Upcoming Performances

Pretending to be Human

Malborough Combined Colleges presents
Pretending to be Human

WHERE: Malborough Girls College Hall, 21 McLauchlan Street, Blenheim
WHEN: 16-20th June
TIME: 7PM
COST: $15-$20
Marlborough Girls College Website

Send a group of “anti-social” teens away on a camping trip, and you’re bound to get some personality clashes. Add in one of those teens sprouting fairy wings overnight, and you’re in for one stressful trip.

Anya and Jack have never felt like they fit in. That could be because she’s battling with anxiety and self-esteem issues and he’s a cyber-bully... or it could be because they’re both changeling children and really don’t fit in.

Abandoned alone in the bush, Anya and Jack have to figure out how (and if) they can get home and what to do about their new unusual physicality, all while trying not to kill each other in the meantime.

Cast: 7 + ensemble (Young adult, any)
Form: Full length
Style: Supernatural, drama, comedy

Past Performances
2020: An early draft was presented as a staged reading as part of the Rejected Script Series at Circus Bar Wellington.

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket

Past Performances

How to catch a grim reaper

A filmmaker, a med student, and a psychology major come up with a plan to catch the Grim Reaper… but there’s just one problem: they need to kill one of their friends to do it. Well… almost kill them, that is. None of them expect it to work… and they have absolutely no clue what to do now they have Death itself caged in their lounge...

How to Catch A Grim Reaper was originally commissioned by the Young & Hungry Arts Trust.

Helen was named Outstanding New Playwright at the 2015 Wellington Theatre Awards for How to Catch a Grim Reaper.

The script was also a finalist for the Playmarket Plays for the Young Award.

Cast: 7 (Young adult - Female: 3 Male: 4)
Form: Full length
Style: Drama-horror-comedy-romance

Past Performances:
2015: Staged as part of the Young and Hungry Festival of New Theatre at BATS Theatre Wellington.
2026: Staged as Stray Theatre’s Contemporary Bill at the Pitt Street Theatre Auckland.

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket

Three feet under

What would you do if you came home to find your flatmate standing over a corpse?

Libby and Jax have been best friends forever. Ride or die, cradle to grave - no matter what, they will support each other... Which is how they found themselves outside, late at night, burying a body in their backyard.

Sammy - Libby's cousin and Jax's ex - has met an untimely end. As Libby breaks down, Jax furiously tries to cover up what happened. The pair bicker, freak out, and generally create a mess of hiding evidence, pushing their bonds of friendship to the limits.

Three Feet Under is a new New Zealand comedy about friendship, mistakes, loyalty... and burying a body in your backyard.

The script was shortlisted for the 2025 Adam New New Zealand Play Award.

Cast: 4
Form: Full length
Style: Comedy

Past Performances
2025: First performed at Te Auaha Tapere Iti Wellington as part of the 2025 New Zealand Fringe Festival.

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket

Confessions of a Sleepwalking Insomniac

A sniper just shot a bullet through Briar’s window. Or… Briar had a nightmare and went crashing into a solid wooden door. Maybe the MRI machine can tell her which.

Briar’s always been a sleepwalker, but when a new relationship sends her sleep disorder into overdrive, it’s not just her REM cycle that suffers. Briar’s grip on reality is slipping, and her life is coming apart with it. The possibility of an assistance dog offers hope, but with injuries a nightly occurrence and her girlfriend’s patience wearing thin, Briar’s finding love might not be as unconditional as promised.

Based on the true story of a series of things that didn’t really happen, playwright Helen Vivienne Fletcher, winner of the Peter Harcourt Outstanding New Playwright award 2015, draws on her lifetime of sleep misadventures in this new solo play.

Falling asleep, or falling in love – which one is about to crash?

Confessions of a Sleepwalking Insomniac was commissioned by TAHI Festival.

Cast: 1
Form: Full length
Style: Solo show

Past Performances:
2022: Development season presented as part of the TAHI Festival at BATS Theatre Wellington.
2024: Full premiere season presented at BATS Theatre Wellington.

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket

Five Slices of Another Life

Co-written with Henrietta Bollinger, Hamish Boyle, Steff Green and Angela Pope.

Two women wait to be rescued from a burning building. Another finds salvation in a box of chickens. Things get awkward in a cafe. A detective investigates himself, and a blind seer delivers one last prophecy.

Five new Kiwi plays, written by and featuring disabled and neurodiverse folk – are you ready to step into another life?

Cast: 7
Form: Full length, anthology of short plays
Style: Comedy

Past Performances:
2023: First performed as a development season as part of the DAT Festival at BATS Theatre Wellington.

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket

 Ruminate

Casey relives an old argument with a friend, but is she remembering everything correctly? Ruminate explores why some arguments are so hard to let go of, and why sometimes replaying them is about more than just that perfect come back you wish you’d thought of at the time.

Cast: 3 (Female: 2 Male: 1)
Length: 10-15minutes
Style: Drama

Past Performances:
2018: First performed as part of The Memory Plays at BATS Theatre in 2018.

