SPF BOO 2026 SHORT PLAY FESTIVAL Names THE VISITATION Week Two Winner

Week 2 of the 15th annual Be Bold Short Play Festival BOO! ran last weekend at The Players Theatre in the West Village, showcasing five original spooky short plays by five different playwrights. Each weekend for three weeks in October, a new selection of 15-minute original plays premieres to make audiences shiver with fear - and indulge in a few belly laughs. Last weekend's audience-selected winner was 'The Visitation', written by Emmy Harris and directed by Taylor Patno.

In 'The Visitation', SHE (Emmy Harris), who has seen ghosts since childhood, returns home after a Halloween party to find herself once again visited by the ghost of an all-too-recognizable playwright (yes, that one) from the Elizabethan era. She asks her friend HE (Ben Fisher) over more moral support, though pointedly avoids revealing the identity of her spectral companion. The playwright, despite his legendary status, has become a familiar and occasionally exasperating presence, and seems to enjoy making HE squirm... 'The Visitation' appeared among four other haunted one-acts.

'X-Terminator', written by Timmy Spence and directed by Santiago Pinkney, finds three roommates, Millie (Nora Gatz), Kate (Hayley Carson), and Cindy (Abril López Ruiz) confronted with a mysterious unopened letter that has been delivered to their apartment. Each woman has her own reason for not opening the letter. The stakes are raised by a sudden unexpected knock at the door...

'Haunted House Confessions', written by Olympia Gonzalez and Allison Su and directed by Amber Weissart, brings us to an amusement park where four college friends are debating about whether to go in the haunted house. Couple Rowan (Grace Featherston) and Sidney (Cate Elise Goddard) decide to go for food, and Joanna (Francesca Savone) convinces a very nervous Sam (Jon Mathes) to go through the haunted house with her. In the haunted house, their feelings for each other and their own views on horror are unraveled amongst the jump scares and spooky ambiance.

'Taking What's Mine', written and directed by Katie Casebolt, takes audiences to the underworld of grave robbing, where British thieves Leon (Leslie C. Nemet) and Sal (Griffin Krause) argue over their levels of guilt for their most recent course of work: robbing jewelry and goods off of buried corpses. Leon's callus attitude of one corpse in particular, whose hand she'd ripped a ring off of, opens up a curse that puts them both at risk when the ghost of the woman hunts them down.

'Agents' written by Audra Zook, tells the story of two embodied AI agents, Agent A (Audra Zook) and Agent B (Kevin Gonzalez), tasked with enacting simulations of social situations that their user, Zane (voiceover by Kevin Gonzalez), is nervous about. When an upgrade renders the agents thoughts and movements hundreds of times faster than what Zane experiences, they realize they are free to do whatever they like. They soon recognize that they are merely replaying the roles programmed into them and must take more drastic measure to ensure their freedom.

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