The Blue and the Grey

As you gear up for competition season, why not check out some of our top picks for standout plays? These scripts are bursting with memorable characters and fantastic stories, giving your students the perfect material to showcase their talent. The right play can really set your students apart in the competition scene. These selections are not only engaging but also offer plenty of moments for your actors to shine. Add one of these plays to your competition lineup, and get ready to see your students make their mark!

As January unveils its wintry palette, our attention shifts to a vibrant selection of plays designed to add some theatrical warmth to your stage or classroom. From dazzling tales to vivid narratives, these scripts are a kaleidoscope of colour, ready to light up the winter scene. So, cozy up and explore our January reading list. Let these plays paint a beautiful picture that transforms your season into an unforgettable experience. Embrace the drama, and let the colours of January come alive on your stage!❄️🎭

This month we turn our thoughts to Remembrance Day and Veterans Day. If you're looking for meaningful and impactful performances to mark this important time of remembrance, we have a curated list of plays that will help you do just that. Our November collection features plays designed not only to pay tribute but also to start and continue important discussions with your students - whether on the stage or in the classroom.

Time for a Tfolk Top Ten Plays For…Advanced Actors. You have students who can go to the next level. They are ready to tackle scripts beyond the norm of character development and realistic story lines. You want to raise the bar and we want to help you do that. Check out our top ten plays for advanced actors. It’s a great mix of issue driven, ensemble driven, character driven work. Click the link and you’ll be taken to the webpage for each play. There you’ll get the details and read sample pages. All the best with your search! Clowns With Guns A theatrical and absurd look at the repeated and seemingly endless cycle of school violence. This story is mean. There are guns. This play packs a theatrical punch. Censorbleep The Bleep Bleep Girls are the greatest group in school. They know what’s best. And when students try to stand up for themselves, or don’t do the “right” thing, they get dealt with. A great character driven piece where teenagers are turned into garbage and disappear. Breathless Three girls named Summer. Summer Adams is looking for love in all the wrong places. Summer Robertson is hanging on through her battle with cancer. And Summer Davis refuses to lose, even at the expense of her body and her friends.Three races of discovery. Will they crash or fly? A beautiful mature character piece with strong female leads. The Blue and the Grey Charlie is surrounded by ghosts: her father, a classmate’s sister, and the grey. Who are the grey? Civil war soldiers. A chance for an ensemble to build a haunting, exhilarating, and theatrical landscape. Power Play A gunshot is heard. Which of the five characters did it and why? Was it the Goth girl? The football star? What are the realities and the stereotypes of high school violence? Violence is about power. So is high school. This play has absurd moments, vivid characterization, and a powerful message. Stroke Static Russ is an eighty-three year-old man in a nursing home struggling with multi-infarct dementia. But in his mind he sees himself as a boy of eighteen, and thus is played by a young actor. The ensemble plays a variety of real and imaginary characters in Russ’ mind. A heartbreaking look at what goes on in the mind of someone who can’t communicate. Tick Talk The teenagers in Tick Talk have a lot to say, but no way to say it. Most characters are limited to only ONE WORD for the whole play. A fascinating challenge for actors: What happens when a character has just one word to express hopes, fears, and frustrations? What if they have something terribly important to say but can’t? Emotional Baggage One of the most unique plays we sell. There’s no dialogue. The play is based solely on non-verbal storytelling through mask and movement. Seven strangers meet in a train station. Instead of luggage, they all carry their own “emotional baggage.” Chemo Girls and Other Plays A collection that examines the impact of cancer through the eyes of teenagers. Characters deal with the difficulty of saying the word out loud, the difficulty of admitting a friend or family member has cancer, and the difficulty of finding the energy and the attitude needed to fight. Have You Heard? A play formatted solely in monologue. The story follows what happens in a school when rumours and secrets spin out of control. What makes a secret more powerful: When it’s the truth? Or when it’s a lie?

