Eric's Plays

Blockhead: A play about writer's block, and how hard it is to find good beta-readers. Drama, 2 actors, mature content. 

Border Dispute: Two people reconnect, after being apart for a while, and not by mutual agreement. Drama, 1F/1M. 

Checking the Boxes: A quick little primer on privilege, with a dose of irony. Comedy, 1F/1M.

Checkmate: A girl, a boy, a high school chess club, a little romance, and a dash of murder. Black Comedy, 1F/1M. 

Creative Accounting: Some home renovation dreams call for unorthodox strategies. Comedy, 1F/1M.  

Couch Potatoes: Two thieves break into a hoarder's home... Black Comedy, 1F/1M, mature content. 

Diagnosis: BDE*: Companion piece to Okay (see below), based on a popular song. Can you guess which one? Drama, 2F, mature content.

Egg Timer: Two people try to figure out what to do before the sand runs out. Comedy, 3F/1M.

Final Countdown: A right-wing pundit and a left-wing radical meet in a coffee shop. Drama, 2 actors, mature content.

Good People: A widower arrives ahead of the placing of statue to honour her late husband. A young woman arrives early with a can of red paint. Drama, 2F.

Hot Tub Confidential: Three people in a hot tub. Are they naked? How do we find out... Comedy, 2F/1M

Klutz Slutz: The weirdest fetish you've ever seen... Comedy, 1F/1M, mature content. 

Love Song*: An adaptation of TS Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, more or less.  Black Comedy, 3F/1M, mature content. 

Mom and Dad: Two teenagers keep trying to hook up, but Mom and Dad keep walking in. Comedy, 3F/1M. 

Money: It's amazing what you can do when the nurses aren't looking... Drama, 3F. 

Not Another Play About a Play: Aren't we getting sick of those? Comedy, 1F/1M, coarse language, mature content. 

Pi Crust: A short play about random silliness. Comedy, 1F/1M. 

Point: Counterpoint: Punching holes in another's logic, for whatever reason. Comedy, 2 actors. 

Rewrites: Never let your ex crash on your couch. Black Comedy, 1F/1M, coarse language, mature content. 

Saturday Morning: A man tries to bring back his cartoon-watching childhood joy. Comedy, 1F/1M, mature content. 

Still, still: A play about writing and rewriting, with a few "helpers" offering advice. Drama, 3F/1M.

Stuck: A play using just 30 words about a truck that's stuck. Comedy, 2F/1M

Tea and Scones: Murder never tasted so delightful! Black Comedy, 3F, mature content. 

App Store Time Machine: A woman from the present tries to go back in time to save us all, only to bring her younger self to the present instead. Comedy, 2F, coarse language. 

Cement Head: A recently-retired construction worker hires an actress to help him get some closure on his past before he dies. Drama, 1F/1M, coarse language, mature content. 

Cliche: My most popular show! A man meets a woman, waiting for a pawn shop to open. Comedy, 1F/1M, mature content. 

Crushed: How far would you go to try to make peace with your past, and what if it all went horribly wrong? Comedy, coarse language, mature content, 4F/1M. 

Dress Code: In a dystopian future where Canada suffers under an oppressive regime that forces everyone to wear the same drab, generic clothing a few rebellious teens meet in secret, to share knowledge of the clothes of the past. But the risk they run is very high, for at any moment the much feared and hated Fashion Police could come crashing through the door, and arrest them all for their defiant behaviour. Comedy-Drama, 5F/3M. 

Heart of Eden: A lovely young woman wakes up one morning in New York's Central Park, tosses the newspapers off of herself, and begins to sing. Musical romantic comedy, 1F/1M. 

Hen House Hotties: Feathers fly as three desperate housewives vie to win a pair of backyard chickens. Comedy, 3F. 

Hitchin' at the Junction: All is well at the Ennotville station when Bessie Buxom, a girl of plain features and modest assets, comes to town. But alas, she has arrived on the day the evil villain (and her arch nemesis) Cyril Snead has hatched his dastardly plot to derail the train and steal the bags of money it carries! It's up to Bessie to save the train, the station-master, and the day. "Gay 90's" melodrama, 1F/2M. 

Human Nature: Three people meet in a prison cell. One has just been tortured. The other two hide terrifying secrets. Drama, 2F/1M, violence, coarse language, nudity, mature content. 

Humans: Two strangers meet in a post-apocalypse wasteland, and don't try to kill each other, for a change. Drama, 2F. 

Leftovers: Two homeless people, "efficiencied out" by modern technology, meet in an abandoned store. A third woman walks in with a child, determined to eat them. Drama, 3F/1 girl, coarse language.

Living: My best play, so far. A young man hurtles into his apartment after a night of drinking, heading straight for the bathroom. A shadow creeps in the open door, a young woman, also drunk, with just one wish - to die. In the darkness of the night these two strangers do battle with themselves and each other, with nothing less than their lives on the line. Drama, 1F/1M, coarse language, violence, nudity, mature content. 

Lost and Found: A man and a woman are thrown up on a rock in the ocean after a shipwreck, where they must wait to die. Drama, 1F/1M, coarse language, violence, partial nudity, mature content. 

Maid of Stone: A brilliant-but-flawed Millenial searches for meaning in a world descending into a neo-fascist hellscape, pushing away her mother and her daughter, until she falls (or did she jump? or was she pushed?) out of the corner office window of her multi-national pharmaceutical company. Drama, 3F, coarse language, mature content.

