Stageplay
Full-Length Stageplays:
To request full digital scripts, send inquiry here.
Material ©Lance Arthur Smith. All rights reserved.
For MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, click here.
Sequence
(available as both full-length and virtual play- content differs in both)
CC0 Public Domain
Production History:
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Full-length Premiere rights available
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Virtual production rights available through Steele Spring Stage Rights
Click here
After losing their oldest son to ALD, Rosalie Enciñias and Terry Entwald advocate for mandatory newborn genetic sequencing in the United States and battle for a way to save their youngest son. Under a national quarantine, they attend (via computer) a landmark bioethics video conference amongst America’s best and brightest scientific minds. Issues of healthcare, technology, politics, and privilege roar to life as United States health policy is debated and dissected.
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Inspired by real events and cases, Lance Arthur Smith’s Sequence dramatizes these questions and the multi-layered, passionate viewpoints within a crucial bioethics conference; a conference conceived to determine the course of human genomic history.
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Sequence is a Eugene O'Neill Theater Center semifinalist.
CAST SIZE: Full length- 8 (5w, 2m, 1 non-binary transgender actor)
Virtual play- 8 (3w, 2m, 1 non-binary transgender actor, 2 non-speaking boys in video footage)
The Price of Peace
(formerly Hemispheres)
THE PRICE OF PEACE charts machinist Sam Penn's journey through wartime America from California to Oak Ridge-- a secret city in Tennessee responsible for the fuel of a destructive new weapon. The city's inhabitants carried on their work and lives in secret without the knowledge of what they were working on or why they toiled. Laundry was folded, bridge clubs and sporting teams were formed, and the course of human history was altered irrevocably for all time.
Based on interviews with primary sources living in Oak Ridge, TN during the Second World War.
CAST SIZE: 6 actors.
2w (20s to early 30s), 4m (mid 20s to early 30s)
Design by Justin Jorgensen
Production History:
2018 Lab, three-night staged reading
New Village Arts, Carlsbad
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2015 Workshop, two-night staged reading
New Village Arts, Carlsbad
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2015 Commission
New Village Arts, Carlsbad
The Two Wisemen of Las Cruces
Design by Manny Fernandes
In 1880 New Mexico, banker Reg Mantle brings a sack of money, a gun, and his son to wait for a confrontation in the desert with an old adversary. The shady financial dealings of Reg's governmental past are illuminated, his wife's love is tested, and he's forced to impart to his son the lessons of a lifetime in a matter of days.
"With gripping momentum, Smith's characters charge through another father-son road trip, set in New Mexico circa 1880. Olivia Espinosa read the part of Sabiduria, a Spanish-Indian woman torn between Coates (Steven Lone) and Reg (Patrick Duffy) and devoted to her son Sam (Jonah Gercke). There is a grisly showdown that seemed to satisfy those present… this is, after all, the Wild West."
-Charlene Baldridge, San Diego Critics Circle
*The Two Wisemen of Las Cruces is a Eugene O'Neill Theater Center Semifinalist and Princess Grace Award Semifinalist.
CAST SIZE: 4 actors.
1w (early to mid 30s), 1m (late 30s), 1m (early 40s), 1 young m (14-16)
Production History:
2012 Staged Reading
Playwrights in Process Series
Cygnet Theatre Company, San Diego
Truth, Justice, and the Four-Color Way
Design by Michael McKeon
Production History:
2012 Workshop
Cygnet Theatre Company, San Diego
2011 Staged Reading
Playwrights in Process Series
Cygnet Theatre Company, San Diego
1950s Postwar America.
Reeling from the shock of World War II, popular culture was forced to abandon darker stories in favor of light fare. Television icons like Lucy reinforced our innocence, as did the ever-popular comic book: Walt Disney’s animal line, Funnies on Parade, and those wholesome superheroes fighting for right and the American way. But springing from fear of the bomb and The Red Scare, juvenile delinquency reached record levels and a desperate public called for its representatives to find a tangible culprit. A handy scapegoat arose in a small contingency of daring, edgy, comic book talent aggressively challenging the flow.
Emile Brereton, Deputy for the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, wrestles with his obligations to his family, his political aspirations, and his responsibility to the nation's youth.
Truth, Justice, and the Four-Color Way explores the trials of parenthood in the face of an apparently uncontrollable media influence, and the near-obliteration of the comic book industry due to the televised 1954 Senate Subcommittee hearings.
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*Truth, Justice, and the Four-Color Way is a Eugene O'Neill Theater Center Semifinalist.
CAST SIZE: 9 actors.
2w (mid to late 20s), 5m (40s/50s), 1m (30s), 1 young m (10-12)
Production History:
2015 Reading
Prod. Noel Orput and Michael Lopez
Golden
Blonde-haired, tall, and stunning (the Aryan ideal) Helene Mayer displayed unmatched skill with a fencing foil. She was the pride of Germany, with a gold medal in the 1928 Olympics and a staggering array of victories. She was also a Jew and after the infamous Nuremberg Laws denied Jews their German citizenship, she found herself stripped of all privilege to fence for her country. She fled west and found a new life in the United States.
With America and several other countries threatening to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games over the issue of anti-Semitism, Hitler and his Nazi Party scrambled to improve public relations. For the duration of the August Games, the German capital would be declared a hate-free city. As a show of "good faith", the Third Reich also proclaimed that Helene Mayer would be brought home to fence for the fatherland. As Hitler's token Jewish Olympian she was determined to regain her citizenship, while shielding her family from Hitler's wrath.
CAST SIZE: Variable. See breakdown here.
One-Act Stageplay:
True Blue
Concepts by Brandon Kenney
Production History:
2006 Production
Actors Alliance San Diego Festival
2003 Production
ARK Theatre Company, Los Angeles
1997 Production
Riverside Rep (now Tricklock), Albuquerque
1996 Production
Dionysus in the Round
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Vincent is a struggling writer. His father, Terrance, is dead. Can Vincent and Terrance find common ground when each is on the verge of eternity?
"True Blue, penned by Lance Arthur Smith, directed by Angela Miller with Christopher Buess and Dallas McLaughlin on stage. Writer's block, that terrible stage in the writing process when nothing works, is often the subject of writers. Smith captures the feeling of a suicidal young man faced with two years of non-productivity. His attempts at hanging are for naught. He is then visited by his deceased dad who has the audacity to come back as a young man rather than the 68-year-old who had left this mortal coil. There is some unfinished business that his son has to face. Director Miller had a gentle feel for the relationship between son and dad as well as another brother."
-Robert Hitchcock, Total Theatre
CAST SIZE: 2 actors.
1m (mid 20s), 1 m (30s)