Time for a Tfolk Top Ten Plays About…Competition Pieces. You want winning plays. You want plays that fit competition rules. You want something that’s going to be easy to stage if you’re performing away from home. You want to give your students an interesting piece to take to competition, regardless of whether they win or not. All of these plays fit the bill. Easy to stage in an unfamiliar space. Many have won multiple competitions. And if they haven’t they’ll give your students an awesome experience. Take them to your next competition with pride. Click the link and you’ll be taken to the webpage for each play. There you’ll get the details and read sample pages. All the best with your search! Competition One-ActsAmong Friends and Clutter This play has won state competitions, been given superior production awards, and won first place in the 2013 Southeastern Theatre Conference High School Festival. The production that won SETC did the play with just a few cubes. It can be done with seven actors but it’s easily expandable. The scenes explore the most important relationships in life: friends, family and love. Anonymous A recent production of Anonymous won at the Arkansas State Thespian Festival and was chosen as a Chapter Select for the 2017 International Thespian Festival. Anonymous is the story of every teenager: the new kid trying to fit in, the best friends, the love interests, the kid in the corner with their secret, individuals trying to belong. Emotional Baggage A multi-award winning piece. It’s reached the All-Ontario level of the Sears Drama Festival, the State Level of Florida Thespians, it’s won straight superiors, critics choice and best play. And there’s a reason it captures attention. There’s no dialogue. The play is based solely on non-verbal storytelling through mask and movement. Seven strangers meet in a train station. Instead of luggage, they all carry their own “emotional baggage.” The Blue and the Grey This play is so imagistic, and so aurally stunning, it’s amazing the set isn’t more involved than it is. A small platform downstage, one upstage, and some chairs. It’s haunting, exhilarating and theatrical. And it’s not a surprise it’s won at competition. First place in the Rappahannock River Conference, first place in the 1A East Region, and an Outstanding Actress Award at the state level. A Deep Poetic Journey into Something There are excellent movement opportunities here and a fantastic main character for a senior girl. Jane wants to break out of her box, she wants a deep poetic journey. The problem is she has no idea where to start and maybe that box isn’t such a bad idea. This play received section 1A honours in Minnesota and advanced to the State One Act Festival. The Hope and Heartache Diner – One Act You want your students to dive deep into character development. You want ensemble opportunities for them. Check out The Hope and Heartache Diner. This play received outstanding production at the Kentucky State Thespian Festival and was chosen as a Chapter Select for the 2016 International Thespian Festival. The Butterfly Queen Beautiful ensemble piece that looks at the nature of sacrifice and putting others first. So easy to stage where a sweatshirt becomes a vehicle for protection. Gender flexible cast and doubling options available. Choose this play and have a transformative experience with your students. One Hundred Lies In this poignant comedy Liz presents her life as a competition, complete with scoreboard and time clock. The goal of the game: to dramatize 100 lies told by and to Liz. But what about the lies she tells to herself? I’ve seen this done with a person playing the scoreboard and clock and it works perfectly. Easy to stage with lovely three-dimensional characters. Mmmbeth I have seen this play so many times in competition and it’s been a blast every time. So much fun to do as it takes a twisty turning and gender bending look at the Scottish play. A great piece to teach comic timing to your students. Numerous outstanding productions! Stressed Another piece I’ve seen in multiple competitions. This is a small cast actor showcase. It has no set and relies totally on the character communication. The play is called a symphony of sound and character and that’s a perfect description. It takes rhythm, timing, and the cast working as one. A winning combination.

