Full Plays Available to Read by Local Playwrights
Derby City Playwrights New Play Library
We are excited to offer a limited selection of exciting new works developed through Derby City Playwrights or by Derby City Playwrights members. See below for descriptions and links to each work. Check back as more plays may be added later.
All of the works on this page are the intellectual property of the playwrights. If you are interested in performing these works, whether it be the play, a scene, an audition monologue or to set up a socially distanced reading in these new and interesting times, send an email to David Clark @ and he will put you in touch with the writers.
Haydee Canovas
Season 3 - Reading
Hilarity and existential tension torment Peety and her parents as they find themselves trapped in a never ending waiting game to see the doctor The family believes will save her father’s life.
David Clark
Season 4 - Winner of the 2020 Arts-Louisville Broadway World Theatre Award for Best Full-Length Play
In a world where the blockbuster film is considered mere popular entertainment for the masses and live theatre is intellectual fodder for the elite, one boastful playwright is about to anger an action-loving deity. With tragic backstory in tow and expendable friends to help him on his journey, Christopher Pentheus must endure an epic road trip to save the script that was stolen from him. Told on an empty stage, with just an overworked 2 person chorus, and very little Tech, the Almighty plans to prove his storytelling methods are supreme!
Season 3 - Reading
In a place of magic, a would-be puppeteer, a dying old man, and a fire-scarred magician must unravel the mystery of a young woman, hidden in a forest seemingly filled with unimaginable power and secrets.
Season 2
A research doctor trying to map infant brains, Genny is in need of a particularly difficult to obtain specimen – the skulls of deceased children. On the verge of giving up on her pursuit, packages from a secret admirer begin to appear with the specimens that will save her career. A romantically, disturbing who-dunnit transpires as Genny and her assistant Monica try to decipher which of Genny’s recent trysts might have fallen this “madly” in love with her.
Season 1 Reading
This is the way the world ends, not with a bang . . . but a fruit. Complete with congressional dance numbers, French-Canadian mad scientists, and a crumbling fourth wall, Bananapocalypse is a dark satiric comedy in which a scientist, trying to save the world, incites a global crisis over bananas when he is forced to trick the US Government into funding his renewable energy project.
Clare Hagan
Season 4 - Reading
A struggling art student is about to learn that nothing is free.
Zoë Peterson
A Shot In the Dark
Season 3 - Louisville Fringe Festival
Coming Soon
A summer night spent with Cass and Jake reminiscing over lost time is plagued by the shadow of the loss of their best friend (and Cass’s brother) in a piece that explores love, loss, and the secrets that we keep.
Vidalia Unwin
Season 4
Set over two decades, Punk Snot follows Brian, Zack, Matt, and Fucking Jeff. First as teenagers in 2000, looking to punk as their saviors against all that they hate in the world. Finally we see them in 2015, no longer following the good word of punk and coming to terms with their sins, both as punks and as humans, each of them learning that there are no saviors, there are only sins.
Season 2
Good hacker, bad hacker, what's the difference? Hacking can change the world, but it can also get you in a lot of trouble. A hacker called Gaz likes them both. So what to do with a new technology that can change the world as easily as it can destroy it? Maybe the answer is bitter revenge.
Season 1 - Reading
When you feel at home sitting in gravel, when blood and alcohol form in the same pool, when the only cure for boredom is theft and violence, when saviors are out to harm you, perhaps the only thing to do is make beauty out of your decayed existence.
A Collaboration with Lex Mitchell
Okay . . . so DCP had nothing to do with this play, but Vidalia and Lex are currently working on the sequel Curse of Blue Moose with us, and graciously offered this piece to help everyone get ready for moosey doom coming soon.
Brian Walker
On the Road with Bernice and Robin
Season 4
As Robin's life begins to spiral out of control, she decides she needs to locate her winning coloring sheet from a contest hosted by the Louisville Zoo when she was ten years old. She embarks on an American odyssey with her mother, Bernice, going from zoo to zoo from Louisville to San Diego to get it back to get her back.
Season 2 -
High Tide is a play about sibling rivalry, dead mothers and transporting octopuses. Bo, Triton and Hurley have never really gotten along that great. Competitiveness and divisiveness have always gone hand in hand with them being siblings, particularly as they became adults. When their mother dies, her last request is for them to finish the work she started as a marine-life vigilante and transport an octopus she’s stolen from poor conditions at a Florida aquarium to a friend in Maine who will release it back to the waters from which it came. Part road trip comedy, part family drama and part mystical pilgrimage; it’s a play that looks at the relationships of brothers and sisters, of man and animal and the benefits of not always being completely sober.
Season 1 - Reading - Winner of the Kentucky Theatre Association's 2015 Roots of the Bluegrass New Play Contest
It's Scotty's last summer before college and he thinks he's made a major discovery on the shores of the Ohio River, a discovery that could change his life forever. In the moment before imagination succumbs to the autumn pull of responsibilities and commitments, Scotty fights for the mythologies and realities he's come to hold dear and is unwilling to trade in order to be an adult. A play about finding what's lost and loosing what you don't need.