Eldridge Plays & Musicals

Eldridge Plays & Musicals is a wonderful play publisher with some truly fantastic plays and musicals for the high school market. They carry two of my plays: The Da Vinci Cold and The Birthday Spaz.

Eldridge has been around since 1906, so they are one of the oldest publishing companies in the United States. What is truly magnificent is how they have stayed up with the times and offer a very user friendly website and "freeviews" of all the plays in their catalog. Personally, Eldridge will always hold a special place in my heart. Not only were they the first to publish one of my plays (The Birthday Spaz), but they also carry the funny one-act comedy, The Night of the Livid Dad by Marc Holland and Michael Davis. This was the play that inspired me to become a playwright myself.

The Da Vinci Cold is one of my most popular plays, and I owe it to their dedicated (and ever expanding) customer base. Teachers have been very faithful to Eldridge over the years, mostly because they offer incredibly knowledgeable and friendly customer service.

Baker's Plays

As a teenager, most of the plays I ever acted in were published by Baker's Plays or Samuel French. So imagine my excitement when they decided to publish my play High School for Dummies. I was beside myself with pride, as this was something I had long been hoping to achieve.

Both companies have come a long way in the past number of years, offering websites that allow customers to peruse the many, many titles in their catalog. Being represented by the company that provided me with most of the plays I was a part of in my childhood really feels terrific! I spent the majority of my teenage years immersed in the drama club, dreaming of the day my plays would one day change the lives of students also looking for an outlet for their creativity.

The fact that High School for Dummies is finding success in high schools across the country is deeply gratifying.

Heuer Publishing

Heuer Publishing carries the rights to my personal favorite of all my plays, Oprah Made Me Do It. Thanks to their wonderful marketing, this play has made quite a splash at theater festivals around North America.

Heuer has been around for quite a long time, yet they have remained a vital part of the play publishing world by keeping up with all the modern trends of the industry. They have a truly sensational website that offers free previews to all their plays. They also offer video rights to all their plays, so for a small fee each and every play may be video taped for distribution. They also are building a large library of Ten Minute Plays, which have become so popular these days. It is no secret that I am very fond of this genre, since I have an absurdly short attention span!

Please sign up for their online newsletter, which will update you on any new plays, as well as old favorites they have to offer.

Brooklyn Publishers

Brooklyn Publishers currently carries the rights to six of my plays: Conversation Therapy, One Foot Over a Banana Peel, Backstage Broadway, The Most Likely Pages, With This Ring and The Wedding Downpour.

Conversation Therapy is among my most produced plays, so it's needless to say that I am very happy with the exposure I have received from this great company. What shocks me is how few people are aware of Brooklyn Publishers in Canada. They, too, have a wonderfully accessible website with free previews of any play. They also provide the ease of online ordering.

One thing that sets Brooklyn Publishers apart from other companies is their enormous selection of Ten Minute Plays. What was once a blip in the theater world has now become a phenomenon. Ten minute plays are taking over high school theater festivals, and for good reason. I believe it is much more rewarding to make a short play the very best it can possibly be, rather than spread your actors thin over a much longer piece. An evening of short plays also affords many schools the ability to use a much larger number of students. An evening of 10 ten minute plays can include upwards of 30 students, and audiences love the variety!

Big Dog Plays

New to the play publishing world in the past couple of years is Big Dog Plays. Most new publishers take years to accumulate enough material for a solid catalog, but such is not the case for Big Dog. Right out of the gate, founder Dawn Remsing has a really wonderful assortment of one-acts, full lengths and even musicals for high school performers. Their mission is along the lines of "for teachers, by teachers."

I am extremely fortunate to have several plays listed with Big Dog Plays: American Idle, The Jigsaw Puddle, Sneezing With Your Eyes Open, and Legitimate Hooey. I have been pleasantly surprised by how quickly they have all caught on, given that the company is still fairly young.

If you want to find some really nifty plays (along with all the promotional material to go along with it!), visit Big Dog Plays. You will be amazed at how many great works you will find.

Playscripts, Inc.

