Lip Service

I have added a brand new play to my website! This crowd pleasing comedy is perfect for all age groups!

LIP SERVICE

Genre: Comedy
Cast: 1m, 1w, 10 flexible
Running Time: 30 minutes
Setting: One interior

Synopsis: They say love conquers all, but that was before The Monkey Bar opened its doors. When Charlie made his reservation at the trendy restaurant to ask for Laura's hand in marriage, he had no idea that his proposal would be repeatedly thwarted by a revolving staff of cuckoos. Among them are a waitress obsessed with conspiracy theories, a bus boy with a cabaret act, a chef with an accent thicker than his gravy, and a violinist that doesn't even know how to play. As Laura flits from disaster to disaster, Charlie tries desperately to make heads or tails of the nonsense spewing from everyone's lips.

Please visit www.bradleyhayward.com and follow the links to read a preview!

Sixteen Shambles

Sixteen Shambles (aka The Birthday Spaz, aka Spaz!) is my latest release from Eldridge Plays and Musicals.

Okay, that's only part of the story. Six years ago I was so excited when my very first play was accepted for publication. It's a very funny play that still ranks among my personal favorites. The story revolves around a teenage girl named Janet who is having the worst day of her life. This awful day also happens to coincide with her sweet sixteen birthday.

Its premiere production in Peachtree City, Georgia was a big success. McIntosh High School did a tremendous job bringing it to life and it was subsequently produced to acclaim by Gordon F. Kells high school in Carlyle, Saskatchewan. Back then the play was known as Spaz! and I always really liked that title. Whenever I can work punctuation into a title, I do.

However, while Eldridge loved the play, they were less enthusiastic about the title. They wanted to play up the birthday aspect, so we compromised and came up with The Birthday Spaz. It has since been produced a number of times, but not as often as I had hoped.

Now that I have more experience writing plays, I know how important gender flexible roles are in making a play a success. So the folks at Eldridge were gracious enough to let me revisit the script make it more accessible. With very few changes to the text, I have now made 7 of the roles gender neutral. I'm confident these changes did not hurt the play at all; in fact, I think they only made it stronger! I love how differently my plays are interpreted when the genders of certain characters are swapped, so I can't wait to see productions with these new changes.

I also thought it was time to revisit the title. I have to concede that Eldridge was right all along, which explains its new moniker, Sixteen Shambles. I actually like this title better than all of the others...it just took me 6 years to come up with it.

I'm very excited to see this play get a shiny new coat of paint and I hope that will result in even more productions. Check it out!

Epic Fail

My latest comedy Epic Fail is now available from Eldridge Plays and Musicals!

My relationship with Eldridge has been a wonderful one! They published my very first play, which certainly had a major influence on my decision to pursue a career in playwrighting.

I now have four plays published with them and hope there will be many more to come. My first break out hit was The Da Vinci Cold and last year Attention Detention was one of my most popular plays. They provide excellent customer service, are infinitely enthusiastic about their plays and playwrights, and have a terrific selection of material for groups of all ages.

Please check out Epic Fail by clicking HERE and do not hesitate to email me with any questions, comments or concerns. I'd love to hear from you!

Sixteen in 10 Minutes or Less

I had a dream.

Seven characters came into my brain and inhabited it for a while.

I told their stories and they left.

Now I'm sitting in my living room with the absolutely stunning books for Sixteen in 10 Minutes or Less in my lap.

The dream came true.

Now it's time for the characters to take on lives of their own.

So take a risk.

And make it happen.

You won't regret it.

YouthPLAYS

There is a wonderful new online publisher of plays for the youth market, appropriately named YouthPLAYS. They have a wealth of excellent material by excellent writers that keeps growing on a daily basis. If you have not checked out their website, please do so by clicking on their logo below.

Not only do they have terrific plays to offer, but you can read lengthy excerpts of each and every one online. And if you like what you see in the preview, you can order a PDF copy of the complete script for free. That's right. Free! You're not able to print these perusal scripts (although for a nominal fee, you may), but just getting the chance to read plays in their entirety before committing to a production means that school groups with limited budgets now have a much larger pool of material to choose from. And what wonderful material it is!

YouthPLAYS was co-founded by two wonderful playwrights, Jonathan Dorf and Ed Shockley. Jonathan is the author of the popular one acts 4AM and After Math, among many others. I've seen several of his plays at various festivals and they are always warmly received by actors and audiences alike. He writes extremely vivid characters that pop right off the page. My personal favorite is Dear Chuck, a touching and funny play told in short scenes and monologues. As well, Ed wrote a nifty play that I have never seen, but am dying to, called Bedlam Moon. It's a hilarious Bronx tale, written in a style akin to Neil Simon.

