Rufus Drawlings's portfolio

Work samples

"Smack 'Em In The Snout" - Act 1 (Charm City Fringe Festival 2017)

Act 1 of my award-winning Charm City Fringe Festival 2017 play "Smack 'Em In The Snout"
"Smack 'Em In The Snout" - Act II (Charm City Fringe Festival 2017)

Act II of my award-winning Charm City Fringe Festival 2017 play "Smack 'Em In The Snout"
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Photo from my play "We Have Always Lived In The Pineapple Upside-Down Cake" at the 2016 Transmodern Festival at The Peale Museum
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Photo from my Audience Choice-winning 2017 Charm City Fringe Festival play "Smack 'Em In The Snout"

About Rufus

Baltimore City

I am an alternative, surrealist playwright from Baltimore who works with absurdism and magic realism. I had two plays per month stage read here from October 2016 until May 2017 for a recorded series entitled Present10s. I had a production in the 2016 Transmodern Festival. I won the Audience Approval cash prize at Yellow Sign Theater on New Year’s Eve and had one of my short plays in the 2017 10x10x10 Festival at the Fell’s Point Corner Theater. I had a play and "playwright's talk-back" at… more

View Rufus's Resume

Smack 'Em In The Snout

Audience Choice Award winner at the 2017 Charm City Fringe Festival.

A gay massage therapist in Baltimore caters to the needs of strippers, fry cooks, waitresses, landladies, and his secret husband……….a chicken hand puppet. But living across from a tombstone-making company and the paranoia that his massage clients are actually giant raccoons hell-bent on stealing his brown gravy and destroying his marriage are making this otherwise sweet "fingers-man" lose his magic touch………..and his mind.

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Meridian Trench

Presented at the Fell's Point Corner Theater's 2017 10x10x10 Festival.

On a typical Baltimore autumn day, waltzing devil Boonshuckle Trim, encounters Melpha, a wreck of a sweet woman eating dirt in a park. His tales of black beans, swerve-berry crimes, and Sumerian princesses changes the taste of dirt for Melpha………and her worldview completely.

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Will Spring Know His Rights?

A short original play presented as part of The Moxie Fords "Rite of Spring" show at Stillpointe Theater in April 2017.

Winter in Baltimore; intersection of a busy thoroughfare; Igor Spring, a wildly dancing homeless man, blocking traffic, screams at drivers in their cars to get out and dance with him to ward off winter (he personifies the seasons as teenage children of Mother Earth) and coax spring to begin early. Officer Stravinsky, a female cop, approaches Igor Spring calmly but firmly, trying to get him out of the road for his safety and to fix the traffic problem. Spring is obsessed with the symphony “The Rite of Spring” and antagonizes Officer Stravinsky who has no clue as to what the man is talking about, or how he is criticizing how tied she is to her profession, rules, law, and “the sidewalk”. At the end, just like the girl in the real symphony who dances herself to death, Igor Spring runs off-stage committing suicide by letting a car going in the opposite direction hit him. The opening to the symphony, as well as the sound effects of honking horns, plays throughout the entire play, with car crash sounds at the end.

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Before It’s Impossible, It Is Unbearable

An original play presented at Yellow Sign Theater's 2017 New Years Eve "Gong Show".

A neurotic and exhausted Father Time is comforted and given tough love by a drunk and slovenly Mrs. Claus as she tries to bolster his spirits about meeting Baby New Year 2017 to pass on his knowledge. Baby New Year emerges as a bouncing, hyperactive bearded hipster, excited and entranced by everything and everyone, but Father Time can’t help but shoot down every bit of joy the “baby” has about his next 12 months. In the end, Donald Trump emerges and tears the group apart, dragging Baby New Year off for how ‘unAmerican’ and ‘undocumented’ he is, and Mrs. Claus for her ‘crookedness’ and the ‘radical feminism’ he can smell on her. They get pushed off-stage with threats of internment camp hell, and while Father Time blathers on with some existential ennui, Trump comes back to threaten the audience directly and knock Father Time down to the ground. The play ends with the line “Brace yourselves, it’s time to die.” and a punk version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ played as the cast takes their bows.

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We Have Always Lived In The Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

An original play presented at the 2016 Transmodern Festival at The Peale Museum.

The bastard love child of The B-52s song ‘Cake’ and the Shirley Jackson novel ‘We Have Always Lived In The Castle’, social pariahs from Planet Claire live a sad, cake-obsessed existence at the edge of the Love Shack, hated by all, until one day, a mysterious relative shows up to whip up their batter to Funplex level, but baby, it comes at a price!

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