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket

ARTSPLAIN

A sculpted pair of lesbian lovers have to listen to a misogynistic museum curator’s inaccurate explanation to a tour group of the women’s “friendship” and his assumptions that the sculptor was a man.

Cast: 3 (Female: 2 Male: 1)
Length: 10 minutes
Style: Comedy, LGBTQ+

Past Performances:
2024: First performed as part of Legacy 7 at Basement Theatre Auckland

CATMAN

A near break up forces Andy to go to extreme lengths in order to communicate with his animal-loving, people-phobic boyfriend.

Cast: 2 Male
Length: 10 minutes
Style: Comedy, LGBTQ+

Past Performances:
2024: First performed as part of Quare Tales at Theatre@36, Dublin, Ireland

New Tricks

Assistance dog Boone mentors newbie pup, Zephyr. But will Boone want to help after learning what Zephyr’s training for?

Cast: 2 (any gender)
Length: 10 minutes
Style: Comedy

Past Performances:
2024: First performed as part of Pint Sized Plays at multiple venues in Queenstown

As Yet Unproduced Scripts

Justice is Blind

When a group made up of a mix of able-bodied and disabled students are asked to work together on the senior production, the disabilities get fed up with the way they are being treated. They become not-so invisible, physically manifesting themselves in the room outside of the people they normally inhabit, in order to put the worst offenders on trial. They are sick of being ignored, patronised, or treated badly, and they’re not putting up with it any longer.

Thus ensues a hostage situation unlike any other. The disabilities have demands and they are not disappearing until they are met!

Justice is Blind was the winner of the 2020 Playmarket Plays for the Young Award - teenage category

Cast: 21 (Young adult) A version that can be performed by 17-19 actors is also available.
Length: 1 Hour
Style: Young Adult

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket.

The God of Unborn Children

How do you grieve a child who never existed?

On the day her nephew is born, Rachel leaves her sister’s maternity room in distress. She gets lost in the hospital, eventually finding herself in a strange room with three basinets, one of which keeps crying for her. But Rachel does not have a baby, and she has no intention of picking this one up.

Rachel cannot leave the room under her own power, but visitors – Ari and Ella – join her there. The pair pull Rachel through time and space, showing her stories ranging from grieving palaeolithic humans, to whales unable to let go of their stillborn calves, to tiny sarcophaguses in Ancient Egypt. Ella and Ari also share their own stories – ones of miscarriage and yearned-for children – that have brought them to this place.

To return home, all three must face and leave their children – the ones who will never be born – a task which proves harder than any of them could imagine.

Cast: 5+ (3 female, 1 male + additional performers of any gender)
Length: 1 Hour
Style: Drama, supernatural

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket.

Beware the Wares

A woman discovers the comically terrifying reason storageware lids never fit in this 60-second sci-fi play.

Cast: 2-3 any gender
Length: 60 seconds
Style: Comedy Sci Fi

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket.

Indefinite Loop

Sarah enters Closure Scope looking to free herself from her past relationship. For more than a year, she has been reliving the same argument in her head. Now, Closure Scope gives her the opportunity to play out that argument, and maybe change the ending, with the help of an AI being programmed with the characteristics of Sarah’s ex.

To her horror, Sarah then finds herself trapped in the simulation room. The power has gone out, and she is left talking to herself – and the non-functioning AI being.

Cast: 2 (1 Male, 1 Female)
Length: 1 hour
Style: Comedy, Drama, Sci Fi

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket.

Chef’s Kiss

Sonia’s wedding day takes a surprising turn when her fiance interrupts the ceremony to compete in a cooking show.

An audio version of this script is also available.

Cast: 4 (2 Female, 1 Male, 1 Any)
Length: 10 Minutes
Style: Comedy

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket.

Goblin Mother

A mysterious crone tells a story around the campfire, but is it a story of ghosts and goblins, or the everyday horrors of man?

Cast: 1 female
Length: 5 Minutes
Style: Drama, monologue

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket.

Grief at 9.15

Old school friends reconnect in a hospital waiting room, as they struggle with fitting grief into their busy lives.

Cast: 2 (1 male, 1 female)
Length: 10 Minutes
Style: Drama

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket.

The Birthday Mystery

Twins, Jodie and Thomas, wake on their tenth birthday to find the rest of their family missing. Have they been kidnapped? Run away to join the circus? Got lost in the basement?

Jodie finds a note – not a ransom note, but a clue. A treasure hunt clue!

Jodie and Thomas must find and solve all of the clues to find their family, and perhaps a special birthday surprise. Along the way, they have some help from the family cat, their grumpy neighbour, and of course, the audience.

The Birthday Mystery was shortlisted for the 2023 Playmarket Plays for the Young Award - 3-7 year old category

Cast: 4-6 (1 lead female, 1 lead male, 2 male and 2 female who could double)
Length: 30 Minutes approximately
Style: Children’s, Interactive

For licensing enquiries, please contact Playmarket.