If you are involved in high school theater and haven't heard of Playscripts, Inc by now, you are probably living in a cave. They carry the hilarious one-acts Check Please and Hard Candy by Jonathan Rand. Heard of them? If you are alive and been to a high school play festival in the last few years, you surely know of these plays. But they are well known for a reason; they are hysterical! I have seen both more times than I can count and they never get old. Same goes for practically everything else in their vast catalog.

Playscripts is a phenomenal publisher of plays and has been, and continues to be, on the cutting edge of the industry. They were one of the first, if not the first, publisher to offer online previews of all their plays. This has since become the standard for play publishing. This has saved high school teachers thousands upon thousands of dollars on ordering plays, only to find out that they are not going to work for them. At first, I thought this would impede on playwrights' royalties, but the exact opposite has proven to be true. With the ability to read hundreds of plays (almost in their entirety) for free, it has opened up every play in their catalog for perusal. This only leads to more productions!

They carry two of my plays, The Day Grandma Got Mad and Squashed the Tomatoes and Imaginary Harry. Both have achieved great success and I beg you to check out their immense wealth of truly terrific material.

Theatrefolk

Theatrefolk publishes two of my plays, Apostrophe's and The Waking Moment. Let me just start by saying this company has some of the most original, creative and inspiring works on the market. Their catalog is entirely suitable for high school performance. Not only that, but all the plays they carry pose a creatively stimulating challenge to actors and audiences alike.

Directly from their website, here is a little bit on how they got started and their mission statement:

• Theatrefolk was started in 1994 by playwright Lindsay Price and actor Craig Mason. We believe passionately in the integral role theatre arts plays in a well-rounded education.

• The study of theatre is as important to the learning process as any other subject. It develops critical thinking, communication skills, team-building, self-confidence, and discipline.

Pretty amazing, right?

My favorite part of their catalog is the abundance of plays with choral material. These kinds of plays really help student actors develop the ability to trust other actors on the stage, and also the audience's ability to use their imagination to fill in the blanks.

Flaky Lips and Tick Talk are among my favorites they have to offer. Both written by founder Lindsay Price, they are exceptionally entertaining for audiences and wildly rewarding for the actors involved.

They also offer a really nifty royalty license called The Script Bank. It's a revolutionary idea that allows customers access to all the scripts in their catalog for a very reasonable price.

So please do youself a favor and check out Theatrefolk. They have a fantastic website with free previews of any play and are always willing to answer any questions you may have.

Finding "The Right Play"

One of my favorite pastimes is reading plays. I read all sorts of plays, but one-act plays written specifically for high school performers are far and away the most interesting to me. Ten years ago, there was a serious lack of good material for teenage actors. However, that has thankfully changed in the new millennium and there is now a wealth of great material, so long as you know where to look.

I am very fortunate to be published by some truly terrific publishers, each having a strong catalog full of high school material. Over the next week or so, I will feature each of them on this blog. Some you will certainly know about, and others might be new to you. But they each bring with them a vast selection of truly great plays that pose a creative challenge to students. I know how difficult it can be to find the "right play," especially in high school when the number and experience of students inevitably change from year to year.

Also, investigating fresh new works by fresh new authors will help remedy the problem of high school festivals being flooded by the same plays year in and year out. I think Juvie is an excellent one-act play, but I could handle a year or two without seeing it so often. Same goes for a handful of other scripts that I know you're sick of seeing as well.

So take a moment to follow the links I'll be providing and see for yourself what an array of super fun, super challenging and super fantastic new plays are out there. Many of these publishers offer free catalogs by mail, and others have it all up online for your perusal. Enjoy the search! For reading a well written play is almost as fun as seeing one!

Enter the Blog

Students and teachers have written me over the past couple of years asking why I do not have a blog on my website. My answer has always been that I don't have that much to write about. Or what I do have to write about, I just put into my latest play. However, that's not exactly true. I have an abundance of thoughts about the theater, but I worried that if I spent my time writing about those, it would simply serve as an excuse not to keep working on a play that might be giving me some difficulty. But I quickly realized that whenever I read other writers' blogs, I get a creative kick in the pants and become more prone to keep slaving away on my own material. So I've decided to give the world of blogging a shot. My posts are very likely to be random, but then again, so are my plays! I hope you enjoy anything I might have to say, and please do not hesitate to leave comments or ask questions.