A SAMUEL FRENCH, INC. TITLE

What Are We Going to Do With All These Rotting Fish (collection)

Collection / Anthology

Norman Habe

Edited by Norman Habe

What Are We Going to Do With All These Rotting Fish?

Eight lively playwrights have written short, fun dramas for young people. They are easy to produce, with simple staging and few props. Dramatic readings can be done as well as full productions.

What Are We Going to Do With All These Rotting Fish (collection)

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  • SubGenre
    Subgenre
    Christmas/Holiday, Faith-based

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Summary
What Are We Going to Do With All These Rotting Fish?

Eight lively playwrights have written short, fun dramas for young people. They are easy to produce, with simple staging and few props. Dramatic readings can be done as well as full productions. Some of the plays are seasonal -- Christmas, Epiphany, Easter -- but they are all appropriate to almost any time of the year. A loneliness, frustration, pathos -- all to fit the different needs and feelings of the groups that use the plays. Young people and their leaders will find lots of ways to express their doubts, faith, bewilderment, and joy, plus a few firecrackers to wake them up and jostle their senses.

Contains: What Are We Going to Do with All These Rotting Fish?, Sacrifice to Virtue; Being the Shadow, It Was in the Stars, What They Didn't Do, Here Comes the Judge, First Night, and To Hell with Aunt Agatha.

Cast Attributes
Performing Groups

What Are We Going to Do With All These Rotting Fish?

SAM - Fortyish; less than polished; the best darned fisherman on the lake; as a youth he was a rabbinical student but he finally tired of waiting.
RUNT - Thirtyish; ever loyal; Sam's junior partner; as a child he was much neglected.
ANGELICA - Mid-twentyish; newly married; her one not-so-secret ambition in life is to live as an angel.
LARS - Mid-twentyish; while holidaying in the sunny south, he met and married Angelica; his oft uttered hope in life is that Angelica falls.
CARPE DIEM - "Carp the Shark," as he is known to his friends, is a first-century free enterpriser who unerringly knows both what and whom to do.

What They Didn't Do

PETE - The muscle. The violent one. But his violence is not undiminished by some amount of honest affection for his friends. He has little love for the adult world and little thought for it.
JOHN - A youth with deep feelings for his peers and the adult world. He has the perception and moral capability to see trouble wherever it lies, and yet his very morals cripple him before any action to right the wrong.
JIM - A negro with John's intelligence and Pete's violence but without John's commanding morality. He is more angry than lonely. He is embittered about adults but his effort to change them is little more than an excuse for expressing his bitterness against them. It is but recently that he found anything worthy in the church. And that was through John as his friend. He actually had more faith in John than he had in Christ.

To Hell With Aunt Agatha

AUNT AGATHA
COLONEL JAMES FRANKLIN BUTLER
WILLA COREY
WILBUR SUTSHELL
MARY FROSNOW
NURSE
ORDERLY
VOICE 1
VOICE 2

Sacrifice to Virtue

JUDITH HUNT
REV. FREDERICK MERRITT

First Night

MARY
JOHN/JOSEPH
APHIA/AZARIAS
KEZIAH/MAGDELENE
A NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO STOOD BY AT THE COMING OF CHRIST

It Was In The Stars

CASPAR
MELCHIOR
BALTHASAR
CITIZEN OF JERUSALEM
COUNSELOR
HEROD
PRIESTS AND SCRIBES

Being The Shadow

THE WHITE MAN - Middle-aged. He wears a dark conservative suit. Has lots of pens and pencils in his pockets, also bits of scraps of paper on which are memos to himself.
THE BLACK MAN - White's shadow.He wears the same dress as White, but in reverse. Light suit, white shoes, etc.
THE WHITE WOMAN - The White Man's secretary; young, attractive.
THE BLIND MAN - An old man. He uses a cane, has a mask over his eyes. Both he and the Deaf Man wear ill-fitting. baggy suits, the sort of thing one picks up for six bits at Good Will.
THE DEAF MAN - Wears ear muffs. He has a hearing aid in his shirt pocket and he frequently takes it out to check on it.

Here Comes the Judge

JOHN
DAVID
STEVE
THE JUDGE


  • Setting Multiple Settings.

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  • Minimum Fee: $65 per performance

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Norman Habe

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