Adam-Richter.com

I just finished writing 28 plays over the course of last month, so I’m a little spent, creatively.

To be specific: I wrote six monologues, six 10-minute plays, 12 1-minute plays and four plays that range from 2 to 5 minutes.

If you were expecting “Hamlet,” either in length or quality, I am sorry.

I don’t mean this as a boast: Every year since 2021 I’ve taken up the challenge. February has become my most prolific month.

That doesn’t mean that it results in 28 stellar plays (29 on leap years). Sometimes the plays I’ve written have gotten produced. Often it’s a 1-minute play will make the cut for a short-play festival. Sometimes, like the Taylor Swift jukebox musical I wrote in 2024, it serves merely to exercise my creative muscles and see what I can do. Nothing more is expected of the play but to be finished.

Every now and then, though, one of these daily plays sticks with me.

“Banshee,” my first full-length play to get a production, premieres May 1-10 at the WCR Center for the Arts in Reading, Pa. It began life in 2023 as a “28 Plays Later” exercise, 12 pages written in haste before I had to get my kid ready for school. It went through expansions, revisions, table reads over zoom, a public reading, more rewrites and finally a selection for Reading Theater Project’s 2025-26 season.

THAT is why I stick with the annual ritual of writing a play a day in February. Out of dozens of first drafts, one might see the light of day as a full production.

Two days after finishing up this year’s blitz of playwriting, I’m not sure what will stick with me. I have a couple of monologues I liked, and several 1-minute plays that might be good for micro-play festivals. The 10-minute plays? The ones that could be revisited, maybe expanded? It’s too soon to tell.

Most of my plays, regardless of length, will probably not get read beyond the occasional lurker on my New Play Exchange page. That’s OK. The act of writing is what’s important, and responding to clever prompts is a good way to practice the craft more creatively.

Seriously, I’m glad just to have done it. A production of any of these would be gravy.

That said, here are some of the plays that I think have potential. I may be wrong.

• “Memory Care” — A drama about two older people finding each other late in life.
• “Sorry Not Socrates” — The famous philosopher’s Apology, updated for the corporate world.
• “Name Changes” — A new immigrant meets an old immigrant in the chaos of ICE protests.
• “Paula’s Last Drink” — A bar patron waits for a banshee.
• “Schrodinger’s First Mistake” — A monologue about the dangers of doing theoretical physics with real cats.
• “One Last Goodbye” — Every year I try a verse monologue, and this was it for 2026.
• “The Defenestration of Frogs” — An absurd play where I wrote the title first and let chaos ensue.

Maybe these will see life beyond February 28. In the meantime it’s back to “Banshee.”

Rehearsals start soon.