Going Bananas! to be published

This is turning out to be a very good year for me. First I had a record-breaking number of productions for the 2025-2026 season, which I posted about in May. Now I'm happy to report that my fifth play for the year (and 37th play overall) has just been accepted for publication by Pioneer Drama Service.

It's titled Going Bananas! and it's a wacky comedy about the world of modern art. The play has a cast of 12 (1M, 2F, 9 any), uses a single art gallery set, and runs about 70 minutes.

First steps

I've been toying with the idea of setting a play in an art gallery for years. My original concept was to make it a comedy about the theft of a painting that was a cheap knockoff of a much more famous painting. I even thought of a catchy title: Who Stole Mona?

The problem is that stubborn old me wanted the theft to happen on stage during the play itself so that the audience could have fun trying to solve the crime themselves. Unfortunately, I never quite figured out how to pull that off.

Then in 2020, the very gifted playwright Michael Druce published a play with Pioneer titled Murder at the Art Show. That felt a little close for comfort so I dropped the idea forever.

Or so I thought. The thing is I've always loved art, and my mind just wouldn't let go of such a rich, potentially comedic setting. So earlier this year, after I finished writing Don't Rock the Boat! and was waiting for Belmont Day School to premiere 30 Minutes Till Boarding, I returned once more to the art gallery. And this time I came up with a premise that I was sure couldn't fail.

Three little words

Here's the synopsis:

When is a banana not a banana? When it's a priceless work of art, of course!

At least that's what an ambitious young art dealer named Danica discovers. Her first charity auction is about to begin and the movers who were supposed to deliver the art piece she's auctioning accidentally break it, making it completely unsellable.

That's when snooty art critic Winfield Jeppson peeks behind the unveiling curtain and spies a banana with the words "DO NOT EAT" scribbled on it. It was left there by one of the movers when his lunch was interrupted, but Winfield believes it to be a groundbreaking work of conceptual art.

Desperate to save the auction, Danica offers the banana for sale instead. To her shock, the bidding tops out at one million dollars. The charity is thrilled. But Danica faces a new dilemma when the mover returns for his banana. Can she convince everyone (including the mover himself!) that he's really an eccentric artist? Or will her entire scheme blow up in her face.

The seed

Reading that, you may assume that the play was inspired by the famous (or infamous!) art piece from 2019 that consisted of a banana duct-taped to the wall of an art gallery. And you'd be partly right.

But my original inspiration actually came about years before when I visited a small art gallery in my then-home of Colorado Springs, Colorado. The gallery was exhibiting an eclectic variety of art pieces by local artists and I found them to be, well, mildly interesting.

What really grabbed my attention was a chair in the corner of the room with a stack of old board games resting on it. I'm sure they were set there by the employees of the gallery so they'd have something to do when things got slow (which, from the looks of it, was most of the time).

Now, if there's one thing I love as much as art, it's board games. I grew up playing a ton of them with my brothers, and I wanted to see if I recognized any of these games.

That's when one of the gallery assistants came over and said to me, in a hushed voice, that the games were not one of their art pieces.

Well, duh.

Banana split

And so, when I was brainstorming ideas for the play, I simply merged the idea of a household object being mistaken for an art piece with the idea that a household object that's treated as art could sell for millions of dollars (that duct-taped banana, by the way, eventually sold for a whopping $6.2 million).

So I had my plot and from that point on, the story just flowed out of me. The challenge was in getting the tone right. Of course, it's very, very silly that a banana with the words "DO NOT EAT" written on it could generate a bidding war among a set of knowledgeable art buyers, and the play could have easily taken a cynical view of the contemporary art world.

But I didn't want to do that. I have a deep respect for contemporary art and the artists who create it, so while I do poke gentle fun at the snootiness of the characters I assembled for my play, I made sure to keep things light.

More importantly, near the end of the play, I have that ambitious young art dealer express in very clear terms the theme of the play. It's a hopeful thing that I think we can all agree with.

Art is all around us. All you have to do is look.

