Two One-Act/Ten-Minute Plays About Sisters - for Youth and Mature Adult Actors
I’ve written about sister-relationships before (in The Bronze Lining and The Moon River Raft to name a few), but the relationship is especially unique in my two Ruby and Millie plays. These plays both feature the same sisters, but at two very different points in their lives.
In Ruby and Millie and the Dying Cucumbers, Ruby is a child around 9 years old and her older sister, Millie, is around 16. It’s 1943 and their father is a Prisoner of War in Europe. He has charged Ruby to lead her apartment building’s rooftop Victory Garden on the homefront in White Plains, NY. With their mother working long hours and their father gone, teenage Millie carries weighty responsibilities of her own. In the play, Millie has been searching for her little sister at night, and finally finds her on the rooftop. While Millie tries to convince Ruby to come inside to bed, Ruby discovers some of her vegetables are dying, and fears this is a harbinger of bad news for her father and the war.
In Ruby and Millie and The Old Chemical Plant, we fast forward 50+ years. The war is a distant memory while Seinfeld blares on the tv at night. Ruby has had a successful career but never married; Millie is a widow with children living all over the globe. The sisters live in the same senior apartments, and are tending to a fig tree in their 1990s community garden together. Ruby and Millie have always been close. Neither one can imagine life without the other by her side. But now they struggle with decisions that may, for the first time in 60+ years, take them very far away from each other.
Ruby and Millie and the Dying Cucumbers is a great play for young actors, showcasing humor and dramatic skills as each character goes on her own journey. It’s funny and active, leaving room for a lot of creative directing and acting. But it’s also complex, as Ruby sifts through big emotions and thoughts. A meaningful and fun activity her father gave her to help her feel a small sense of control during the war also leads her to feel guilty and terrified at what failing at that activity might mean.
Ruby and Millie and The Old Chemical Plant is a great play for mature women actors in their 60s-80s (could be a bit older or younger). This play is filled with humor and sisterly banter, but also dramatic moments which land. While not all of the lines can be drawn from age 9 to age 60, you still see Ruby and Millie shine as older versions of their 1940s selves.
These two plays are about many things, but at their cores, they are about sisters caring for each other. They might continue to annoy each other (they will continue to annoy each other!), but they also continue to love each other, and to be there for each other, even if that takes different forms from childhood to adulthood.
Ruby and Millie and the Dying Cucumbers and Ruby and Millie and The Old Chemical Plant can stand alone as their own short plays. But they also are part of a larger collection, The Victory Garden Plays, which you can read about here.
Click here to read an excerpt of the 10-minute play, Ruby and Millie and The Dying Cucumbers. Click below for the complete digital copy (immediate download) of Ruby and Millie and The Dying Cucumbers.
CLICK for a free excerpt to Ruby and Millie & The Old Chemical Plant. CLICK below for a complete digital copy (immediate download) of Ruby and Millie & The Old Chemical Plant.
You can read the entire collection, The Victory Garden Plays, below:
While soldiers fight abroad in WW2, those remaining in Westchester County strive to make a difference on the Homefront by creating Victory Gardens, supplementing limited food supply. But the pressures on the homefront extend much further than simply growing produce. A child worries her failing rooftop garden is an omen of misfortune for her father’s return from a POW camp. An infertile woman throws her purpose into feeding neighborhood families. A wealthy man whose chemical plant is commissioned by the government for war purposes struggles with how to leave a meaningful legacy not tainted with warfare. These stories, and more, are given light in The Victory Garden Plays, a series of vignettes chronicling people’s journeys with their new realities of love, growth, life and death.