THE FLAT AND THE SPARE
by Sean Murphy
Conrad sleeps under a bridge because it’s raining and takes pills because bad dreams keep them up at night. Is that young busker, Whalen, a ghost or a real flesh and blood fiddle player? While Whalen plays a lullaby Conrad shares more than a meal and more than intended. Sunny and Winter are young lovers. Love is an other-worldly presence. Winter struggles with trauma disorder. Sunny struggles with Winter. Love conquers all. But what does Neil Diamond and a “top 40 sing-along from the days of bell-bottoms and LSD” have to do with it all? An anthology of seven short plays about belonging, kindness and surviving trauma.
- Min 6 with doubling. 18 individual roles. 9 Any Gender
- Running Time: 90+ minutes
- Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Order Digital Download (Will NOT download to phones, cannot be printed)
About the Playwright
Sean Murphy writes plays about belonging, kindness and surviving trauma. Past lives include: songwriter, stagehand, high school drop-out, butterfly chaser, recording artist, rejection slip collector, sound designer, workers’ rights activist, homeless services attorney, composer, and blue-collar bon vivant. Sean’s plays exploring the connections between developmental trauma and chronic homelessness have received particular notice. Sider, a full-length play set against the rise of Trumpism, featuring homeless characters, and investigating what it means to belong and to have a home, was commissioned and staged by Idiom Theater in Bellingham, Washington, when Sean was honored as Hotbox Playwright in 2018. Memory is a Thief, a short format ghost story about childhood trauma set in a homeless encampment on a rainy night, has received the greatest attention, being chosen for inclusion in the 2021 Magnetic Theater One Act Play Festival in Asheville, North Carolina, published in the literary magazine, Lost Lake Folk Opera, and chosen as a finalist for operatic adaptation as part of the 2022 Stencils Festival staged by Strange Trace Collective in Boston, Massachusetts. Sean’s unproduced backstage drama, The Rose’s Name, telling the story of an African American musical saving a down on its luck theater by bringing in sell-out crowds, and Dee, the new hand at the theater, awkwardly, after many self-inflicted humiliations, finding belonging while also discovering they are less white and more racist than they had believed, was honored as a Semifinalist in the ScreenCraft 2021 Stage Play Contest, seeking stage plays suited to cinematic adaptation. Sean’s current project in search of development opportunities, The Bureaucrat, examines the author Franz Kafka’s overlooked historic achievements, not in literature, but in governmental reform and public advocacy, and how the author’s own struggles with developmental trauma and neural divergence drove his ceaseless and peculiarly informed advocacy on behalf of survivors of catastrophic injury. The play focuses specifically on Kafka’s work with veterans returning from the trenches of WWI with the newly diagnosed disorder of trauma induced neurosis, and his personal obsession with converting Frankenstein Sanatorium in the Bohemian Alps into a home for these men, many of whom had been made homeless by their condition.
Review The Flat and the Spare.