David K. Farkas is the co-organizer of an informal theater group that stages 10-minute plays. We are based in the Lake Forest Park suburb of Seattle. Dave has written many plays for the group. He has Kindle-published Fourteen Jewish-Flavored 10-Minute Plays and Academic Life in Sixteen 10-Minute Plays. He has also written a full-length play based on the life of Stephen Crane and a child-friendly version (no bed trick) of All's Well That Ends Well.
Plays
I've placed these ten 10-minute plays in the public domain for anyone to read, perform, or modify. They are also included in my book PERFORMING 10-MINUTE PLAYS WITH FRIENDS. 2nd ed. Amazon Kindle 2023.
A 10-minute play (never performed): A mentally unstable Horizon Airlines ground-crew worker steals an airliner, threatens to topple the Seattle Space Needle, and has two F-15s preparing to shoot him down.
A 10 minute play (never performed): Sam Dowling’s final moments there is respect and disdain, love and resentment, kindness and cruelty, and an extraordinary final act of forgiveness.
A never-performed 10-minute play (erotic and perhaps transgressive): When a psychology professor has a nervous breakdown, a trio of young women develop a plan to get him back on track.
A 10-minute play (never performed): In the year 1040, Greg’s long-time girl friend is falling in love with a new face in this New England fishing village. Then a vessel wrecks in a storm, and Greg’s rescue squad ventures out into the perilous surf.
A ten-minute play (never performed): Al, a salesman and the playwright’s father, watches with cheerful bemusement as prosperity forces itself upon a clueless store owner. Al’s life is also changing, in this gentle story of male friendship in the years after World War II.
This (never performed) 10 minute play is highly unusual in its subject matter and the kind of theatrical experience it generates. The play incorporates the story of Baucis and Philemon in Ovid's Metamorphoses. The elderly couple are rewarded for graciously hosting the Zeus and Hermes, who are disguised as hungry travelers. In my expansion of Ovid's story, the fate of Humankind hangs on whether the couple will show kindness to strangers. I also extend Ovid's story far into the future to give the play more spiritual resonance than Ovid intended in his story. The play has ritualistic elements and considerable mythic power.
A 10-minute play (never performed): Terry claims that the Cosmos has assigned her a special life-mission: preventing suicide. She succeeded with Greg, and they have begun a relationship. But who exactly is Terrie?
A ten-minute play (never performed): Ben is a self-acknowledged screw-up and loser. Sandra suspended his driver’s license for monumental stupidity. But a moment of crystalline honestly changes their lives.
A 10-minute play (never performed): One impulsiveness act of kindness sets Professor Thomas Lockwood’s life on a long downhill slide. But, despite the booze and sexual indiscretions, he holds a few pieces of his life together.
A 10-minute play (never performed): What could be worse than the death of your husband and children at the hands of a brutal regime’s security police? Elena is about to find out in this drama of terrible tragedy, savage humor, and faint redemption.
A 10-minute play (never performed): In the midst of the Great Depression, Joe, an ambitious young Jew right out of accounting school, agrees to work for the “family” of his baseball buddy Dominic. But Dominic violates the Mafia code.
10-minute play (never performed): In 1911, Frederick Taylor, the guru of Scientific Management, is one of the most celebrated men in America. But a crusading Congressman from the Pennsylvania coalfields and a woman whom Taylor fired from her much-needed factory job will change all that.
A ten-minute play (never performed): In the violent world of espionage, love takes strange forms, as two lovers and two theater-goers discover.
A professor instructs his students on how to conduct research and succeed in the modern research university. A horse, a lion, a zebra, and an aggressive fly are active participants in the research.
Barry Bright, bullied by his greedy daughter and son-in-law, reluctantly turns out tired imitations of the paintings that made him a celebrity 50 years ago. Now he draws the line at signing forged “Barry Brights.” He doesn’t know that Lucy, his new studio assistant, has been hired to make him “more manageable.” But sweet freedom is about to whisper in his ear.