3 Female, 3 Male, 1 Any Gender • Two-Act/Full Length • ~120 Mins

www.craighouk.com/brute-farce.html

Four vengeful, narcissistic actors – backed by a brutish stage manager and a cynical stagehand – kidnap a theater critic infamous for closing productions and destroying careers with his ruthless reviews. Their plan? To murder him live onstage during a performance of the very show they’re all starring in. Less than an hour before curtain, chaos erupts as it becomes clear that none of the conspirators actually understand the plan or its designed outcome. Brute Farce is a sharp, satirical take on the tangled, often dysfunctional, and sometimes explosive relationship between actors and critics.

A future theater-laughs-at-itself classic alongside Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.

Houks comedy is a near-perfect, laugh-out-loud farce, owing not only to the cockamamie plot but to the comic invective among the bungling actors, harried production crew, and acerbic critic.

In what has to be one of the funniest props in theater lore, Reggie has rigged an elaborate electrical cueing system involving four colored light bulbs, one for each actor, and four clear light bulbs, one for each scene. The actors all being themselves dim bulbs, the device results in complete confusion.

High stakes, nutball characters gifted with enormous self-regard and not much else, an over-engineered backstage prompting system, and no recurring gag too cheap to revisit, Brute Farce is a venomous delight.

A very funny, very dark backstage comedy of errors and terrors.

A backstage - or in this case under stage - farce worthy of being ranked with The Play That Goes Wrong and Noises Off.

Full of laughs and vile, self-centered characters who suffer the tortures of the damned.

5 Female, 4 Male • Two-Act/Full Length • ~150 Mins

www.craighouk.com/cold-rain.html

Carly Weekes and her sisters, Lolly and Shirley, are witches. When the trio casts a spell to conjure a perfect partner for Carly – a famous musician from Colorado – Shirley adds a dangerous twist: a questionable incantation with potentially deadly consequences. Fearing they’ve cursed Carly and her future family, Lolly attempts to undo the damage, but her counterspell backfires, banishing her to an alternate realm. Years later, tragedy strikes when the Pacheco twins mysteriously drown. The case goes cold, but suspicion lingers as many believe Carly’s eldest son, Johnny, was involved. Cold Rain is a dark, often comic tale of a family bound by black magic and unraveling under the weight of misguided intentions, buried resentments, and forbidden longing.

The reverse audience omnipotence made the aha moments both more frequent and rewarding, as you often learned something new and discarded old assumptions in the very same snippet of a scene.

The dark humor laced throughout was almost always impeccably landed to provide a release from the tense situations. The dry, damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t humor paired wonderfully with the main themes of family, fate, and choice.

This was art and theater imitating life in all of its strangeness and ironic sadness.

The characters are all well developed, and each of them, in their own way, is a person who doesn’t belong. This play is hard work that looks effortless.

Epic, sprawling, structurally ambitious, wildly funny, wildly horrifying, Cold Rain grabs one’s attention from its first lines and keeps it through every twist and turn of its haunting, dark magic-tinged plot.

Hulking, encompassing, evocative of that special feeling you find in vintage Stephen King, where every word and scene drips world-building of historical proportions.

If this show is any indication, then, much like this tantalizing family mystery, Craig Houk is a force to be reckoned with.

Houk cunningly constructs the play to reveal each secret, motivation, and detail drip by inexorable drip.”

2 Male, 1 Female • Two-Act/Full Length • ~100 Mins

www.craighouk.com/cooler.html

Oscar-winner Jack Dunn emerges from self-imposed exile to confront his oldest friend – and fiercest rival – Wade Henry. What starts as a friendly, nostalgic poker night quickly unravels into a tense, whiskey-soaked reckoning, where long-buried grudges resurface and the weight of fading legacies takes center stage. Cooler is a darkly comic and gripping meditation on ambition, aging, and the masks we put on when the spotlight fades.

Houk tackles toxic masculinity here with his accustomed caustic wit and singularly off-kilter view of the world, and proves once again he can write straight male characters with strength, heft, and grit while being unforgiving of their sometimes idiotic foibles.

With a setting and characters that seem to have stepped out of the glorious golden age of stage and screen, we are thrust into a Who’s Afraid of Virigina Woolf type atmosphere riding along on one whiskey after another as the characters open a new pack of playing cards in an attempt to start afresh. But can they? Houk offers up some great comic lines which buffer the tension that builds and the pathetic fallacy throughout will leave an audience on the edge of their seats.

