writing – Briandaniel Oglesby

NEW PLAY COMING SOON!

The Peculiar Playground at Slackridge Park is a collection of short stories about a playground that’s haunted – or cursed – or maybe just a gateway to another dimension. Every piece of playground equipment has its own story.

A teeter-totter launches a child into a tree – and turns her into a bird.
The swing sends an influencer into the sky to become a star.
A Talk Tube connects a bookish kid to a voice from the past.
The big slide changes reality.

And so on.

The style is somewhere between RL Stine’s Goosebumps and Louis Sachar’s Wayside School.

This is intended to be highly flexible. Directors can adjust to the cast, their taste, or even the set.

It’s fun to produce. The dramaturgical research is hey, let’s go to the park and remember what it was like when we were just a little younger.

THE PROCESS [a short summary]

In the old times, my boyfriend Emmett used to tell stories to his brother about a cursed playground. He lent me the idea, and I took it to my actors.

With the help of a parent, I took the young actors to the school playground, then on a field trip to public park that had different areas for different ages. I sent them to play first, then gave them different ages and relationships to play around with.

We gathered material, jotted ideas on poster boards, then used that to create stories and characters. I started bringing in pages, showing them different stories early in the process, eventually building out the ideas with them.

For the set, we put signs with the different pieces of equipment around the theatre, then found benches and tables and other items to play these parts. This was in part how we created the play, and how we would eventually design the set.

I held auditions. The parts the kids didn’t audition for, I cut for this production.

In the end, every actor had a ‘lead’ and every actor also had a break.

My tech crew was small this time around, so we had to be crafty. We’d build the set mostly from recycled materials like old fencing and branches, buying only what we had to with the time we had. It’s the perfect play for Facebook Marketplace.

With the money we saved, we splurged on sand for the sandbox and small amounts of artificial turf.

I’m in the process of revising the play and adding a couple stories. It will be available for licensing in August.

ACME’S PRODUCTION of ANNE BONNY AND MARY READ

Acme Theatre, a company near and dear to me, is working on a HS-aged production of Anne Bonny and Mary Read […]. If you are in Northern California, come on out to see it.

Acme is bringing on a professional fight choreographer for this, so the sword fights should be electric.

Thanks to Ground Floor Theatre, there’s also a small-cast professional version of this play. Acme is doing the PG version.

New Plays

STEAMPUNKUNDERSEATEMPEST is currently under consideration for new play development opportunities; however, we’re open to non-professional/educational licensing of the play. It’s exactly what it sounds like – a steampunk adaptation of The Tempest set under the sea. There’s a billionaire whose submarine explodes, which was certainly an interesting topic to explore at this time. Plenty of physical comedy, can be done with as few as six actors, lots of opportunities for creating beautiful marine life, and so on. Contact me for perusal copy.

I recently revised FALLOUT OF THE SKY as a commission for the Albuquerque Academy’s middle school program. The world was expanded and the characters deepened. The bones of the story remained — it’s a series of vignettes centering the myth of Icarus, imagining the various members of the community surrounding the missing child telling their view on his story. Beginning, like most tellings of the myth, as a cautionary tale about obeying your parents, a teenager investigates what ‘really’ happened. She speaks with the fisherwoman (inspired by the Bruegel painting) who saw the boy fall; she interviews the fish who ate him; she gathers the testimony from Helios, the conductor of the ‘sun’ who hit him; and so on… The cruelty of King Minos locking him up with this father is also not lost on this version.

When I was in my early twenties, I once gave myself the task of trying to write in with what I called a ‘plural first person’ point-of-view. A community speaking, not an individual. A “we” instead of an ‘I’. I was mostly a fiction writer back then, so I didn’t think to look at choral storytelling in plays. A few years later, I figured out how to pull this off in a short play with the original version of Fallout – then titled ‘Our Flock’. More than ten years since, I was happy to have the chance to revisit the play and expand the chorus. I had more to say.

Also a recent script finished, WHEN ALICE KILLED FREDA is the play that scared me the most to write. It imagines a group of young people in the ’90s using an actual historical murder as inspiration for a movie. Although initially ostensibly making the film homophobic, things get more complicated as characters make some self-discoveries. Even language intending to demonize becomes a way to liberation. In a time of deep and vicious homophobia and compulsory genre roles, these kids find each other.

I am shopping this around for new play development, and will make it available soon.

PRODUCTIONS

It’s been great to see pictures of high school productions of The Apocalypse Project, Twelve Huntsmen, Dead Victorian Child, and others popping up in my feed. This summer I’ll be joining Acme Theatre and their production of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Late of the Island of Providence…

Basement Demons and Trailer Saints opens at James Madison University this month. Please check out this article on it: https://www.jmu.edu/news/2026/02/27-madison-new-works-lab.shtml

Scriptworks’ Out of Ink will be including my play Out of This World in it’s upcoming ten-minute play festival.

Tag: writing

Summer Updates

Updates: New Plays, Productions, etc