The Ten-Timers Club is born

Seven years ago, I instituted something called the Five-Timers Club. Inspired by the similarly named group on NBC's Saturday Night Live, it's limited to those schools and community theaters that have produced my plays at least five times.

To date, there are eight members, from Johnston Heights Church in Surrey, British Columbia, to Firehouse Community Theatre in LaBelle, Florida. To be honest, I thought that would be the extent of the clubs. I mean, who would be crazy enough to produce my stuff a whopping ten times?

Standouts in Wellington, New Zealand, that's who! This private arts studio just booked my Old West comedy The Stinky Feet Gang for a production in July. That makes ten shows since 2019 when they performed their first play of mine, which also happened to be The Stinky Feet Gang. In between, they also happened to produce the world premiere of two of my plays, Doggone Detectives and The Real Reason Dinosaurs Went Extinct.

I've kept in casual contact with founder Gemma Shapleski over the years and I never cease to be amazed by all that she does. Not only is she a gifted theater director and voice teacher, but she's a pretty decent writer in her own right as well as a tireless advocate for the arts in her culturally vibrant city.

So thank you, Gemma! I can't tell you how much I appreciate your support!

The critic lives!

Once upon a time there was a theatre critic. He enjoyed being a theatre critic very much.

He loved seeing shows, night after night after night. He loved writing about those shows. And he loved supporting the local theatre community.

But seeing so many plays made him realize one thing. What he really wanted to be was a playwright.

So he wrote a play about what he knew. And that was being a theatre critic.

Only the theatre critic he wrote about wasn't very nice. In fact, he was downright awful. He was so awful, in fact, that an impulsive young actor kidnapped him in order to prevent him from slamming his Broadway debut.

Sadly, the actor wasn't very careful. When the critic asked him for a bottle of scotch, the actor accidentally handed him a bottle of rat poison. And the critic bit the dust.

Oops.

The playwright liked what he wrote. So he asked a friend to direct it.

The director cast some of the funniest actors in town. And the play was a big hit. At least in Colorado Springs, where the play received its world premiere.

The actors loved the play so much, they performed it at another local theater a couple months later. Full of hope, the playwright submitted the script to over a hundred theaters and contests. It had its second production at a theatre in Austin and even received a staged reading at a theatre in Hollywood (yes, that Hollywood).

And there it stopped. No other theaters wanted to perform it. No publishers wanted to publish it.

And so the script sat. Unperformed. Unpublished. Unloved. For eight long years.

That playwright is me, of course. And the play is Kill the Critic!

The story does have a happy ending. Kill the Critic! was finally published by Heuer Publishing two years ago. And this week, the play is receiving its third production--eleven years after its second!

The lucky theatre company? Hawkeye Community Theatre in Fort Dodge, Iowa. This article in The Messenger tells the tale.

In it, director Lindey Krug doesn't go into detail about why she chose the play, opting to focus instead on the audition process and the set design. But she does describe the play as "laugh out loud" and waxed poetic on how easy it was to visualize the play.

Hide-the-corpse farces are like that.

And with that, I'll wrap up this post by wishing the entire cast and crew very hearty broken legs. I just know you're going to "kill" it!

30 Minutes Till Boarding to be published

It's been a very long road--or should I say runway?--but my airport comedy is finally ready for the big time. Thirty Minutes Till Boarding has just been accepted for publication by Pioneer Drama Service. This is my 32nd play with them, and 36th play overall. And am I relieved!

The commish

I've been working on Thirty Minutes Till Boarding since April 2025, when Belmont Day School commissioned me to write another large cast play for them, my third in five years. The play finally premiered to great acclaim in March of this year. And you might think that would be it. Send it to Pioneer, wait for the inevitable acceptance of such a brilliant work, and move on to the next play.

Except it wasn't that simple. Pioneer liked it, but not enough to actually send me a contract. They wanted changes.

I was cool with that. I mean, I've revised my plays for them before, and the plays always come out stronger as a result: tighter, more organic, easier to produce. But this time they wanted a LOT of changes.