10 Female, 5 Male (Doubling, Tripling) • Two-Act/Full Length • ~105 Mins

www.craighouk.com/herb-cleary-meant-no-harm.html

For nearly fifty years, Cleary’s Delicatessen has been the most popular dining destination in Clarksville, Tennessee. Nowadays the business practically runs itself. It’s best-selling item? Grandma Cleary’s potato salad. Three generations of Cleary men have reaped the rewards of its success. And now young Herb Cleary will be the next to take the reins. One minor problem, however: Herb ain’t right in the head.

Craig Houk’s delicious knack for redneck repartee is one of my absolute favorite things, and that gift is on full display here: A Robert Altman movie’s worth of diner denizens cheerfully muddle through one very peculiar day, with disturbing and hilarious results. Underneath the barbs and shenanigans, you’ll also find an allegory about institutional rot - showing how dumb ain’t harmless, and good intentions and benign neglect can allow poison to fester and grow.

2 Male • One-Act/Full Length • ~90 Mins

www.craighouk.com/radiator.html

Lou Brunazzi & André Cooper live across the hall from each other in the basement of a beat-up apartment building in the Bronx. On the landing between their units stands a noisy radiator, which is connected to a deteriorating boiler. Determined to stop the whistling, hissing & banging that’s keeping him awake at night, André endeavors to turn the radiator off, but is cut short by Lou who is determined to keep it running at all costs. What starts as a battlefield between two headstrong men slowly evolves into a makeshift sitting room where the pair begin to form a unique and lasting bond.

Excellent two-hander from Houk; typically twisted Houkian characters, conflict and tension expertly delivered, and quite a bit of humor keep the steam rising with consistent energy. Great fun and well done.

3 Female, 2 Male • Two-Act/Full Length • ~120 Mins

www.craighouk.com/syd.html

Decades before the tragic Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, a devastating fire at a gay bar in New Orleans claimed the lives of thirty-two men on June 24, 1973; an act of arson set by one of their own. That same night, Sydney “Syd” Trahan, a young nursing student, is arrested for dancing at Brady’s, a notorious lesbian bar in the French Quarter nearby. As Syd’s parents, Bud and Helen, grapple with the shock and struggle to reclaim some sense of normalcy, their neighbors Beau and Beverly Larson harbor dark secrets that connect them to both the fire and Syd’s arrest.

From the good things come in small packages file, an incisive, emotional script, an engaging and committed cast and brisk, clear direction make SYD, the new show at Ybor City’s tiny LAB Theatre Project, a major accomplishment.​ - Bill DeYoung, The St. Pete Catalyst

It’s a slow burn, with a great act one/into act two question and a perfect closing image. I loved every word of this piece.

The characters are written with humor, salt, specificity, and empathy. A compassionate and thoughtful work.

The greatest strength of the piece lies in Houk’s sure-footed characterizations of the main players.

Houk pulls you in with the complexity and strength of the characters. A truly compelling and heart-breaking story.

Syd is a play, a character, and perhaps a warning. Lush dialogue and dialect place this play in a New Orleans of the not-so-distant past and raise familiar issues of family and acceptance. An important story, very well told.

With a nod to William Inge and Horton Foote, Craig Houk\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\'s SYD is a theatrical treasure of drama, social commentary and vivid storytelling.

Houk expertly renders the regional dialect while giving each character a believable individual voice within it. Family tensions and affections feel complex and real. Some of the characters make disturbing choices, while others rise to the challenges with unexpected grace, and it’s all written with compassion and insight.

5 Female, 2 Male • Two-Act/Full Length • ~120 Mins

www.craighouk.com/the-reluctant-hen.html

Pete, a well-meaning but misguided working-class schmuck, is desperate to comfort his wife, Peggy Lynn, a strong-willed beautician quietly breaking under the weight of infertility. In a last-ditch effort to heal what’s slipping between them, Pete makes a devastating choice: he fathers a child with another woman, intending to present that baby to Peggy as a gift. What Pete believes to be an act of love instead sets off a chain of tragic events, leaving lasting damage in its wake and pulling everyone around them into the fallout.