I recommend plays at playscripts.com. Each year we do a no-cut play to raise money for charity, and often it needs to accommodate as many as 20 actors--many of them first-timers. We like playscripts shows because in their ensemble comedies, the roles as usually able to be played by either gender, they don't require much in the way of setting pieces, and many are primarily collections of scenes that can be rehearsed by themselves. The scenes usually involve 1-4 people, so that our strong actors can play different characters in different scenes. We've had good luck with "21 Guaranteed Ways to Get Detention," "13 Ways to Screw up Your College Interview" (and its sequel), "15 Reasons Not to Be in a Play" (and two variations of that by the same playwright), "Action News," "The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon," "Law and Order Fairy Tale Unit," "Help Desk," and "Check Please (which I can no longer find on their website). These aren't classic literature, but audiences love them and the actors have enjoyed performing in them (we do more classic work in our regular season). We've also done several original plays in a kind of workshop manner--we select a theme, and then at our rehearsals we divide the actors in groups of 2-4 to plan and perform an improvised scene around that theme. As a group we decide which of the scenes are the strongest and earmark them to develop for the actual performance. We do a few more sessions like this, then decide on the scenes we're actually going to develop. We then cast those scenes to make sure everyone has a role, and at rehearsal refine those scenes. Finally we put them all together for performance. A variation of that that we also did to raise money for charity--the students decided the worst types of students (such as the one who is always bored, the teacher's pet, etc.). Then we got teacher volunteers from other disciplines to play the student while the actual student actors played the teachers in each scene. There were two rehearsals in which the teacher and student met to plan and rehearse the scenes, and then one run-through with everyone. This was fun for our students to be able to work with teachers as co-creators, and the teachers had a blast playing bad students.
To echo what Janet Wood wrote--we have also done plays by Don Zolidis with success.
What excellent work you're doing--providing acting opportunities to so many people.
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Rebecca [Reisert
St. Xavier High School
Louisville, KY
rreisert@saintx.com------------------------------