Plays
Plays are available for licensed production. For licensing information, visit the Contact Page
Sunflower
A play about love, language, and why flowers face sunlight. Five characters in various stages of relationship decay discover their words may not mean what they always thought. Then they must decide what to do. Poetic, heartbreaking, and painfully provocative, this uniquely theatrical play uproots a romantic ideal of love that so frequently lets us down. Sixty minutes with five actors.
Sunflower premiered on October 6, 2022 at Greenhouse Theatre in Chicago, produced by Theatre Contronym. The production was staged with no director.
Critical Reception
Through the use of repetition, poetic musings and meaty metaphors...[Sunflower's] poignant moments painfully give way to open wounds and bittersweet epiphanies that often leave you lingering to absorb each perspective at a time...While not necessarily prescribing solutions nor a sense of hope, there is something refreshing about witnessing the blunt desires and fears about relationships unearthed in all their painful, messy glory.
- Mariah Shultz, Chicago Theatre Triathlon
[Sean] Dance has created an impressive display of language and storytelling. Their examination of what relationships mean and how we interpret them invites the audience to consider what it means to love another person, and be loved in return. The script is enticing in and of itself, but this is an exciting new play that could be produced in any theatre around the country, and should be.
- Jacob Menke, Playwright
Twenty Horses Dead in KentuckyA Hillbilly Effigy
Fourteen horses lay dead on a mountaintop-mining strip in Appalachian Kentucky. A soldier returns home to discover the sun hasn't risen in three months; the only sign of life is a friend who can't find another job. As the night gets darker the long estranged friends discover what it means to leave home, return again, and give your blood to the dirt that birthed you. They encounter an old woman and a young girl fighting for things they will never have. Six more horses die. This play is a condemnation of JD Vance and his reprehensible book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. What does a culture in crisis mean to those who abandon it? Two hours, four actors.
Twenty Horses Dead in Kentucky was under consideration at The Royal Court in London during 2021. Sean Dance is currently seeking a premiere production.
Critical Reception
The complex symbolism, metaphor, and detailed references that are lyered throughout the play...created a staggering world of abstracted pain and complex tenderness. The way that space was made to feel both vast and small at once was dizzingly effective, and {I} appreciated that the social commentary was at the heart of the play - the metaphors about land ownership and rural poverty (both economic and emotional) were deftly seeded in.
Although {I} found it a complex read, {I was} intrigued by the way in which the stage directions generously challenge the reader and audience. {It} offers much space for theatrical interpretation and realization, particularly with the play's arresting visual language which makes for an exciting offer of theatrical problems to solve.
- Ellie Horne, Royal Court Literary Associate
An ambitious, visceral, highly theatrical work.
- Aubrey Cefaly, Playwright
Electric Flesh Chewed Upin the Chaos Engine
There's a thing in the back of their throat. It might be eating their teeth. But there's no way of knowing until they look. Six people linguistically unravel as they stumble through addiction and the choice between going to the dentist or pulling out their own teeth. A full throttled ninety minutes for six actors, maybe five.
Electric Flesh Chewed Up in the Chaos Engine has received a private reading and is currently under consideration at an unannounced theatre. Rights inquiries for the premiere production remain encouraged.
Read Electric Flesh... on New Play Exchange
Critical Reception
This play threw me for a loop so big I needed three to five business days to recover. It dives into addiction and the recovery from it in a way that captures a humanly inhuman experience. Sean [Dance] has a wonderful way of creating characters from nothing but symbols and concepts. Wonderful from start to finish.
- j chavez, Playwright
The Airplane Game
Six people gather to participate in a dying pyramid scheme. They do whatever they can to maintain plausible deniability and make themselves richer. When a new passenger joins the game, the nature of the system comes to light. A satire about money and the way we trust the structures that reward us with it. This play utilizes six actors for 90 minutes.
The Airplane Game was developed with Derby City Playwrights for their 2020 New Works Festival. It was subsequently produced as a digital reading with DCSG Theatre. It was a finalist for the B-Street Theatre Comedy Festival in 2018.
Paralysis
Logan's mother is dying from a genetic disease. Mireia is pregnant with their first child. Together they have the opportunity to use Crispr DNA splicing to make their child a "genetically perfect" designer baby. Logan remains bewildering apprehensive, while Mireia is confident to the point of cruelty. They have two weeks to decide. A heart-breaking linguistically driven story with unique spiraling structure, this play asks: how do you make choices while pulling against the weight of unseen implication?
This play runs eighty minutes with six actors.