The Plays
A selection of Marge’s plays. Please read them, share them, use their text for monologues and scene work, and otherwise pilfer them for artistic inspiration. If you want to put on a production of one of these plays for an audience, reach out. These works are protected by US copyright law.
Grainville Cereals Incorporated
Five employees of a breakfast cereal manufacturer are kidnapped by their employers and forced through a gauntlet of twisted, Saw-like death games. What begins as a darkly comic allegory about the horrors of capitalism becomes something entirely different when the contestants get caught up in a polyamorous love story…
pages: 90
roles: 8
Premiered in Minneapolis in the fall of 2022, produced by Commutator Collective.
Directed by Sam Weisberg.
© 2024, Marge J. Buckley
Detective Chunk, The Multiverse, and Me
YouBone true-crime influencer Detective Chunk is trying to find out who killed their own mother. The only evidence is a jar of goop, their Neighbor Pip (suspicious), and a 1987 sketch of an alien abduction found in the exact spot where Mommy was murdered. Coincidence? Their camera operator, a housecat named Sigourney Weaver, isn’t so sure.
pages: 86
roles: 23 (doubling encouraged)
Premiered in Minneapolis in the fall of 2021, co-produced by Commutator Collective and the Virginia Twins.
Directed by Rosie Tabachnick.
© 2024, Marge J. Buckley
The Earth Room
On a Mars colony built to sustain the future of human life, homesick immigrants look to reconnect with the Earth in any way they can. They take comfort in virtual reality, a familiar brand of cookies, and giant murals of automobiles. But a first-born generation of young Martians is struggling to make sense of their lives. In The Earth Room, the snow is artificial, but the challenges of the future have never been more real.
pages: 122
roles: 5
Premiered in Boston in the spring of 2019, produced by Fresh Ink Theatre Company.
Directed by Rebecca Bradshaw.
© 2024, Marge J. Buckley
Fry of the Day
Originally written as a companion to Marge’s academic thesis Writing Postdrama, Fry of the Day (it/it/its) is a theatrical collage that explores text as a tool uncoupled from dramatic storytelling. It is a delirious pastiche of ideas that nearly grapples with the inherent absurdity of American mythmaking. It is a script-as-blueprint which presents scenes, monologues, movement, and design ordered as a stream of consciousness.
pages: 50
roles: 5 or more
Unproduced. Care to be the first?
© 2024, Marge J. Buckley