What I also appreciate is their growing selection of plays that deal with LGBT issues. About a year ago, writer Dan Savage started the It Gets Better Project, which encourages gay youth to stay strong in spite of the bullying and prejudice they may be facing in high school. There are already a couple of plays in the YouthPLAYS catalog that deal specifically with this topic, which is so awesome. It's an important topic that should be addressed in schools, and I'm happy to report that now there is material out there for brave teachers and administrations to tackle.

So you can imagine how delighted I was to hear this morning that YouthPLAYS has offered to publish my play Twinkle Toes. It's a dramedy about a gay teen as he prepares for his dance audition at Julliard, and it is very near and dear to my heart. I'm honored that it will be now be made available to students and teachers who are willing to take a risk.

It really does get better and I'm honored to have a play out there that proves it.

Lip Service

I have a new comedy called Lip Service that I'm very excited about! It's a screwball comedy, which is far and away my favorite film genre. I'd be hard pressed to come up with movies I enjoy more than Bringing Up Baby, The Palm Beach Story, What's Up Doc? and Easy Living. I always wondered if the wacky situations and zippy dialogue (trademarks of a screwball comedy) would translate onstage, so I decided it was time to take a crack at it. While it's nowhere near as great as the dazzling Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks comedies, I am very happy with how it turned out. As I watched the pages spool out of the printer, I couldn't wait to put them into the hands of an actor. It has yet to be produced, but it's being considered by a number of schools as we speak. In the meantime, I fiddled around with an online animation program and put together a sneak peek.

Reading Room: Sex Lives of Superheroes

Anyone involved in high school drama for at least a day has heard of the play This is a Test by Stephen Gregg. It's a really great piece of theater that students have had a blast with since it was published in 1988. Gregg offers in the stage directions that it's "a play that begs to be messed with" and "any changes are acceptable per the author." Sounds like fun, right?! No wonder that it's one of the most produced one-act plays of all time. When I was in high school, I petitioned hard for us to "mess with it," but never got the chance. Instead, I performed in such forgotten classics as Her Majesty the King and Mama's Little Helper. Eek. Well, since graduating I've seen it more than any other play and I still wish we had done it. I suppose I could stage a production and star in it, but at 30 years old, I think that would be a tad creepy.

What I can do is recommend another Gregg play that I think is even better. That play is Sex Lives of Superheroes. I didn't discover this script until after high school, but if I had, I probably would have been just as adamant that we produce it. It's a terrific three-hander, with a few members of the audience joining in. With an enrollment of 10 and a budget even smaller, it's just the sort of play my little drama club could have knocked out of the park. The characters are fun; a comic book nerd, a jaded girlfriend and an opinionated love interest. So anyone looking for the road less traveled (I’m not sure how often it’s produced, but certainly not as much as TIAT), check out this fun script that’s appropriate for all age groups.

The Birthday Spaz

Here's a super fun clip from an awesome production of The Birthday Spaz that I thought I'd share. Enjoy!

Courtesy of Gordon F. Kells High School - Carlyle, SK

Gender Neutral

As I've become more experienced at writing plays for high school students, I've also become better at writing roles that may be played by either male or female actors. Writing gender neutral roles is a particular skill that is often challenging, frustrating and limiting. Ultimately, however, it can also be quite rewarding.

Back when I started writing plays, I was pretty set in my ways. The characters I wrote were often based on people I knew and I wanted them represented exactly as I had imagined. But when I went to a production of one of my first plays and saw that they had changed the genders of several of the characters (all male to female, I might add), I was blown away at how much it impacted the message of the play. The structure was still the same, but with each scene being told from a different perspective, it was almost a completely new play. At first I was put off by the changes, but as the play progressed, I was pleased that the material still worked, and actually took on a whole new flavor. It was different than what I had come up with, but different in a good way. I appreciated that the actors and directors were able to turn the material on its head and come up with something equally as good as what I had written.

From that point on, I have always tried to make the roles in my plays as neutral as possible. Not only does it mean the plays will cast a wider net by being accessible to more schools, but it also means that I cannot rely too heavily on stereotypes that come from being a boy or a girl. Even when I write scenes about boys and girls in love, I think about the possibility of them being two boys or two girls in love. I know productions that feature gay relationships will be few and far between, but I like knowing that the option is there for brave students, teachers and administrations that are not phased by the facts of life.

I have written many plays that feature completely gender neutral casts. Split, Attention Detention, Epic Fail, Apostrophe's, Note to Self, Smarty Pants, Outside the Box and Drama Geeks all have widely flexible casts. Occasionally I still write plays that have fixed characters because there are times that the battle of the sexes is important to the plot. But even in those instances, I may be pleasantly surprised someday by a director who asks to switch one of these roles to the opposite gender. My only hope is that it will be from a female to a male. Drama is for boys, too!