Please contact me at mark dot stevick at gordon dot edu if you’d like to produce one of these plays!

Goodnight, Captain White (90-minute, two-act interactive comedy/murder mystery) download script

Synopsis: It’s 1830. All friends and well wishers are invited to attend the retirement party of Captain Joseph White’s most successful ship, the Caroline. But this magnanimous invitation lures a host of enemies and ill-wishers into the perfect opportunity to murder the rich, old captain. Allegiances twist and turn. Foibles are exposed, depravities revealed. It’s up to the audience and an under cover Daniel Webster to figure out whodunit and how.

The Fish Mysteries (vernacularization of The Second Shepherds Play, set in Gloucester, MA)

Synopsis: At a wharf in Gloucester, three fishermen encounter Mack, a trickster, who lightens them of one of their fish. Mack and his wife Jill plan to dine on sushi, but the anglers retrieve their tuna — then meet an angel bringing news of a newborn, whom they visit, bringing gifts.

Someplace Called Fred’s (ten-minute play)

Synopsis: When miracles start happening at Fred’s Breakfast Shop, the Gloucester restaurant becomes the site of a CSI–a curiosity scene investigation. The patrons marvel and the experts opine, but in the end no microphone or microscope can quite capture whatever humble magic is at work in the popular greasy spoon.

The Screwtape Letters – A Play for Voices (for reading only, not to be performed)

Synopsis: This is a “theatre of the imagination piece” which is composed of three works by C.S. Lewis: The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce and Poems. It dramatizes a series of letters written in Hell (where the souls are food and the stakes are very high) by a senior tempter, the rigorous and ironic Screwtape, to his niece Wormwood. Wormwood has just been promoted to junior tempter and has undertaken her first charge (in this reading he is called Clive). Screwtape and his colleagues furnish counsel on the art of temptation.

EXCERPT (some of the only stuff I wrote for this piece)

-prologue-

TRIPTWEEZE
Good mortals, young and old, give audience
And heed the spectacle that plays our stage,
A comic tale of cosmic relevance
To sober auditors of any age.

This man is Clive: a chap of average head,
Whose prospects are as modest as his eyes,
But as his days are coldly numbered,
His soul is hotly counted as a prize.

A cast of fiends most diabolical
Combine their darkest skill to seal his fate:
Slumtrimpet, Slubgob, Glubose, Scabtree—all
Conspire (with Triptweeze) on the side of Hate.

The leaders of this Clive-corrupting crew
Are Screwtape and young Wormwood, Screwtape’s niece;
The letters which exchange between these two
Comprise the bulk and drama of this piece.

Confederates in a grim conspiracy,
We fallen angels go to great extremes;
You witness here what none but we do see,
You overhear our underhanded schemes.

So, take into account all that we say,
For each must choose for each who wins the day. 

SCREWTAPE
My Dear Wormwood,
     Just a brief word of congratulations.  I am pleased to hear of your promotion to Junior Tempter; your father would have been proud of your persistence.  I hope you’ll be glad to learn that I myself will be overseeing your case—encouraging you and offering what wisdom I have gleaned from over 30 eons in the temptation business.
    Although your patient is not at present a Christian, your job will not be an easy one: you must never allow yourself to become complacent regarding a potential conversion, as the Enemy will attempt to win him from the most unlikely quarters and with the most ungainly tactics.  Remember Balaam’s ass.
   Your affectionate Uncle,
Screwtape