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!