ANDREW BISS

Talk about a fast turnaround. I'd completed a new short play entitled ‘The Butcher’ on March 20th and somehow managed to secure agreement for its debut production on March 31st – an astounding 11 days later! This, quite simply, never happens. No matter how good or how well-received a newly written play might be, it can take months or even years for it to make it from page to stage (see aptly named production title below). Of course, there were extenuating circumstances that led to this remarkable occurrence. I’d been contacted by a theatre group in Hong Kong ( The Hong Kong Players ) a few days earlier, inquiring about the production rights for a number of my short plays from The Meta Plays collection. When they informed me of the theme of their production, I happened to mention that I’d just completed a new play that seemed tailor-made for just such a theme and would make it available for them to read if they so desired. They did, and a couple of days later they contacted me to a...

The Meta Plays , my anthology of short comedic plays, is now available through Cyberpress , the publishing arm of the website Stageplays . Stageplays offers the largest collection of Plays & Musicals in the world. Based in the UK and the USA, they’ve been serving the online theatre community since the last century…if you can remember that far back. I’m very pleased to have this play available through another publishing platform, especially one that is geared specifically to the theatre community where it’s likely to have far greater exposure to its target audience. Check out Stageplays the next time you’re looking for a play to produce or a monologue to perform – they’ve got it covered. And now they’ve also got… The Meta Plays! This unique compilation of wittily inventive short comedies can be performed by as few as 4 actors or as many as 18, all with minimal set and prop requirements. Many of these plays have gone on to receive highly successful productions around the wor...

Though it may have appeared as though time itself might actually expire before The Meta Plays would finally be released, in the metaphysical world, that seemingly endless wait for one of the most hotly anticipated works of fiction in the known (and unknown) universe actually took place in the mere blink of an eye. And so it has arrived, without great fanfare, without fuss, and without any grinding and tiresome ad campaign desperately trying to flog it to death to all and sundry. No, instead it quietly – some might say eerily – materialized one day in that vast expanse of literary agglomeration known as the Kindle Store . And that day, of course, was today…or, if you’re reading this in the future, quite some time ago. And what better way to ring in the holidays than with a collection of metaphysical short dramatic works hell-bent on tinkering with your jaded sense of reality. Imagine the look on little Timmy’s cherubic face as he wakes up on Christmas morning, delves into his v...

No, not politics – plays! “The Skewed Picture”, my one-act comedy from “The Meta Plays” collection, has been chosen to be part of Stage Left Theater’s Hit and Run IX, the ninth year of their ever popular staged reading of short comedies by playwrights from the Spokane area and beyond. The show will take place November 6-8, 2015. Located in Spokane, Washington, Stage Left Theater is committed to presenting works of social, political and intellectual merit. The plays will be recorded and posted online, so I will endeavor to embed or provide a link to them here at that time.

I’m pleased to report that “A Rebel Among the Wretched” has been selected for production by Phoenix Stage Company in Naugatuck, Connecticut as part of its 3rd Annual One Act Festival, a four day festival of one act plays from around the world. After receiving over 600 entries for this year’s festival, the company’s reading committees have selected a small number of scripts to be performed over four days. Plays ranging in length from 10 to 30 minutes, comedies, dramas and farces will be performed in this hosted event. This will mark the first full production of the play, which was a Heideman Award finalist in 2011 and was performed in a staged reading by LA’s Actors Workout Studio in 2014 as part of their Spring Festival. The production will take place at the company’s temporary home at Clockwork Repertory Theater , in Oakville, CT, June 18-21, 2015. More details can be found on the company’s website .

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? 

I'm very pleased to report that my short play "Filler" will be published by theatrical trade publisher Smith & Kraus, Inc. , the largest publisher of trade theater books in the United States. The play will be included in the upcoming anthology The Best Ten-Minute Plays of 2014, edited by Lawrence Harbison. Photo courtesy of Olybrius "Filler" begins as a fairly standard mystery thriller, then soon meta-morphs into an exposé of both the play and the playwright, before finally turning into a rumination on the meaning and fleeting nature of life itself. All that in around 10-minutes! "Filler" is, of course, taken from "The Meta Plays," my short play collection that takes theatrical conventions on a metaphysical joyride. The compilation can be performed by as few as 4 actors or as many as 18, all with minimal set and prop requirements.

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...