30 Minutes Till Boarding is now available!

How about one more play for good measure? 

That's right! Just in time for the new school year, Pioneer Drama Service has released my airport comedy, 30 Minutes Till Boarding. It's my 32nd play with them and 38th play overall.

Developing the play has been a long journey with several layovers, starting all the way back in April 2025 when Belmont Day School in Massachusetts commissioned me to write a third full-length comedy for them. The play finally premiered to lavish praise in March of this year. And after an extensive round of edits to make it more producible, we ended up with a play that truly reaches new heights in terms of storytelling, emotional impact, and just plain fun.

Originally written for a cast of 40, 30 Minutes Till Boarding has now been slimmed down to a slightly more svelte 36, and you can get it down to 30 by cutting two of the twelve storylines (and the associated dance number!) as spelled out in the production notes.

One of the challenges with this play is that nearly all of these people (along with their luggage!) are onstage at a couple key points in the story, but the script includes some very useful suggestions to make things manageable.

But hey, at least the set is relatively simple, requiring a gate counter, a departure sign, and yeah, a whole bunch of chairs and/or tables.

Here's the synopsis: 

The snow is coming down fast and furious at the airport, but the intrepid gate agents for Sunshine Airways Flight 901 to Rome assure the waiting passengers that the plane will depart as scheduled. Alas, the flight is delayed later and later until finally the flight is canceled, upsetting the plans of passengers and crew alike.

The folks stuck at the gate are an eclectic bunch. There's the therapist taking her fear-of-flying group on their first flight. Imogene is a newlywed who learns that her new mother-in-law is coming along on the honeymoon. A self-absorbed pop star is horrified to discover that nobody recognizes her anymore... and that she has to fly coach! There's also the hilarity of a cocky, young co-pilot trying to hide from the flight attendant he ghosted on a date, and the sweetness of a kindly old couple who accosts everyone they meet with pictures of their new grandbaby.

Airport delays might not seem the subject of comedy these days, yet Todd (that's me!) creates plenty of both hilarious and heartwarming moments in this entertaining ensemble piece. With these rich characters plus many more, this high-flying comedy gives every actor a chance to soar!

I just know you're going to love this one. For a free script sample as well as complete ordering information, be sure to visit the play's webpage.

And buckle up. You're going to have quite a flight.

Survival Island is now available!

Hot on the heels of my 3rd play with Heuer Publishing (and 36th play overall) comes the publication of my 4th play with Heuer Publishing (and 37th play overall).

Survival Island! is a full-length comedy about eight contestants on a TV reality show who must learn to survive for real after the host and crew of the show fall into a volcano. The play has a cast of 10 (1M, 1F, 8 any), uses only a single simple beach set, and tuns about 75 minutes.

I've already spoken about my inspiration for the play. I've shared one of my favorite scenes from the script. I've also posted some great photos from the world premiere at Jacksonville Performing Arts in North Carolina, where it was a big hit.

Executive director Nikki Dyba said audiences absolutely loved the play, but what she really raved about was how great an experience it was for the kids (the word "EPIC" may have also have been used a couple of times).

I think that's because the roles are surprisingly meaty for kids. Sure, the characters are fun and over the top, but they're grounded in the real-life personality types we so often see on TV reality shows (as well as in real life itself!).

There's the hardcore gym bro. His hyper-competitive female rival. The laid-back surfer dude. The stuffy anthropology professor. The manipulative executive chef. The shy librarian. The self-absorbed fashion icon. And the greedy investment banker.

Together, they forge a fragile compromise in order to get themselves rescued. But as their resources grow increasingly limited, we see how each character's flaws contribute to the chaos that follows.

The world premiere was performed by upper elementary students. But it could just as easily be done by middle schools, high schools, colleges, community theatres, and even (like many of my plays!) retirement centers. Seriously, this is a comedy for all ages.

Want to know more? Then be sure to visit the play's web page.

Fear of Clowns is now available!

I'm thrilled to announce that Heuer Publishing has just released my 3rd play with them and 36th play overall. The play is titled Fear of Clowns and it also happens to be my first published ten-minute play.

I think it'll fit in well with my other Heuer plays. Like Kill the Critic! and The Last Radio Show (and the upcoming Survival Island!), it's a little dark, certainly darker than any of my Pioneer plays.

But don't let that scare you. It's also very funny--the world premiere in Colorado Springs got a ton of laughs. It's just that the humor comes across in a sad, tragic-clown kind of way. And it's my only play that doesn't have a happy ending.

Fear of Clowns is a breeze to produce. It features a cast of two (one clown and one psychiatrist) and requires no set beyond a couch, a desk, and a couple of chairs.

But it does require sound effects. Or should I say, one very key sound effect.

At the opening of the play, the psychiatrist is working at his desk when he hears the sound of laughter coming from outside his office. The stage directions describe it as "loud, raucous, annoying even, like a bad TV laugh track".

That laughter is the reason Jocko insists in seeing the psychiatrist today. He detests the sound of it, and he doesn't understand why it seems to follow him everywhere.

Now I don't want to give away any spoilers, so I won't share with you the psychiatrist's final advice to the clown. But I will say that the only thing that really changes by the end of the play is that laughter. For as Jocko exits, the stage directions state that it "sounds different now--colder, crueler. Or does it?"

I really want that laughter to land like a gut punch to the audience. If done properly, it will.

Oh, and if you want to read about the play's unusual history or the classic joke that originally inspired it, be sure to check out this post from January.

Freaky Tiki gets animated

I missed this when it got posted to YouTube four months ago, but it's just too good not to share now.

Joe Marquez, the insanely talented technology instructor at Clovis Unified School District in beautiful Clovis, California (nicknamed the Gateway to the Sierras), created an awesome five-minute animated cartoon to promote Clovis Elementary School's production of Freaky Tiki. It introduces the characters, explains the plot, and backs it all up with a catchy ska tune.

Enjoy! And for more info on this hilarious, high-energy comedy, click here.

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!