Plays by Majkin Holmquist

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Tent Revival.

Rural Kansas, 1957. A farmer-turned-preacher searches for inspiration, his wife for hope, and their daughter for a sense of stability. When a seeming miracle turns their church on its head, young Ida follows her parents across the state as they spread the word of their newfound faith. But when the miracles begin to multiply, and the demand for spiritual healing grows faster than anyone expected, Ida must confront the cost of deeds done to inspire devotion.

Every Anne Frank.

For Majkin, a white public school teacher, the lessons of The Diary of Anne Frank feel impossible to instill within her students who seem to disrupt her teaching at every turn. For Destiny, an eighth grader whose office referrals are quickly accruing, those lessons are already manifest in the daily struggle of being a Latina student in the middle of Kansas. For Mrs. B, being a principal means being pressured to adopt the rigid and punitive systems of punishment of her male counterparts. Every Anne Frank is an exploration of how history, betrayal, and power repeat themselves unrelentingly — even in the most mundane corners of everyday American life.

Stargazers.

Stargazers is a play about land. A piece of land that hosts friends and lovers, enemies and prospectors, those that stay and those that leave, campfires and funeral pyres, pasture parties and picnic tables, ABBA and boxed wine, electricity and ghosts, and skeletons buried in the corral. It is a story about women who love the land and the agricultural communities who have no place for them. But most of all, it’s about the land.

Skinflint.

Once upon a time, in a land destroyed by unfettered capitalism, rugged individualism, and toxic masculinity, where a person’s worth is literally a person’s worth, a narrator tells the tale of a bear of a man, felled by the forces he himself has promoted. Lovers scrounge for post-coital sustenance, neglected girls hunt for a prize to justify their care, and a son challenges his father for his life’s savings. Skinflint is a nihilistic fairy tale about surviving a world that values a person only for the coins in her pocket and the meat on her bones.

The Dog Pack Play.

A feral pack of dogs stalk a small town in rural Kansas, driving the townspeople to construct a wall to fortify themselves. After a young boy has been attacked and killed, the residents are on high alert for the dogs, neglecting the imminent dangers being posed by their neighbors and friends. The Dog Pack Play is about how our terror consumes us and morphs us into our greatest fears. Oh, and it’s a comedy.

Quickmatch.

It’s the Fourth of July and Amber, manufacturer and marketer of illegal fireworks, can’t catch a break. Handcuffed to a tree downtown, she becomes witness to a man, mind crumbling from opioids and religious delusions, convince his wife they must leave this town before he sets fire to it all. As the town burns, Amber must face her own complicity in the disaster.

The Quonsets.

Quonset huts — cheap, prefabricated, circular sheds — are a common sight on farms in Nebraska or Kansas. In one, you might find seed bags, a post-hole digger, or bailing twine. You might also find a pair of teenage siblings grappling with a visitor’s assumptions, or a woman confronting her husband about mishandled money in the wake of a drought. This duet of intertwined plays, co-written with playwright Alex Lubischer, invites you to huddle close, rather than merely fly over.