Grimm headed to the big house? Will Holly & Opal figure out why the mothers are always missing in fairy tales? If we know our onions, this delightful ensemble play for young performers and family audiences is the bee’s knees! Holly Abel is root beer barrels full of fun for casts and audiences of all ages, so get on the trolley with Holly, Opal and a gaggle of fairy tale characters!

• Cast Size: 6M 18W 3NB
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

We first encounter Edna at ninety-six, alone in her apartment in the small town where she has always lived. Like many others her age, she is awash in memories, appearing to await the end of her life. As we meet her best friend Margaret, and travel back in time through a handful of moments from Edna’s past, her very human journey unfolds. With good humor and the strength it takes to survive nine decades, Edna reminds us everyone’s story is full of dreams, some met and some lost, challenging our perception of the elders among us.

• Cast Size: 2W
• Running Time: Over an Hour
• Royalty Rate: $50 per performance

The empire has been in turmoil since the late empress was tragically eaten by a bear. The emperor has gone mad. A mysterious bandit is on the loose, robbing the tax collectors and returning money to the poor. The emperor’s evil sister Jezebeth is scheming to take over the empire. The advisors fight all the time, and the guards are morons. But when a brother and sister team of con artists pose as tailors promising to sew an amazing outfit for the Emperor’s birthday, Princess Primrose’s troubles really begin. This fast moving retelling of The Emperor’s New Clothes is fun for any age group!

• Cast Size: 3M 7W 11NB
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Everyone in mid-century Dublin knows Mamie Cadden — she’s the boorish woman who motors around the city in her bright red sports car. She also happens to be a notorious backstreet abortionist who profits off the secrets of Dublin’s most powerful men. When the body of pregnant Helen O’Reilly is found dumped outside of Mamie’s flat, the infamous nurse is sentenced to hang. Can a Divine intervention save Nurse Cadden’s soul before it’s too late?

• Cast Size: 1M 4W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Maya was eager to start her freshman year in college, but one night in September changed the landscape of her life forever. Plunged into an unexpected emotional turmoil, she found herself grappling with feelings she had never foreseen. Despite the presence of her supportive friends, can Maya navigate this darkness? Or will the secrets of that fateful night ultimately consume her?

• Cast Size: 3M 4W 1NB
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

PERMAFROST is the third in a Climate Change Cycle of Plays which opened with “Starlight” and went back in time to “1969”; we find The Scientist in a room overlooking the Atlantic in the company of a Cat, poring through research and documents going back to the mid-19th Century which may hold the solution to climate change and extinction.

• Cast Size: 1-2W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Valerie’s world is turned upside down when she learns she is being unjustly fired by St. Sebastian University. As she attempts to save her career from freefall, she discovers the corruption running rampant among her conservative, religious male colleagues. Meanwhile, Valerie’s star student, Marina, is lured into sex work to pay her tuition. As the costs become too high to bear, Valerie and Marina find the seedy underbellies of their career paths exposed, but which profession is more corrupt isn’t entirely clear. As religion, sex, and politics collide, both women must answer the question: how much should be sacrificed for a job?

• Cast Size: 3M 4W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

RAW AND OTHER SHORT PLAYS by Victoria Z. Daly

Cast Size: Flexible

Running Time: 90+ minutes (Full Version), 10-minutes (individual plays)

Royalty Rate: $75 per performance, $10 for individual plays

A collection of one-act dark comedies, dramedies and absurdities by award-winning playwright Victoria Z. Daly. Includes the titles RAW, HIGH WATER LINE, FAR NORTH, CIRCLING THE GLOBE, BOTTOM OF THE ORDER, WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT (#AFTER THE BANS,) and FINAL REST. By turns intimate, unsettling, politically pointed, and hilarious, these plays for 1-3 actors feature humans desperate to connect with each other. Grieving, clueless, wounded and wounding, the characters often find themselves ensnared in over-the-top physical situations. See why these plays, vows one producer, make the audience “squirm, gasp and laugh all in the same breath.”

Three sisters journey back to the place that has been their biggest source of contention – Roswell, New Mexico. To the oldest, it is a place of wonder. But to the others, it brings only frustration. Perhaps, though, this trip will be different. Perhaps this time they will find something truly out of this world.

• Cast Size: 3W
• Running Time: 60 minutes
• Royalty Rate: $40 per performance

Time does not heal all wounds. Best friends Jessica and Sam each have scars from their pasts that have not healed. Jessica has never been able to get past an extremely damaging romantic relationship from her formative years in college, while Sam has been ignoring a painfully fractured relationship with her sister. After years of denial, an impromptu lunch date and a surprise overnight guest forces them both to confront these wounds and face what they didn’t want to see head on.

