CONTACT: JudyKwrites@aol.com

WEBSITE: www.judyklass.com

GENRE: Science Fiction Comedy Drama

CAST SIZE (M/F): 5M, 4F

LENGTH:  Full length

SUITABLE FOR ALL:    Ages 13+

This is a reimagining of Moliere’s Tartuffe, set in a Christian Fundamentalist post-apocalyptic America. The population has been decimated by the super-strain of the Avian Flu – stolen from a lab, probably by Fundamentalists. Oral, a rich businessman, has opened his home to a former megachurch pastor, disgraced in sex scandals: the Reverend Chadwick Pusser. Oral’s son Daniel cannot be free with Tyler, the guy he loves, with Pusser around, planting hidden cameras. Daniel reads SF alternate histories and suspects his own world is an aberration. 

He asks the website oracle.net for the original draft of Moliere’s play Tartuffe – the one that was banned, before Moliere watered the play down. Daniel thinks if he can get a pdf of the original, the universe will shift back to what it should be. Tyler’s older brother Vaughn is engaged to Daniel’s younger sister Mary-Anne – but Oral decides to force Mary-Anne to marry Reverend Pusser, horrifying her. Pusser tells Oral to control his women; he cites Lot as the kind of upright man the Lord smiles on. Oral won’t listen to truth after Reverend Pusser makes a pass at Oral’s wife Alma, or hear the outspoken housekeeper, Doreen, who denounces Pusser and tries to get Mary-Anne to stand up for herself. Daniel rejects a pass from Pusser also … and it seems that there is no end to Pusser’s hypocrisy and to Oral’s gullibility … but the people who see through the evangelical con man keep on fighting for truth, and for change.

This play is published by Next Stage Press and one needs to apply to them for a license to produce it. It is a quirky post-apocalyptic play in verse that riffs on Tartuffe by Moliére. In some ways it is a sex farce … but it is also a reflection of our dystopian nightmare world … https://www.nextstagepress.com/after-tartuffe/

GENRE: Drama/Murder Mystery

CAST SIZE (M/F): 4M, 2F

LENGTH:  Full length

SUITABLE FOR ALL:    Ages 13+

Dennis Kadman has been caring for his brilliant, erratic, disabled older brother Michael in Dennis’s NYC apartment. Because Michael was an addict, the court placed him in Dennis’s custody, against Michael’s will. Detective Rodriguez wants to know if Dennis gave Michael the drugs that led to Michael’s death by overdose. Since Dennis was focused on keeping Michael alive, however self-destructive he was, Dennis is looking for other suspects. A lot of the play happens in flashback, showing Dennis, his fiancée Julie and others interacting with Michael in his final days

Cell was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award, and is published by Concord Theatricals. https://www.concordtheatricals.com/p/836/cell-klass

It was first produced at a mystery festival in Kentucky.

GENRE: Drama, Murder Mystery

CAST SIZE (M/F): 4M, 5F

LENGTH:  Full length

SUITABLE FOR ALL:    Yes

This is not a musical; it’s a play that contains some songs and song fragments, since it is set at a songwriting seminar in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. 

Talented, charismatic, cruel and abrasive Kyle, a country star, alienates a group of people who have come to learn to write country songs – and when he turns up dead during a blizzard, with no phone or email access, the others look at each other and wonder whodunit. This play won the SOPS competition and was produced at the Shawnee Playhouse in Pennsylvania. 

It was produced online during the pandemic by Quarantine Players; they released a podcast version and a Zoom recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX-Z_wjjRSc&t=1795s

Published by Lazy Bee Scripts in the UK, and they handle licensing. They can also provide access to recordings of the songs and song fragments, and sheet music. (Some can be sung acapella.) 

https://www.lazybeescripts.co.uk/Scripts/script.aspx?iSS=3658

It’s good if a few people in the cast can play guitar a little.

GENRE: Comedy drama, Murder Mystery

CAST SIZE (M/F): 3M, 5F (doubling is possible for one male actor)

LENGTH:  Full length

SUITABLE FOR ALL:    Yes

Theatre people have gathered for a mystery festival and stay at a bed and breakfast in a small town in Maine. Difficult but talented director Trevor Connelly runs things. He wants a writer to “dumb down” her play for the locals, gets accused of #MeToo bad behavior in the past – and has alienated a number of people when he turns up dead. 

The local cop assumes he has died of natural causes. Some think he may have been murdered, since the body was found with a tea cozy on its face. But if someone killed Trevor – who was it, and why? 

This play has had a number of readings, virtual and onstage, including two fine staged readings with Script2Stage2Screen in Rancho Mirage, California: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=rMS9BaXABYM&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=AlanCarvalho

GENRE: Drama

CAST SIZE (M/F): 4F

LENGTH:  Full length

SUITABLE FOR ALL:    Yes

Boots Gallagher was a child star on a sitcom called Pebbles McKinley. Now she is in mid-life and has a home in Hollywood, which she shares with Sofía, her Nicaraguan housekeeper who is also her friend, and with Allison; Allison is Boots’s doctor and lives in her pool house. Sofía has been turning Boots on to Nicaraguan poetry, like the work of Rubén Darío. 

