Craig McNamara writes

Advertising characters gather for the funeral of a beloved cereal mascot — but what’s behind his unexpected death? Is one of the mourners … a cereal killer? One of the frequent themes of play competitions is the short murder mystery. I wasn’t a huge fan of the genre, and I knew that any attempt by me to write a traditional, typical whodunit would pale beside other entries.  Still, I was intrigued by the challenge. But I’d have to find a quirky hook for the story that would make it stand apart and be uniquely mine. What I came up with was a murder set in the world of advertising — more specifically, advertising characters , who exist alongside us flesh-and-blood humans (I don’t get into how; just accept it). It seemed like a fun idea — an offbeat scenario with larger-than-life characters and a mystery with an unexpected conclusion.  The writing came fairly easily, but first, there were two big problems to solve. One was in characters. I wanted an assortment of stock advertising...

“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 ).  ...

After a performance of my play,  Wanted Man  – wherein a woman comes up with a surprising way to meet somebody after she witnesses a bank robbery – the lead actress mentioned to me that she felt like the story was from another time, noting the absence of cell phones in the story.   A perceptive comment – because  Wanted Man  is indeed a remnant of a previous era. It was adapted from an unsold screenplay that I wrote in the mid 1990s.  The screenplay had one standout scene that drove most of the action that follows. I just had to figure out how to compress the whole two-hour story into that one scene. Despite this being more of an exercise in salvaging an old idea than a serious playwriting effort, it took me four drafts just to get everything set up right so it all pays off somewhat logically (for a romantic comedy, anyway).  When I finished, before I set it aside and went on to other things, I decided I might as well enter it into at least one play fe...

In a way, this was 35 years in the making.   Back in 1989, a local screenwriters’ group sponsored a public reading of a movie script I had written called  The Last Couple to Prom . It was an ‘80s screwball comedy wannabe, in which the protagonist, Ben, moved next door to his high school crush, Tracy, and spun an escalating series of lies and deceptions in order to get close to her. Instead, he becomes friends with her husband and learns a secret that could end their marriage and give him the chance with Tracy he was hoping for.   At the end of the night, I received a cassette tape recording of the production … which I never revisited for the next three decades.     Back then, I was weirdly averse to outlining, or even just thinking through, script ideas I had. I would just start writing, hoping my momentum would carry me through the next 90 to 110 pages. Spoiler: More than once, it didn’t. This time it did, but it also baked in some storytelling problems th...

A casual apology during coffee between friends leads a series of surprising confessions. That's my 10-minute play, The Besting of Friends , inspired by an occurrence in my life.  (Yes, I inadvertently lost a childhood friend's action figure. Yes, he had totally forgotten the incident when I replaced the figure decades later. No, nothing else that follows actually happened.) Over the last two years I've racked up a lot of rejections for plays I've submitted to various short-play festivals. (Part of the process, and a career in advertising has given me lots of experience in having ideas rejected.) So, at best, I was hoping that The Besting of Friends would at least make it into one of the many competitions in which it was entered. I was pleasantly surprised that it was produced  by two different theatre companies in the same month, February 2025.  The Rainy Day Artistic Collective, based in Seattle, included my play in their New Works New Writers 2025 showcase that was s...

  It's Christmas Eve in a dive bar, where Santa's most famous reindeer has a lot to say about "The Big Guy," commercialism, and his role as a holiday icon. I wrote this in response to the Theatrical Shenanigans podcast’s call for holiday plays.  Since this would be an audio production, I realized I could adapt (and extend) my 2003 short essay about a conversation between a bartender and grumbling Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and not have to worry about costuming.  Produced by the podcast for their "12 Plays of Christmas" Special, December, 2024. (The title graphic for the play was created by me.)

Last fall, I posted here about having a two-minute (yes, two-minute) play,  Thinking of Elephants , produced by the Minnesota Shorts Festival.    It was a simple idea for what was essentially a quick skit. Taking place in a laundromat, one person’s discomfort at having the “underthings” in her basket seen by a coworker ends in a kind of “mutually assured destruction” scenario; she demands a peek at his own “unmentionables.”   But even for that simple scenario, I wrote too much dialogue and had to throw out many lines to keep it to about two minutes.   But after seeing the two-minute production, I wondered if the idea couldn’t sustain the 10-minute length that most short-play competitions request. The key wasn’t just to add back in my excised dialogue, but to find an emotional core to the story that would make it about more than just embarrassment. Pondering this for a while, I realized that the text of the story – feeling exposed before a coworker – could be su...

Back in the late ‘80s, a Minneapolis screenwriters' group sponsored a couple of public readings for a movie script I’d written. It was small performance, for maybe 40 to 50 people, but it was professionally done, with local stage actors volunteering their time and talent to act out my words. And though the script never amounted to much beyond that, I still remember the thrill of hearing my characters come to life, hearing my jokes getting actual laughs.   I didn’t go on to become a screenwriter or TV writer, but last year, I started thinking about the possibility of again having something I wrote performed on stage, this time via those 10-minute play competitions that are popular with theatre groups. I had a story that I’d started to tell in a movie script 40 years ago, but never finished; I lifted a sequence from that screenplay, and through a lot of rewriting, turned it into ten-minute, two-person play.   Twenty-five submissions later, that play remains unproduced. But in th...