Jack Karp
Playwright
Produced Plays
Sleeping with Strangers
This absurdist one-act looks at how we don't really fall in love with other people as much as we fall in love with the image we create of them.
Don't Write a Bad Play, or
A playwright is taught a lesson in this one-act when he writes a particularly violent and brutal play about torture and his characters, sick of being subjected to such treatment, kidnap and torture him into changing the ending.
Tell Me You Love Me
This full-length play tells the story of four friends living in New York City in the months following the September 11th attacks and the effects the fear of that period has on their marriages and relationships. This quickly paced whirlwind of a play echoes the relentless cycle of government warnings and breaking news that was the norm after the attacks. From the stripping of our civil rights to the rounding up of Middle Eastern immigrants to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the prison abuse scandals that followed, the play, much like the morning paper and the nightly news, is about the mean, stupid things people do to each other when they're scared.
Sex and Money and Money and Sex
This one-act play is a comically and darkly absurd take on the way couples have the same arguments and play out the same patterns over and over as relationships progress from the first blush of love through frustration and anger to violence.
Multiple Choice
What if we could only communicate with each other through prewritten multiple-choice questions with a very limited number of acceptable answers? The characters in Multiple Choice do exactly that. In this comic send-up of modern Internet dating, Tom and Sarah meet for the first time on a very awkward blind date, prewritten questions for each other in hand. But frustrated by their inability to find a real connection, the two decide to veer from their date’s scripted format and turn instead to an uncomfortable and very humorous honesty that reveals just how much of what we show the world is false and how hard it really is to get to know another person.
One Night Stand
This one-act comedy, set completely in a darkened apartment where none of the actors are ever visible to us or to each other, takes a humorous look at the lengths to which two strangers will go to find some kind, any kind, of connection, and drunkenly and hysterically fail.
The Famous Elephant Play
The Famous Elephant Play is the first ever play written by an elephant. It is about what you would expect a play written by an elephant to be about – basically, lions and peanuts. Part of the very hip, avant-garde animal art movement, thousands of people have lined up and paid a fortune to see it, and it is sold out for months. But when a new actor arrives to take over the lead role, he is forced to face the comic absurdity that is our attempts to make art and just what we will put up with to make it.
Shacking Up
This full-length comedy is set around the production of a hackneyed, cliché-ridden murder mystery that begins to spin out of control when the star’s jilted fiancée shows up and takes over the lead role. Characters are added, scenes are rewritten, and even the play’s title gets changed by a group of actors unhappy with the script they have been given to play. Eventually even the audience gets pulled into the action as the characters begin to confuse drama and reality, character and actor, audience and witness.