Since the play was written on commission, it was tailored to the requirements of the school. And Pioneer felt some of those requirements wouldn't carry over to other schools and community theaters. 

So I fired up my laptop and got to work.

Trimming the fat

The first thing that had to change was the size. This monster of a play was 104 pages long with a cast of 40. It was fairly easy to cut out 4 of the characters as they were in standalone stories and didn't really interact with the characters in the play (although I greatly miss the humor in those scenes). That. and some judicious trimming of the dialog throughout, got the script down to 88 pages and a cast of 36.

I also added a production note that explained how directors could cut additional characters to get the cast size down to 32, 30, or even 26.

Pioneer was concerned about the location. The play was originally set at Boston Logan International Airport, a nod to the school that commissioned it, and that turned out to be an auspicious choice because the airport's quirky nighttime closing policy inspired one of the key plot points in my play.

The problem is that Boston Logan is still remembered by many people as being the originating airport for the two planes that flew into the World Trade Center on 9/11. Wishing to avoid that association, we decided to change the location to a very generic-sounding New England International Airport (a suggestion of my editor Brian).

Tying it all together

The biggest change--and the one that took the most time--revolved around the characters of Egbert and Henrietta. I included them because my intent with the play was to show a cross-section of humanity, and what could be more human than an elderly couple who is traveling to see their brand new grandbaby and can't stop showing pictures of her to everyone they meet?

Egbert is also quite a talker, and in the original version of the play, he dishes out words of advice that happen to solve some pretty big problems for the characters he talks to.

Well, Pioneer wanted more of that, and I agreed. So I came up with ways for Egbert to solve EVERYONE's problems,. The trick was doing so without making it seem forced or overly sentimental.

I think I did it. As a result, Egbert has become the connective tissue of the play in that he ties all of the individual stories together. But he has also become the heart, dispensing wisdom without really realizing it and making the world a better place along the way.

Oh, one more thing. Pioneer wanted to change the title from Thirty Minutes Till Boarding to 30 Minutes Till Boarding so it would show up higher in search results. Eight keystrokes later, the change was made. If only all changes were that easy!

Fortunately, Pioneer loved my changes and agreed to publish the play just in time for the new school year.

An adorable child

This is the place in the post where I usually give you a taste of the play by sharing one of my favorite scenes. Of course, I already shared a scene in an earlier post, but that was one of the ones ended up on the cutting room floor. So instead, let me leave you with a scene which is absolutely, positively guaranteed to show up in the published script. In it, Egbert and Henrietta are assisted by the two very different gate agents, Marsha and Kylie.

MARSHA: May I help you, sir?

EGBERT: (Reads her nametag.) Oh. I see your name is Marsha—

MARSHA: Yes, it is—

EGBERT: We have a daughter named Marsha. Just had our first grandbaby, she and her husband Dave. That's why we're traveling, you know. To see her.

MARSHA: (Unenthusiastic.) Well, isn't that wonderful?

EGBERT: Would you like to see a picture of her?

MARSHA: Um—

KYLIE: Of course, we would! (MARSHA rolls her eyes at KYLIE. EGBERT pulls out his wallet. The accordion-style photo holder inside falls open.) Wow. That's a lot of pictures.

EGBERT: You can never have enough pictures when you've got the cutest grandbaby in the world!

HENRIETTA: Oh, Egbert! Stop bragging!

EGBERT: That's not bragging! It's a documented fact!

MARSHA: She's an adorable child, sir. Now how can we help you? 

EGBERT: What? Oh, yes. I was hoping we could get our seat assignments.

MARSHA: Of course, you can, sir. May I see your boarding passes?

EGBERT: (Digs in his pockets.) Boarding passes. Boarding passes. Now what did I do with those?

KYLIE: They're right here, sir. (Grabs the boarding passes and holds them up.)

EGBERT: Well, would you look at that! I plumb forgot I set them down!

(DR. DIAZ forms a line behind EGBERT. GERALDINE, PAUL, and BELINDA quickly join her.)

