JU1CE

A 10-Minute Play Festival

March 6 – 8, 2026

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An evening of original 10-minute plays exploring the power of truth and discovery. Local playwrights bring fresh stories to life—funny, bold, and heartfelt—in this co-production with the Orange County Playwrights Alliance. Each piece responds to the prompt “a secret is revealed.”

Playwrights

Anteros Was Here

Playwright: AJ Layague

A myth-inflected Western where cowboys, gods, and choral figures collide. On a ranch, violence, desire, and power unfold as the god Anteros watches humanity wrestle with love, justice, and consequence. The play blends ritual, poetry, and physical storytelling, ending in a reckoning rather than resolution.

The Gravity of Black Holes

Playwright: Linda Goddard Schmenk

A quiet, poetic two-hander linking a contemporary Japanese-American science student with a woman from another era. Through physics, grief, and time, the play explores loneliness, inherited pain, and the mysterious forces that pull people together across generations.

The Green Grocer

Playwright: Joni Ravenna

A sharply funny and tender story about aging, desire, and self-image. When Katie develops an unexpected crush on her younger grocer, fantasies and insecurities collide with the reality of her marriage. The play balances humor with emotional honesty about love, longing, and choosing what matters.

Merely Players

Playwright: Eric Eberwein

Three lives cross at the intersection of faith, death, and moral compromise: a priest, a hospice nurse, and a woman in emotional free fall. Darkly comic and deeply human, the play interrogates hypocrisy, grace, and the difference between performing belief and truly living it.

Tempus Fugit

Playwright: Greg Atkins

A playful but pointed reflection on time, ambition, and regret. When Cynthia meets her future self, their conversation becomes a clash between youthful idealism and hard-earned lived experience. Fast-moving, imaginative, and funny, it asks what responsibility we hold toward the people we are still becoming.

The Takeaway

Playwright: Linda Goddard Schmenk

Two estranged sisters reunite in a Chinese restaurant, navigating old wounds and cultural expectations while waiting for food that ultimately becomes a catalyst for truth. The quietly perceptive restaurant owner observes it all, adding warmth and perspective. Themes include family identity and the emotional cost of silence.

Trapped in Limbo

Playwright: John Franceschini

Set in a psychiatric institution, this unsettling drama collapses past and present as a wealthy baroness relives childhood trauma under clinical observation. The play uses mandated doubling to expose cycles of power and abuse, exploring memory, control, and the brutality hidden inside social respectability.

Your Pleasure Is All Mine

Playwright: Nikki Pearson

A near-future grief story where a woman coexists with an AI replica of her deceased partner. As intimacy, consent, and autonomy blur, the play examines the ethics of artificial love and the human need to be deeply known, even when emotional risk is unavoidable.