Drama.  Flexible ensemble of 9-30 actors.  About 50 minutes.  Suitable for middle school and up.  First performance:  $60 (this includes permission to make copies of the script as necessary for your production).  Each additional performance:  $35.



Hardcastle Flowers:  Space Detective was developed under its original title of 2071 (A Moral Mystery) as part of a residency at Lower Merion Middle School. Students suggested the theme and plot settings (a moon of Saturn, the surface of Mars), and author Ed Shockley created a unique play utilizing these conditions.

Stahl Flowers, the non-violent champion of inter-galactic peace (inspired by Martin Luther King), has been killed in what first appears to be an accident. The Chief of Police has assigned an incompetent investigator and a laser happy boob to investigate, but a crackerjack detective (in the vein of Inspector Clouseau) muscles in on the investigation that leads from an orbiting space station near Earth to an asteroid-pelted relay station on the Saturn moon Titan. Reuben, a bumbling bureaucrat, continually inhibits progress by zapping informants and destroying clues but the trail still leads to the badlands of Mars. There it is revealed that Stahl Flowers is still alive, but the response to his erroneous death report has been so unifying that there is a trans-galactic effort to at the very least delay his resurrection until the long festering hatreds of multiple colonies have been laid to rest. Now, do you reveal the truth or collaborate in a well intentioned deception?