Welcome to our Featured Play Spotlight. Today we look at ghosts, the civil war, Walt Whitman and ice. Charlie is surrounded by ghosts. The ghost of an estranged father who leaves her an antique musket. The ghost of a classmate’s sister who cautions Charlie, The Grey will hear you. Who are the Grey? Ghosts of Lost Confederate soldiers ambushed following the first battle of Fredericksburg, 1862. As the Aurora Borealis light up the Virginia night sky Charlie must confront the living and the dead. She’s trying to find peace but will she make the right choice? What brings her to the centre of a barely frozen lake with the musket and her ghosts? Beat! Beat! Drums! Blow! Bugles! Blow! Why did we publish this play? Theatre must be theatrical. Period. Which sounds like a given, but that’s not always the case when you’re reading a manuscript. Publishers often only have the printed script to go from (rather than being able to see the play produced). We have to be able to “see” the play on stage, and “see” what it would look like brought to life. The Blue and the Grey is all that and more. It is haunting. It is exhilarating. It is theatrical. There is choral sound work that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. And I haven’t even started talking about the unique, flawed, interesting characters yet. Pick this play up now. Read it now. Buy it now. Let’s hear from the author!1. Why did you write this play? The answer is a deceptively simple, as well as a little complicated. The “deceptively simple” answer is: I wrote this play for my students. The “a little complicated” answer is: Coming off the previous year’s success performing Ray Bradbury’s Kaleidoscope, I wanted to challenge the students, but felt underwhelmed by choices I was seeing from my normal publishing sources. Simultaneously, I had a hankering for a “ghost play,” and had a notion involving Walt Whitman visiting Fredericksburg, Virginia — a historical fact a colleague of mine had recently written some newspaper articles about for local interest. Those two thoughts combined led me to understand exactly how I wanted to challenge my students, and that was with a play that mixed emotion, memory, history, poetry, and hauntings of various sizes, shapes, and textures into something that was uniquely ours. 2. Describe the theme in one or two sentences. The theme is about the difficulty to escape one’s own past — be it personal, local, or national; and how the only way to cope with that difficulty is by making obvious connections in the unlikeliest of places. 3. What’s the most important visual for you in this play? Certainly the climactic image — which was actually my starting point. At the risk of spoiling things, I always knew the most arresting moment would be a modern, teenage girl hammering at the ice beneath her knees with a Civil War-era musket, while Confederate ghost soldiers trained their own muskets at a child in a blue, puffy winter coat. That was literally the first image that came to mind when I had the pieces in place, and I was always writing to that inevitable, inescapable choice for the main character. 4. If you could give one piece of advice for those producing the play, what would it be? Embrace the ephemera of it. I discovered through writing, and through the first production, how dreamlike and surreal the piece was — that some of the transitions and some of the moments developed a real dream-logic to it that I ultimately embraced. Charlie’s line “Was I daydreaming sleep? Or was I a sleeper wishing I was awake?” summed a lot of that quality up for me, and it was a line that we refined and refined throughout production. The sentiment of the line, though, came to me one morning before school started, in that special sleepless restlessness that comes midway through any production. I was walking into the cafeteria of the high school to go check on something in the auditorium, and I heard this underwater-sea-shell noise through the haze of my sleep deprivation. That sound, obviously an audio hallucination of some sort, struck me as the correct tone for the whole piece — the uncertainty of the way reality shifts around you when you’re half-awake and unsure of your surroundings. That’s also when the self-contradictory nature of the line came to me, and when I felt confident in exploring and expanding that quality. 5. Why is this play great for student performers? I originally intended this to be more didactic — to teach the students who performed it more about history, particularly as it happened in our own backyard, an echo of which sentiment I gave to Morrissey early on. As we developed and performed the piece, however, it became clear that dramatic license would overtake the didactic qualities, so what really replaced it? For me, it’s the sense of collaboration, both between myself and the cast, but also among each other. I still have students who remember with fondness their role in the ensemble and the difficulty in, say, matching the rain-tapping in Scene 10 with the emotional intensity of the actor playing Darren. The effect of that moment — of actually listening to, and responding with, the emotional crests effected by that particular actor, and how in tune with each other and each other’s performances they all had to be spoke tremendous volumes to the performances that they each managed from the piece. Though the play is undoubtedly Charlie’s, it’s a play that begs for an ensemble to work together to achieve its effects. So as student performers, they had to be so in touch with each other on an emotional and on a performance level, that surprises, changes, feints, new wellsprings, and old habits could be indulged, experimented with, discovered, exposed, and incorporated by all.

