Craig McNamara writes

“A married man shows up at the door of his skeptical former lover, hoping to convince her — and perhaps himself – that he’s ready for a long-term commitment. If only their cell phones would stop ringing …” Another self-created production — yes, featuring digitally generated voices and images — as a last-ditch effort to see my first short play as something more than words on a page. It started with an unfinished screenplay from 1989 for a romantic comedy called The Last Affair. I had written about 30 pages before I lost the thread on where it was supposed to be going and abandoned the story. Some 25 years later, I rediscovered the script and, looking for a creative challenge, began toying with somehow refashioning it into a one-act play that could maybe be staged at local theatre.  But again the story defeated me – for all my rewriting, there was still barely a plot, just a lot of discussing and arguing and sniping with no sense of forward movement.  So when I began readi...

In early 2025, I saw a competition for 10-minute plays that took place anywhere within an airport.    I assumed most people would naturally gravitate to scenarios around the most obvious settings – TSA lines, airport gates and baggage claims. So it seemed one way to stand out was to set my script in none of those.   Instead, I’d feature a family of four as they arrived at the airport with their bags. No interactions with airport personnel, no social or political commentary – just an all-out comedy about their inter-family conflicts, triggered by the stresses of traveling together.    I thought of it as writing a scene for the cast of a family sitcom –  All in the Family  in particular, not that I was trying to use their characters. But like that show, and other well-crafted sitcoms, I wanted every cast member to have a distinctive relationship to each of the other characters, that would guide their responses. In fact, I (sloppily) diagrammed out how ea...

Santa faces some uncomfortable truths when he’s subjected to the harsh scrutiny of a focus group.   Since I’d had early success getting  Red-Nosed Drunk  produced in 2024, I decided to try adapting another holiday essay I’d written years ago, this one about Santa Claus getting an image makeover. (You can read the original essay here .)   Because there was no actual narrative in the one-page essay, I created a meeting between St. Nick and two marketing professionals.    Admittedly, the premise made for a pretty static play. Still, I thought it could work in ten minutes or less. The marketers presenting research that undermined all the tropes of Santa, and his reactions to their bizarre recommendations, seemed surprising, absurd, and funny.    One big problem, though: My play, like the essay that inspired it, turned on a pop culture reference that was nearly 50 years old (a popular character from the 1970s-era sitcom,  Happy Days ).  ...