Playwright Don Zolidis wrote ‘10 Ways to Survive Life in a Quarantine,’ a Covid-19 comedy that centers on students stuck at home. Above, Mr. Zolidis in Cazenovia, N.Y.
Photo: Anne GodfreyDon Zolidis has been writing plays for 15 years that are often focused on young-adult themes and have been performed in thousands of high-school theaters. The one he wrote in March about life in the era of Covid-19 has been the fastest selling work of his career.
The play, titled “10 Ways to Survive Life in a Quarantine,” was written in four days and centers on students stuck at home during the coronavirus lockdown. It has been licensed by amateur theater producers 170 times.
Because stages have gone dark in recent months, “10 Ways” is designed to be performed by teenagers live via videoconference and includes a series of vignettes about students. No sets, costumes or stage crew are required.
Characters include a boy who uses the promise of four-ply toilet paper to convince girls to date him, a student who performs “Macbeth” with stuffed animals and a stir-crazy girl who makes her cat dance to music from the Broadway show “Cats” (the actor in that role must already have one cat, preferably more).
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“I hope this quarantine play gets produced all over the place this spring and never gets done again,” Mr. Zolidis said. The comedy was commissioned by publisher Playscripts as the pandemic was shuttering schools and leaving plans for spring shows in disarray. With scores of Mr. Zolidis’s plays canceled, the quarantine script has helped him recoup lost revenue and break even for the season, he said.
The pandemic has forced Mr. Zolidis to make some changes. Instead of writing in coffee shops, he has to work at home. In a typical year, he sees about 10 productions of his plays, but now travel is out. He has been spending his quarantine in upstate New York but normally lives in Austin, Texas.
Mr. Zolidis, a 44-year-old former theater teacher, has written 120 plays to date. A native of Wisconsin, he is largely unknown in New York theater circles, but he is influential nevertheless.
Playscripts has licensed 16,000 productions of Mr. Zolidis’s plays since 2005, and the rights to “10 Ways” were licensed more times in a month than most plays are in a year, according to Brendan Conheady, Playscripts vice president of operations. Mr. Conheady called the sales spike for the title “completely unprecedented” for the publisher, which charges schools between $200 and $300 for “10 Ways” scripts and a performance license.
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Before he had finished writing “10 Ways,” Mr. Zolidis sent an email to the roughly 6,000 teachers on his mailing list announcing that a pandemic-themed show was on its way. Within a day he had 700 requests for copies, he said.
Mr. Zolidis has long engineered his plays to appeal to school drama clubs. Casts are big and sections can be added or cut without derailing the plot. Scenes often feature just a couple of characters so a teacher can rehearse several groups at once. To make the quarantine play work, he said, he whittled most of the scenes down to one character to avoid too many camera jumps.
Mr. Zolidis, whose second young-adult novel came out this month, knows how to get exposure. He named one of his plays “Game of Tiaras” at the height of the “Game of Thrones” mania. He once titled a play “!Artistic Inspiration” so anyone looking for ideas in an alphabetical catalog would see it first, since a punctuation mark precedes the letter “a.” He hopes schools will want a complete change of subject with his next play, the story of a cross-country journey in a magic hot-air balloon.
When he has a new work, he emails directors with a promise: The first person who contacts him with a premiere date for the show will get the cast’s name printed at the front of the book when the script is published.
Mr. Zolidis and his dog Bardwell.
Photo: Anne GodfreyMr. Zolidis estimates he has created at least 2,400 characters in plays and has written too many lines to remember. “I’m writing a joke and it will be like, ‘Wait, didn’t I use that joke 45 plays ago?’”
He has some favorite themes, like mean parents and audience participation. Teachers say they know it is a Don Zolidis script if a body gets thrown on stage from the wings. “I have a dummy at school just so that I can do Don’s plays,” said Karen Szalach, theater director at Buffalo Academy of the Sacred Heart in Buffalo, N.Y.
Ms. Szalach’s students performed “10 Ways” last month. They learned it after their roughly $5,000 spring production of the Stacey Lane play “67 Cinderellas” was canceled seven hours before opening night. Ms. Szalach heard about “10 Ways” from Mr. Zolidis at just the right moment.
“It was perfect,” she said. “He’s the only playwright who actually emails me.”
Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com
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