ANDREW BISS

‘The Craft’ was announced the ‘Best of the Decade’ winner on September 6th, 2018 at the Minnesota Shorts Play Festival in Mankato, Minnesota, which restaged their best reviewed shows from the last nine years of producing the festival. The play also garnered best actress and best actor awards for its talented cast of Callie Sonnek and Zach Bolland. Hearty congratulations to all! Director Chad Brancamp, with Callie Sonnek and Zach Bolland.

It suddenly struck me as I was writing the last blog post that I had neglected to make any announcement on here of the recent publication of my short play anthology, “ Ten-Minute Plays: The Comedy Collection .” It seems rather astounding in a way, but I can only put it down to the fact that almost immediately upon its release I embarked upon a stretch of foreign travel, and upon my return I was dealing with a rather nasty case of dengue fever (a souvenir from the aforementioned foreign travel). So allow me to attempt a little rectification. As the title suggests (or more accurately, makes patently clear), this is a collection of ten-minute plays, all of which fall into the comedy genre in one way or another. It seemed to be a good idea to put together a collection comprised solely of comedies, as these are often the favored genre in ten-minute play festivals and so would provide a great resource for any theatre practitioners looking for just that. The volume contains 15...

I’m very pleased to have had “The Craft” selected by Bellingham, Washington’s iDiOM Theater for its Best of Brass Monkey production, part of its upcoming Spring Rep show. This will be the Pacific Northwest premiere of the play, and I have a feeling that iDiOM Theater are going to do a terrific job with it. They are, after all, the Hardest Working Theater in the Known World! The show takes place from May 7 to May 30, with more details available on the company’s website .

I’m happy to report that the Royal Court’s GRIT project has just added my monologue “Organ Failure” to its Tumblr site. If you have a spare moment I highly recommend taking a look through some of the plays, short texts and images on the theme of “moments of rebellion that go unnoticed and the voices of dissent which can't be heard.” There’s a great variety of work, from the very moving to the wryly humorous, and some very clever examples of tiny acts of defiance.

I’m very pleased to report that “The Craft” will be performed in London next month as part of an evening of short plays produced by the artists collective Fractured Lines . Fractured Lines brings artists together, creating opportunities for experimentation and development, fusing live performance and film to heal the divide between creators and consumers of art. The group produces a bi-monthly evening of complementarily themed plays under the title “ Blaggards ”.      “The Craft” will be presented as part of Blaggards on the September 8 th at COG ARTSpace , a new studio theatre space on the border of Hackney and Islington showing the best in new theatre, stand-up, spoken word and more. If you can make it along, they’re located at 113 Southgate Rd , above the De Beauvoir Arms, London N1 3JS. I hope all involved have a great time rehearsing and performing in what is rapidly becoming my most produced short play to date!

I’m pleased to report that my short one-act play A Rebel Among the Wretched has been selected by The Actors Workout Studio in Los Angeles to be included in their upcoming Spring Festival. The play will be part of a series of staged readings of short plays over the weekend of the festival. The show takes place at the The Actors Workout Studio’s theatre space, which is located at 4735 Lankershim Boulevard, North Hollywood, in the NoHo Arts District . Here’s a brief synopsis of the play itself (another from my Meta Plays collection), which was a finalist for the Heideman Award at the Actors Theatre of Louisville back in 2011: A celebrated, multi-award winning dysfunctional family drama continues to enthrall audiences night after night. But what happens when one of the characters finally decides they’ve had enough doom and despair and resolves to leave the play to join…a musical? 

“The Craft” continues on its path to global domination with an upcoming production in Canada ( Dartmouth, Nova Scotia to be precise). The play is to be produced as part of a variety show opening the new season of Dartmouth Players . I hope all involved have a great time with the show and are able to get the theatre’s season off to a rollicking good start. I’ll have more news regarding “The Craft” coming soon. Stay tuned…

I'm very pleased to announce that my short play "Filler"  has been selected for City Theatre of Independence's 5th annual Original Playwrights Festival , taking place July 11th - 14th at the Powerhouse Theatre in Independence, MO. The play is taken from my collection "The Meta Plays," a series of eight short plays that take a few metaphysical liberties with theatrical conventions. "Filler" at first appears to be a tale of undercover intrigue as two characters anxiously await the arrival of a third party. Soon, however, it becomes apparent to one of them that the third party is never going to turn up...not because of any slip up in their plan, but because the playwright never intended it to happen. They soon realize that their scene has very little to do with the rest of the play and that they essentially only exist as filler to pad out the overall length of the larger work, sending one of them into an existential crisis. In "The Met...

The original stage play version of Cafe Grotesquerie has just been published by Smith & Kraus in their anthology The Best Ten Minute plays 2011 . As you may know, I recently adapted the play into a short story as one of the Broken World collection I'm putting together. I hope to have the rest of those stories, and the complete collection (or omnibus edition) out over the next few weeks. I'm also going through some changes and transitions in my private life (all good), which has resulted in me not being very present around here or much of anywhere lately. This situation will continue for a little longer, and then when the dust has settled, I'll be back with a vengeance. And since I'm shaking things up and reconfiguring some things in my life right now, I've decided that this would also be a good time to redesign the blog, so if you happen by here sometime over the next few weeks and think that you've come to the wrong place, don't worry -...

I'm pleased to announce that my short play "What's the Meta?" will be included in the upcoming tenth edition of the Bedford/St.Martin’s textbook The Bedford Introduction to Literature . I'm very honored to have a work of mine included in such a respected (and best selling) publication, which is written and edited by the noted scholar and author Michael Meyer. After all of my recent immersion in the frontier world of ebooks, it makes for a lovely counterpoint to have a work of mine included in a great big, hardcover, 2000+ word tome! "What's the Meta?" is one of eight short plays in my recent collection "The Meta Plays" and was originally published by Smith & Kraus in the anthology "2009: The Best 10-Minute Plays for 2or More Actors (Contemporary Playwrights Series)" . The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing, 10/e, by Michael Meyer is tentatively scheduled for release January 2013...

As we move closer to the autumn, I'm looking forward to seeing how my play The Craft fares at this year's Off Cut Festival at Riverside Studios, in London. Interestingly enough, the play is written by an Englishman living in the U.S. (yours truly) and is being directed by an American living in the U.K. What are the odds? There are a whopping 28 plays in the festival, and these are whittled down through audience voting as the festival progresses through its 3 week run, until a winner is declared at the end. Sort of like an American Idol of short plays. I hope I make to a respectable finish at least, and don't get chopped in the first week. The Craft is from my play collection The Meta Plays , and revolves around two actors performing a scene from a play. However, the words you hear them speak aren't the words of the play they're acting in but rather their inner dialogues, which are comprised mostly of their mutual animosity towards each other. Anyway, I...

I was happily surprised to receive a call from one of the Artistic Directors at In Company Theatre in London, letting me know that my short play “The Craft” has been selected for this year’s Off Cut festival at Riverside Studios. A total of 28 short plays will be performed during a three week run at the end of September and beginning of October. For the first two weeks the audience gets to vote on their favourite of the evening, and all of the finalists are voted on again during the third week. At the final performance, a panel of industry professionals, chaired by the National Theatre’s Writer-in-Residence, Moira Buffini, will choose the winners of the Playwright, Director and Company of Actors Awards. This is a very popular event (formerly held at The Old Red Lion, where the 2009 and 2010 festivals were its most successful productions ever) and great exposure for all involved. And since Hammersmith is a former stomping ground of mine, it’ll sort of feel like a homecoming. Nice!