All three women are on hand when Boots’s old sister Dori, who has lived in Colorado for the last eight years, comes to stay with Boots after a bad romantic breakup. Dori acts protective of her sister, the former star, and she sharply questions Sofía and Allison, suspecting them of using and manipulating Boots. Allison and Sofía are equally wary of Dori, with Allison pushing back against Dori’s questioning, and asking pointed questions of her own. Dori has ideas about a show that she and Boots could write together – a sitcom, a drama, a reality show, or maybe it could be a film? It would be about a former child star, Boots or a fictionalized version of her, trying to navigate the adult world and her “has-been” status. Dori seems to think Boots was permanently damaged by the years she spent mugging and being adorable; now it's hard for her to live among grown-ups. Allison has cynical, acerbic things to say about how Dori may be trying to use her formerly famous sister to get ahead. 

Boots is warm toward Dori in some moments, and she tries to diffuse the tension in the room – but she is also emotionally volatile, and she goes through some quick changes. Boots goes off to take a nap, and the other three women continue to talk … Until there is a problem with waking Boots up from her nap. Dori has accused Allison of being a “Dr. Feel-Good” type, the kind of doctor who writes all kinds of prescriptions: the kind involved in the death of an Elvis Presley, a Prince or a Michael Jackson. But Allison points out ways in which Dori may be implicated in what has gone wrong – ways in which, as Sofía says, all four women may be implicated.

GENRE: Science Fiction Comedy Drama

CAST SIZE (M/F): 1M, 1F, 8 GN (some doubling is possible)

LENGTH:  Full length

SUITABLE FOR ALL:    Yes

Viridian and Teal are therapists in a future society in which people are no longer consistently either male or female. Fetuses are treated by nanobots in utero with genes from hermaphroditic fish. Children mature without fixed genders. Upon reaching adolescence, people learn to become male or female, physically, or to express in other ways along a spectrum. Viridian and Teal evaluate a couple who have lived as a man and a woman for years, and wish to be “frozen” in those genders. The therapists must determine if this binary couple is sane. 

Viridian cannot understand why anyone would want to go back to the Dark Ages before gender fluidity, when there was so much more crime, cruelty, and more messed-up relationships, mental illness, addiction ... Viridian loves Umber, who counsels Viridian to keep an open mind. Umber has stress at work also, directing a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on a big theater’s mainstage. Hibiscus, who hired Umber, wants to impose certain rigid, dogmatic interpretations on the production. Partly to distract Hibiscus/keep Hibiscus busy, Umber writes a play for the theater’s black box in which actors playing Viola and Olivia in Elizabethan times are girls disguised as boys (or, in the case of Viola, a girl playing a boy playing a girl playing a boy) and fall in love with each other as they rehearse scenes from Twelfth Night. Umber writes in a role for Hibiscus (a foolish Malvolio figure) as Will Shakespeare, watching them rehearse, moved by their androgyny as Shakespeare was moved by the young man in the sonnets.

GENRE: Drama

CAST SIZE (M/F): 3M, 1F

LENGTH:  Full length

SUITABLE FOR ALL:    Ages 13+

Gary hopes to re-connect with his estranged older sister Kay, who teaches at a small college but is visiting his city for an academic conference. Gary lives with his lover – Kay’s best friend from school: Eytan. Now, Eytan and Kay hate each other. 

Kay is married to Curtis, who is black. Eytan and Gary write humorous songs which Gary sings as a female character called Ovaria Strange. Kay tells them she considers drag to be misogynist: a caricature of women – a kind of minstrel show. Eytan is incredulous at how she seems to be dismissing transgender people and others. He considers Kay a humorless feminist spouting theory, ridiculously teaching African-American studies when she’s white, (which is also a kind of minstrel show, he argues). 

Low-key Gary and Curtis cannot stop Eytan and Kay’s battles, which continue after Curtis and Kay watch Gary perform in drag at a club. Issues of possible antisemitism come into the mix along with Gary and Kay’s relationships with their difficult, cold mother. Each character faces the audience at some point, and speaks from the heart. Everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong.

This play had a strong reading online during the pandemic, presented by Quarantine Players. They released a podcast version, and a Zoom recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtOxS1OIVWw&t=1195s

GENRE: Drama, Science Fiction

CAST SIZE (M/F): 2M, 1F, 1GN

LENGTH:  Full length

SUITABLE FOR ALL:    Ages 13+

This is a play for an age of billionaires with too much money and power, who hurt others and themselves. Caleb Parker started out poor, with an abusive, alcoholic father, but he’s good with science and marketing. He’s now worth billions of dollars, has a popular social media platform, and sells surveillance systems … and he’s experimenting with AI. Nikki, an immigrant, tries to take care of Caleb who lives alone in an isolated ranch house, taking drugs. 

Caleb spends time “relating” to his younger brother, Avery. But Avery says cynical, cutting things, and is not what he seems. Caleb says his first wife Helen is the only woman he’s ever loved, but, but when Helen enters, she’s hard to quantify, like Avery, and critiques how Caleb treated her and his subsequent wives and kids. Nikki returns. Avery says caustic things about all three of them in relation to Caleb … and Caleb may be self-destructing, before their eyes. 

Vent has had a rehearsed reading at the Hendersonville Theatre in North Carolina in their New Works Series.