KYLIE: (Looks at the boarding pass.) Oh, look, sir. You already have your seats assigned. See? You're in 21E and your lovely wife is in 21F.

EGBERT: Huh. I wonder when we did that.

MARSHA: You must have done it at the ticket counter.

KYLIE: Or maybe you did it at home?

EGBERT: Now how could we have done that?

KYLIE: Oh, it's really very simple, sir. Just go to our website or download our app—

EGBERT: Nope. No way. We don't do any of that fancy internet stuff.

KYLIE: Okay...

EGBERT: It's like our daughter always says. She says, "Dad, you really need to get a cell phone." Well, I've gotten along fine without one for seventy-two years. Why would I need one now?

KYLIE: It looks like you're all set for your flight, sir. (Hands the boarding passes back to EGBERT.)

EGBERT: And besides, you can't make a real connection with someone over the phone. You've got to talk to them face-to-face!

MARSHA: Excuse me, sir, but there are people waiting behind you.

EGBERT: Huh? (Turns and sees THERAPY GROUP.) Ah. So there is. So there is.

HENRIETTA: Come along, Egbert. Why don't you find us a place to sit?

EGBERT: I think I'll find us a place to sit.

KYLIE: You have yourself a sunshiny day, do you hear?

MARSHA: Please. Don't encourage him.

I think this one is going to be a big hit. It's got humor. It's got heart. And it's got Egbert. What else do you need?

South Dakota Route 66 celebrates America's birthday

Route 66 may not have gone through South Dakota. But it definitely leads to the heart of one Coyote State theater.

For 34 years now, Area Community Theatre has entertained the citizens of Mitchell, South Dakota (home of the world famous Corn Palace!). They do five adult shows a year plus one youth show in the summer.

This year, with the 250th birthday of America just around the corner, they wanted the youth show to celebrate our country. And what could be more American than It Happened on Route 66, a play set along that famous ribbon of asphalt known as America's Highway?

According to this news article on the Mitchell Now website, the cast and crew are having a blast.

"Everybody is really enjoying it, and getting into their characters," says office manager Jesse Stroud. "And having the hands-on piece, too, of the set building and picking out some of the props and doing those things is giving them a lot of ownership in the process."

Sounds like a fantastic experience. But that's not all. In a first for the theater, they've arranged for a fun, 20-minute history lesson on Route 66 to be presented before the show by Dakota Wesleyan University in partnership with LifeQuest, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting persons with developmental challenges.

The good folks at Area Community Theatre may not realize it, but there's another reason why It Happened on Route 66 was an especially apt choice. This November 11 marks exactly one hundred years since the highway was commissioned by the Federal Government.

Happy birthday, America! And happy birthday, Route 66! 

On weddings and rollercoasters

I don't usually talk about my personal life on these pages. But then I don't usually have a weekend like the one that just ended.

It all started on Friday with the wedding of our daughter Brooke to the love of her life, a wonderful young man named Ryan Winter (Brooke Winter has a nice ring to it, don't you think?). It was a gorgeous outdoor wedding in the Rim Country of Arizona, where the desert suddenly gives way to Ponderosa-covered mountains, and the weather was pretty much ideal: warm but not too warm, with an endless blue sky and not a drop of humidity in the air.

The wedding took place at Cabins on Strawberry Hill, a rustic resort with fourteen small but very cozy cabins, a wood-paneled reception hall, a large firepit, and an outdoor area with a mountain backdrop for the ceremony itself.

The wedding was officiated by a guy who works with Ryan (they're both civil engineers working on mostly highway-related projects; Brooke is an account manager at a marketing firm). Derek had gotten ordained so he could officiate another friend's wedding, but that one fell through so Brooke and Ryan are actually the first couple he ever married.

The setting for the ceremony was glorious, the bride was beautiful (of course!), and the vows were heartfelt and humorous (especially the bit about Ryan promising not to get mad when Brooke's Diamondbacks beats his beloved Padres).

