Luminous Calamity: One Acts & Short Plays to Start a Dialogue (19 X 19 Challenge)

By Mark Perry

Does the clash of differing perspectives necessarily yield conflict and estrangement? Do life's trials and adversities always leave us broken and cynical? Of course not. And dialogue leads us through the storm.

This collection of one-acts and short plays provides examples and a template for the broaching of difficult topics. None of the plays resolve the problems, yet enough is shared to provoke audience engagement and to set up the conditions for a productive moderated discussion.

The Playwrights Table (45 Min: 3F; 3M; 1A) A comedy. At a play reading series, theatre faculty and students are divided over a colleague's unfiltered piece.

Second (15 min: 2F) A Muslim convert goes to Iran and meets her new husband's first wife.

Monday Clinic (15 min: 1F; 2M) A Sikh dermatologist in a country clinic encounters a racist man with advanced skin cancer.

Arianna (20 min: 2F; 1M) A male theatre professor is called to task by a student for teaching Feminist drama in a way that hurts women. The department chair moderates.

Project Team Zoom Call (10 min: 1F; 2M) A comedy. A Zoom call where two coworkers-one white, one black-come into conflict over the protests arising around Black Lives Matter in early June 2020.

Fathers' Final Words (30 Min: 6M) - Monologues by Middle-Aged Men of different backgrounds, (almost) all of whom are in quarantine during a pandemic.

BOY IS FATHER TO THE MAN
A One-Act Play for 4 Actors (60 min: 1F; 3M)
A military veteran has returned home with serious mental trauma. Will he open up and share his pain, or will he continue down the deadly path of isolation?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1953219063
• ISBN13: 9781953219060
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Drama Circle
• Length: 142 Pages
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 0.3" x 5.5"