The Plays
Here are (some of) Marge’s plays. Please read them, share them, use their text for monologues and scene work, and otherwise pilfer them for artistic inspiration. If you want to put on a production of one of these plays for an audience, please reach out. These works are protected by US copyright law.
Grainville Cereals Incorporated
Five employees of a breakfast cereal manufacturer are kidnapped by their employers and forced through a gauntlet of twisted, Saw-like death games. What begins as a darkly comic metaphor about the horrors of capitalism becomes something entirely different when the contestants overthrow their captors and get caught up in a polyamorous love story…
pages: 90
roles: 8
Premiered in Minneapolis in the fall of 2022, produced by Commutator Collective.
Directed by Sam Weisberg.
© 2024, Marge J. Buckley
Detective Chunk, The Multiverse, and Me
YouBone phenomenon Detective Chunk is trying to find out who murdered their Mommy. The only evidence is a jar of goop, their Neighbor Pip (suspicious), and a very specific drawing of an alien abduction from 1987 that Sigourney Weaver (their camerawoman—a cat) found in the exact spot where Mommy was murdered. Coincidence?
pages: 86
roles: 23 (doubling encouraged)
Premiered in Minneapolis in the fall of 2021, co-produced by Commutator Collective and the Virginia Twins.
Directed by Rosie Tabachnick.
© 2024, Marge J. Buckley
The Earth Room
On a Mars colony built to sustain the future of human life, homesick immigrants look to reconnect with the Earth in any way they can: virtual reality, nostalgia-based cookies, and giant murals of automobiles. But a new generation of young Martians want to leave the past behind and carve out a culture for themselves, even if it means they have to fight for it. In The Earth Room, the snow is artificial, but the challenges of the future have never been more real.
pages: 122
roles: 5
Premiered in Boston in the spring of 2019, produced by Fresh Ink Theatre Company.
Directed by Rebecca Bradshaw.
© 2024, Marge J. Buckley
Fry of the Day
Originally written as a companion to Marge’s academic thesis Writing Postdrama, Fry of the Day (it/it/its) is a theatrical collage that explores text as a tool uncoupled from dramatic storytelling. It is a delirious pastiche of ideas that nearly grapples with the inherent absurdity of American mythmaking. It is a script-as-blueprint which presents scenes, monologues, movement, and design ordered as a stream of consciousness.
pages: 50
roles: 5 or more
Unproduced. Care to be the first?
© 2024, Marge J. Buckley