Plays
Bitch of the Baskervilles
A meta-fictional parody (2 men, 7 women)
Approx. 90 minutes
From the Socratic Theatre website: On a dark, cold night, Dr. Watson waits on the moor outside Baskerville Hall, and hears the mournful howl of a mysterious hound. Only, this Dr. Watson is wearing a corset, and is rather surprised to discover that her anatomy is a little different than usual. She soon discovers that not only is she a lady, but the Great Detective is now Miss Sherlock Holmes, they have a butler named Hudson, and they are protecting one Lady Henrietta Baskerville from the predations of the spectral hound.
S.R. Kriger brings a gleefully metafictional twist to Conan Doyle’s classic stories, complete with mysterious figures, speckled bands, and a lady’s bust…of Napoleon.
Check out the first workshop video:
The Dark Room
A dramatic collage (6 performers)
Approx. 90 minutes
Shakespearean. Romance. Movement. Comedy. In eight different styles, this play has eight different ghost stories to share. From a tale of a young man who yearns to learn his wife’s morbid secret to that of a woman who must uncover why her dead best friend appears to her as a silent little girl, each narrative explores our hopes, fears, and dreams of what might return from beyond the grave.
This play shared the 2006-2007 J. C. W. Saxton Prize in Playwriting, awarded by the Queen’s University Department of Drama. It was performed as a staged reading at that institution.
Murder Mystery
A comedic mystery in two acts (6 men, 5 women)
Approx. 120 minutes
At isolated Codwall Manor, Devonshire, the guests are dropping like flies. Taciturn detective Stanford Scriven and his amiable partner, Mrs. Murdock, are on the trail of the homicidal madman responsible. But there’s something deucedly odd about Codwall. The fire in the fireplace isn’t real. The books in the book-case are painted on. Slowly, Scriven and Murdock grasp the horrible truth: they and their companions are characters in a murder mystery, and the author is killing them off one by one. As if that weren’t bad enough, the author has disguised himself as one of them. But which?
This play was performed as a dramatic reading by Staged and Confused Productions in the fall of 2006. It won the 2005-2006 J. C. W. Saxton Prize in Playwriting, awarded by the Queen’s University Department of Drama.
Plot/Counterplot
A quartet of one-act plays (2 men, 2 women)
Approx. 15 minutes each
Boy-wizard Dante Dixon refuses to inspire any more best-sellers until his demands are met. The honeymoon is over for an aging Romeo and Juliet. And psychiatric patient Wolfram Samovar can’t be a real evil mastermind… can he?
In four interludes, eight characters (like teenaged Stacey, who discovers her sitcom family adopted her from the “real world”) probe the differences between fiction and reality and answer every fan’s secret question: what if our favourite characters really could come to life?
Various scenes from this piece have been produced by the Vogt Studio Series (Kingston, Ontario), Gnu Ground Theatre (Kingston, Ontario), and students from Merivale High School and the University of Guelph.
The interlude “Laughtrack” is available through JD Drama Publishing.
Reviews include:
“The script […] is a wonderful case of wit and sarcasm blending to create a story that laughs at literature and its authors.” (Queen’s Journal, on the scene “Writer’s Bloc”)
“…containing many funny lines and clever Shakespearean in-jokes, it […] serves as an interesting meditation on the contrast between the romantic fictions people have of life and death, and the mundate reality” (Queen’s Journal, on the scene “As Time Goes By”)