• Cast Size: 2M 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

History remembers Nero as one of the most bombastic and cruel emperors of the ancient world. His tutor and later advisor, Seneca, the stoic philosopher and dramatist, takes drastic measures to reign in the emperor, and in his quest to save Rome, Seneca writes some of his most enduring plays. Focused on the power and failures of the political insider, Seneca and the Soul of Nero looks back to ancient Rome to hold the mirror up to modern American politics.

• Cast Size: 11M 6W 1Baby Doll (Doubling Possible)
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Seven charming and sometimes fiery Southern lesbians volunteer to plan the first LGBTQ prom for the local high school students. The twenty plus years of life since college have not dulled the jealousy and unrequited love of a few of the old friends. A successful sorority sister returns to town determined to romance the woman she has loved all of her life. Grief and mourning are on full display as the lovers expose their separate pain. As prom night arrives, plans unravel, infidelities are revealed and these women are forced to confront their fears. The first dance commences at dusk on the worn floor of the café in hopes that dreams really can come true.

• Cast Size: 7W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

A woman lawyer, Bayley, and her girlfriend, Shue, a struggling classical musician, see their relationship teeter as Bayley’s mother falls to Alzheimer’s and the looming memories of her own unloving marriage to a lighting scientist. In stylized storytelling with the World’s Fair in the background and the WNBA in the foreground, Bayley seeks to recharge her life and chart a new path.

• Cast Size: 3W
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

In 13th century Mali, Sundiata, a physically handicapped young survivor of violent political intrigue, has been prophesized to become Mali’s greatest king.  It is a tale of good overcoming evil.  The story of his recovery, his exile, and his evolution as a great leader is presented through dueling griots, traditional African storytellers and preservers of African history and traditions.  As the principal griot observes, “There are usually at least two sides to any story.”  He traces the legend of Sundiata, enacted by the characters in the play, with interruptions from a second griot presenting a contrary version.  They duel over episodes from Sundiata’s sickly childhood to his climactic victory over his evil rival, Sumanguru, at the battle of Kirina.

• Cast Size: 14M 4W Many ensemble roles, doubling suggested
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

A play about philosophy, love, and saving the Universe: Set in a desolate post-apocalyptic land called “the Universe” characters Hannah (a young woman philosopher from “the Beyond”) and Vlad (an older male teacher from “the Beyond”) come together to “help” the people of the universe: the Citizens and the Givers. Six actors are required to play the Citizens and Givers, each role can be played by any gender. All roles can be played by any race or ethnicity. Centers female characters. Dystopian drama that is experimental, fantasy, and political. A distinctly original take on the legacy of totalitarianism. 

• Cast Size: 1M 1W 6 Any
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Twelve short interconnected plays based in modern day France at Christmas time. Twelve stories set in Paris, Brittany, Normandy and Provence which weave together wild boars and hunters, swans on the Seine, partridges in plum trees, lonely lovers and more… 

• Cast Size: 2M 4W w/ Flexible Casting
• Running Time: 60+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

High-powered film executive Caroline Davis is on her way to a very important meeting on the Oregon coast. Preoccupied with phone calls, she takes a wrong turn and ends up stuck in the mud, on an old logging road. Thunder rolls. Cell service drops. Rain begins to pour. But there’s a light, in the distance. A cabin in the woods. Perfect! Caroline jumps out of the car and hurries off, through the rain, in search of a phone, unaware that her life is about to change forever, thanks to a mysterious old woman who lives in the cabin. Her name is Violet Underwood, and she’s the last living resident of Valsetz, Oregon – Population 1. 

• Cast Size: 2W
• Running Time: Over an Hour
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

The Thanksgiving gathering in this small apartment is no Norman Rockwell picture. The vegan teenager in the family is horrified that a “poor bird” is roasting away in the oven. There’s not enough food, but two uninvited guests manage to wangle their way in for dinner. Another couple said they had “news” to share and the family figured they’d hear about the upcoming birth of a child. Wrong. When the turkey catches fire and folks decide to take off for roomier pastures, an environmental accident occurs and everyone must “shelter in place.” Can it get any worse?  Oh, yes indeed.

• Cast Size: 4M 6W 1 ANY
• Running Time: 90+ minutes
• Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Wickedest Woman tells the true story of Ann Trow Lohman, a female doctor (midwife and abortionist) in New York City throughout the 1800’s. Known as Madame Restell, when Ann began performing abortions in 1838 they were legal in the United States and when she committed suicide almost 40 years later at the end of her career, they were illegal. Madame Restell became the face of evil that the anti abortion movement used to rally people to their cause. A gender bending cast of 7 actors tells this epic story of Ann’s rise to notoriety and her struggle to keep her life intact as the scrutiny and even physical danger became ever more intense.  

Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

Cast Size: 3M 4W (Flexible Casting)

Running Time: 90+ Minutes