Muzzle Blast: A mother and her daughter cling to civility in a low-rent Montreal apartment. A father of two moves in next door after a long and bitter divorce. Love, lust, and the longing for better days behind and ahead ferment within all three, until the politics of violence ignites a powder keg of emotion beneath their feet. Drama, 2F/1M, coarse language, violence, mature content. 

Okay: Are you okay? I mean really, are you okay? No, you're not okay. Drama, 2F. 

Room 101: In an Orwellian-inspired room with two locked doors, three people confront their greatest fears. Drama, 3F, coarse language, mature content. 

Selfie: Three people are stranded in a deserted field at the end of the day after a sketchy music festival. Only two of them are going to get home safely. Drama, 2F/1M, coarse language, mature content. 

Shakedown in the Loose Moose Caboose: Cheer on the virtuous maiden Beulah Belle, temple of virgin purity, as she desparately tries to foil the evil villain Tyrone T Turncoat's dastardly plot, and save the life of a sleeping, drunken brakeman. "Gay90's" melodrama, 1F/2M. 

Stalemate: An old man and a young woman have a standing game of chess, every week, or at least that's what they both seem to think it is. Maybe this week it will turn into something more. Drama, 1F/1M.

The 3 Witches: It's load-in day for "The Scottish Play," and there's a few surprises waiting in the dressing room. Comedy, 3F, coarse language, nudity, mature content. 

The Miller's Tale*: Based on the rather raunchy Canterbury Tale, you should probably bring you own bathtub to this one.  Comedy, 2F/3M, mature content. 

The Reeve's Tale*: This Canterbury tale is actually about an unscrupulous miller, his wife, his eldest daughter, a baby, a cradle, and two very handsome, virile, intelligent young gentlemen scholars - okay, so they're more scholars than gentlemen, but they are quite virile. Comedy, 2F/3M, coarse language, mature content. 

The Nun: A fictional tale of how the world's first-known female playwright could have gotten her start. Comedy-Drama, 10F, or more. 

The Un-Helpfuls: Joe is just an average guy, trying to make his way in the world, but he's pestered a bunch of "super-heroes" with really lousy powers. There's Procrastinator, Sleepy-Time Tease, Grassy Green, Guilt-o Shame-o, and their mysterious, omnipotent leader, Death Lord Doubt. Is today the day Joe will finally defeat them all and take the next step towards his dollar-store dreams? Comedy, 2F/4M, doubling possible, mature content. 

Three Days Later: One woman saves another woman from danger, and they become fast friends, or so it seems. Drama, 2F, coarse language, partial nudity, mature content. 

To Do, or Not to Do: Ever wonder what the little angel and the little devil that fly just over your shoulders do when they're not trying to help you sort out a major moral conundrum? Watch Red and White battle in out inside Emma's head as they struggle to meet the demands of their respective bosses. Comedy, 2F. 

Where Corn Don't Grow: Samuel is an abusive, alcoholic father, having completely failed to carry on after his wife's death. When his kids come home from school one afternoon they carry with them news that will finally bring their secret out into the open, and tear the family apart. Drama, 1F/2M, coarse language, mature content. 

All My Sins Remembered: A mid-sized Western town of no particular importance is besieged by a bizarre string of gruesome murders. As the bodies pile up it becomes apparent that each of the incidents closely mimic the murders, suicides and battle-kills of Shakespearean tragedies. Suspicions fly around a graduate student at the university who's writing his thesis on the Bard's treatment of death. But the case is far from certain, and the student himself is sure he is innocent. Satire/Drama, 3F/2M, doubling, coarse language, violence, mature content. 

Big Money: The pandemic is finally over. Three budding entrepreneurs gather at the lakeside retreat of an eccentric millionaire to pitch their ideas for new business ventures to take advantage of the opportunities in this brand new world, but the zest for life in a mysterious house guest pulls them away towards something that is more important to each of them than the three million dollars they came here to seize. Comedy-Drama, 3F/2F, coarse language, mature content. 

Biosphere: It's a bleak, barren, post-apocalypse future planet Earth. A young woman staggers out of the wastelands and into the fortified oasis of the Pentheus clan, one of the last remaining pockets of humanity. Before Dakota can even begin to beg for her acceptance into the clan outside forces thrust them all into an epic battle for their very survival.  Action/Romance, 5F/1M/1 Girl. 

Dirty Deeds at Handlebar Dan's House of Old Wives, or How Sally Simple Saved the Sarsaparilla Saloon: The title is so long that it pretty much says it all! "Gay 90's" melodrama, 6F/4M (cross-gender casting appropriate and encouraged). 

Home Farm, or Life Before the Cows Went Berserk: This play was conceived of before the Canadian Beef industry was destroyed by the paranoia over BSE, or Mad Cow Disease. Rewritten to adequately reflect the impact this has had on Canadian agriculture, Home Farm has become a eulogy of sorts for the family farm. The plays' premiere in October 2004 struck a chord with rural and urban audiences alike, establishing Grinder Productions as a theatre company truly willing to dare to be different. Comedy-drama, 1F/1M.  

People Like Us: A play written almost entirely in iambic pentameter about the realities of life on the front lines of working poverty, and the shattering reality of a first day on the job. Drama, 6F/3M, mature content. 

Sinistral Intentions: An old man takes his daughter and granddaughters fishing for the weekend, or at least that's what he's told them. A satiric look at populism run amok. Comedy-Drama, 3F/1M, coarse language, mature content.