Juice--A Ten Minute Play Festival

🎭 JU1CE: A Secret Revealed
✨ Directed by Craig Tyrl & Teddy Pagee

📅 March 6–8, 2026

The Wayward Artist presents 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.”

🕰️ PERFORMANCES
🎟️ Friday, March 6 @ 7:30pm
🎟️ Saturday, March 7 @ 7:30pm
🎟️ Sunday, March 8 @ 7:00pm

🐎✨ 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. Ritual, poetry, and physical storytelling lead not to resolution, but reckoning.

🪐🧪 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 unseen forces that draw 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, fantasy and insecurity collide with the reality of her marriage 💍. Humor meets emotional honesty in this reflection on love and longing.

⛪🖤 Merely Players
✍️ Playwright: Eric Eberwein
Three lives intersect around faith, death, and moral compromise: a priest, a hospice nurse, and a woman in emotional free fall. Darkly comic and deeply human, the play questions hypocrisy, grace, and the difference between performing belief and truly living it 🎭.

⏰✨ Tempus Fugit
✍️ Playwright: Greg Atikins
A playful but pointed look at time, ambition, and regret. When Cynthia meets her future self, youthful idealism clashes with lived experience. Fast-moving, imaginative, and funny, it asks what we owe 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 becomes a catalyst for truth. A perceptive restaurant owner observes it all, adding warmth and perspective. Themes of family, identity, and silence linger.

🧠🔒 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. Mandated doubling exposes cycles of power and abuse, revealing the brutality hidden beneath 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 explores the ethics of artificial love and the human need to be deeply known—even when the risk is real.

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