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.