Time for a Tfolk Top Ten Plays For…Ensembles! It’s not about the leads and the chorus, it’s about the ensemble. The definition of the word ensemble is to have parts that come together as a whole and are only considered in relation to the whole. It’s all about working together to make a great production. Here are 10 plays that explore the concept of the ensemble. Click the link and you’ll be taken to the webpage for each play. There you’ll get the details and read sample pages. All the best with your search! The Blue and the Grey This play starts with the sound of drumming and the words of Walt Whitman. This sets the tone of the play and lets us know what to expect. This is the work of the ensemble. In this play of ghosts, the past, and those left behind – The ensemble creates the aural world in The Blue and the Grey – haunting, necessary. Finishing Sentences Sometimes an ensemble is needed to populate the world of the play. In Finishing Sentences Kendra finds herself surrounded by camp life – that’s what the ensemble provides. And besides, you can’t have a colour war without them! (even if the blue team can’t get their chant together) Storied Quite often, the world of the play is, well, out of this world. It’s built in the imagination of the playwright, and in order for the audience to buy in, they need to see characters who also buy into the world. Storied takes place in a magical dimension inhabited by characters from fiction. Everyone from Javert to Santa Claus to Elizabeth Bennett lives there. The ensemble is crucial to the audience leaving the real world behind as they watch the play. The Happiness Shop In this play an ensemble of “Roppets” – robot puppets litter the stage. They are on stage for the entire play. They visual demonstrate “happiness.” They smile, they laugh, they hi-five all the time. It isn’t creepy at all. Aren’t middle schoolers happy all the time? They’re too young to have problems…. The Scarlet Heart The Scarlet Heart is a commedia dell’arte piece which can be played as scripted or off of scenarios. To play off a scenario means a group really has to know each other, listen to each other, improv often together. They’ll have to become a true ensemble. Being Bianca: The Semi Complete Guide Being Bianca has a huge cast – it can include up to 50 actors. And that means everyone has to be on the same page and working toward the same goal. Bianca has to do some community service. She decides the best service is to teach the world what it’s like to be her. Who wouldn’t want to be Bianca? Ariadne’s Thread: The Adventures of Theseus and the Minotaur Ariadne’s Thread has an ensemble in the classical sense of the word – a greek chorus. Again it’s all about creating the world of the play and in this tale of Minotaur’s and mazes the greek chorus observes and comments. They are the voice of the audience and they share that voice in perfect unison. Stupid is Just 4 2day We can’t avoid stupidity. It happens. To everyone! But it’s just temporary. The characters in this vignette play are all named after orchestra instruments. And that’s because all the transition pieces are performed like music rather than theatre. Everyone speaks, and gestures in unison. Win the Best Ensemble award! Chemo Girl Camille is given a video game system from her mom as a form of recovery therapy for cancer. The ensemble creates the video game for Camille as she is drawn into the world and takes on the name “Chemo Girl.” Think video games can’t be done in the theatre? The ensemble makes it happen. Anonymous In Anonymous everyone is just trying to get along, get by, make themselves heard. It’s hard when you don’t have a face or a voice. The teens in this play have no names because they’re everyone. The ensemble brings this theme to life.

Time for a Tfolk Top Ten Plays About…Dramas. Issue plays that don’t talk down to your students. Theatrical explorations of serious topics. Read one, read them all! Click the link and you’ll be taken to the webpage for each play. There you’ll get the details and read sample pages. All the best with your search! Look Me In the Eye Teenagers in the future are obedient, polite, and respectful. Everything about their life is black and white, right or wrong. This is due in large part to the government-required “Observation Sessions.” But there is a dark underside to this utopian vision. Sometimes life is grey. Chemo Girl A collection that examines the impact of cancer through the eyes of teenagers. Characters deal with the difficulty of saying the word out loud, the difficulty of admitting a friend or family member has cancer, and the difficulty of finding the energy and the attitude needed to fight. Chicken. Road. Why did the chicken cross the road? Why is the sky blue? What’s two plus two? Why did he kill himself? A group of teenagers grapple with unanswered questions as they struggle to understand why someone who seemed to have it all would commit suicide. Have You Heard Everybody knows a secret. Some keep them quiet. Some let them loose. This monologue-based play follows what happens in a school when rumours and secrets spin out of control. What makes a secret more powerful: When it’s the truth? Or when it’s a lie? Upon a Sea of Dreams: A Journey on the Titanic An amazing character-based drama with a unique look at this infamous event. In a tiny third class cabin sisters plan for a new life in America. Suddenly the ship stops moving and sirens blast. The girls are told to stay in their cabin. Another passenger says the ship is sinking. The Waking Moment Julie would do anything to be just like her best friend Rhonda. She gets her wish when she wakes up one morning in Rhonda’s bed – but nobody seems to notice. Julie quickly realizes that Rhonda’s perfect world is actually a nightmare. Deals with sexual abuse. Anonymous We all have our stories. “New and old, complete and untold.” Anonymous is a story of every teenager: the new kid trying to fit in, the best friends, the love interests, the kid in the corner with their secret, the group of individuals each trying to belong. The teenagers of Anonymous have no names because they are “Me” and “You.” They are everyone. Discovering Rogue Rogue has the best beachfront property – right on the ocean. Her home is a cardboard box but she doesn’t mind. Others, though, mind very much. They want Rogue to leave the beach. Now. But Rogue isn’t just running away from home; she’s running away from herself. Breathless – Three girls named Summer. Three races of discovery. Will they crash or fly? A beautiful character piece with strong female leads. Clowns With Guns (A Vaudeville) – A theatrical and absurd look at the repeated and seemingly endless cycle of school violence. This story is mean. There are guns. BONUS! NEW DramaThe Blue and the Grey – Charlie is surrounded by ghosts: her father, a classmate’s sister, and the grey. Haunting, exhilarating, theatrical. Planning on performing one of these or another Theatrefolk play? Let us know all about it with pictures and highlights – we might even feature you on our site! Click here to submit your story.