Derek brought the funny as well. We all knew that Brooke and Ryan met on the dating app Hinge and that they'd bonded over a shared love of hiking, beer, and dogs. What we didn't know, at least until it was revealed by Derek, was that Ryan borrowed his roommate's dog for his profile picture because he didn't actually have one of his own.

The next hour was spent taking pictures, then we all proceeded to the reception, where a taco truck served a delicious, if messy, reception dinner, while the specialty cocktails included a Spicy Mika-Rita (named after Brooke's sassy rat terrier mix) that was a big hit. Afterwards, the DJ kept the energy level high and the crowd dancing with an eclectic mix of yacht rock (blame Brooke), alt rock, and hip hop. Everyone had a fantastic time.

The bets part: my 83-year-old widowed mother-in-law caught the bouquet.

At the same time, Tammy and I were dealing with a dying dog. After our 12-year-old lab mix Honey lost interest in food at the beginning of May, we spent the rest of the month shuttling her from vet clinic to vet clinic, trying to figure out what was causing it and what could we do about it.

The answers turned out to be: 1) a 5cm squamous cell carcinoma mass in her soft palate and throat, and 2) nothing. Chemotherapy is ineffective with this type of cancer, and while radiation would kill the tumor, it would leave a gaping hole in the roof of her mouth which would still make it difficult to eat.

We knew she would need to be put down eventually, but we didn't want to rush it just before the wedding. We were hoping to give her a few special days before she passed. So we rented an Airbnb (dogs weren't allowed to stay at the cabins) and brought her with us.

She loved it there. She was so excited to sniff the long grass around the house we'd rented, just as she used to do before she fell ill. And on Saturday, when we took her for a brief visit to the cabins, she reveled in all the attention she got from the wedding guests.

It may have been her last happy day.

Brooke and Ryan are now in Cabo San Lucas and we're back at home, making preparations for Honey's farewell. And as I look back at the weekend, I'm struck by what a rollercoaster ride of emotions it was. We're thrilled for Brooke and Ryan, that their wedding was everything they dreamed it would be and that their future is so blindingly bright.

But we're finding it difficult to separate that from the grief we feel knowing that Honey will soon no longer be with us. She's always been such a sweet, kindhearted dog, and we're going to miss her terribly.

The greatest of joys to the deepest of sorrows, all in one weekend. It's almost too much to bear. But I suppose that's life.

Ohio Ghosts wins big at high school drama awards

Theatre isn't about winning prizes. It's about expressing your individuality. It's about making a meaningful connection with other human beings. It's about creating art. 

But, boy, it sure does feel good when you do win a prize!

Fairport Harding High School in Fairport Harbor, OH, has plenty to feel good about after the local Rotary Clubs handed out their annual drama awards for Lake County high schools earlier this month. As reported in this article from the News-Herald, the school's production of Too Many Ghosts received a nomination in all eight categories it was eligible for and won four. Now that's impressive, especially when you consider that there are 17 high schools in Lake County!

Alas, Too Many Ghosts didn't win Best Drama/Comedy, losing out to some obscure play titled Peter and the Starcatcher, but it did win the Behind the Scenes Award for their backstage crew work.

Here's the complete list of nominations that the show received:

Male Lead in a Drama/Comedy
Hunter Wilson as folksy handyman Ernie

Female Lead in a Drama/Comedy
Irelyn Swan as level-headed innkeeper Jo
Ava Flerchinger as Jo's horror-loving teenage daughter Lily (Winner!)

Male Support in a Drama/Comedy
James Thellman as fussy 1790's ghost Roland

Female Support in a Drama/Comedy
Fiona Johnston as melancholy 1940's ghost Sophie

Male Sub Support in a Drama/Comedy
Kayden Moser as bombastic 1850's ghost Barney (Winner!)

Female Sub Support in a Drama/Comedy
Nikiyah Clark as cranky 1690's banshee Orla (Winner!)

Best Drama/Comedy

Behind the Scenes Award (Winner!)

Congratulations to all the nominees and winners! You make an old playwright proud.