Comedy-Drama; Farce/ 4 characters, 2 male, 1 female, 1 any gender, extras possible/ Full length
Synopsis: Recently widowed playwright Michael “Mitch” Michaels, wealthy from a large inheritance and vulnerable to challenges from his daughter over his competence, meets actress Patricia Hulick in a Social Security office. What begins as an awkward encounter quickly becomes an intense connection.
Michael reveals that he has been secretly observing Patricia after seeing her audition for his latest play and soon proposes an unconventional arrangement: marry him so he can protect his fortune from family interference, while she gains financial security and the opportunity to pursue long-delayed artistic dreams.
As their relationship deepens, the lines between performance and reality blur. Harvey Hanger, Michael’s manipulative director, has his own designs on Michael’s wealth and theatre company. His schemes entangle the couple in a web of deception involving staged romances, hidden agendas, a failed robbery by a desperate actor, and questions about who is using whom.
The play explores love, loneliness, aging, ambition, and the uneasy relationship between art and life. As Harvey’s machinations escalate and Michael is declared mentally incompetent and confined to a psychiatric institution, Patricia must determine what is real, whom she can trust, and whether her feelings for Michael are genuine. Ultimately, Social Insecurity becomes a comic yet heartfelt battle between greed and generosity, manipulation and authenticity, and asking whether love can survive when everyone seems to be playing a role.
Dedicated to Paul Eisemann whose wit and wisdom made this play possible.
Amateur and professional rights:
Coni Koepfinger
Ph.: 412-983-1029
koepfingerc@gmail.com
About the Playwright: Winner of the 2021 Olwen Wymark Award from the Writers Guild of Great Britain, Coni Koepfinger believes creative energy is never lost — it simply changes hearts, heads and hands. She is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon (Literary and Cultural Theory MA 2002) and Penn State (Theatre Arts BA 1980), and also a member of the National League of American Pen Women, Theatre for Young Audiences/USA, the National Association of Musical Theatre, the Lifeboat Foundation, a lifetime member of the Dramatists Guild, a former board member of the International Centre for Women Playwrights, and former committee Chair for the League of Professional Theatre Women. Her work has been produced by the Gene Frankel Theatre, the American Theatre of Actors, the Rogue Theatre Festival, the UNFringed Festival, The Secret Theatre, the Manhattan Repertory Theatre, Cosmic Orchid, the Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, the Harlem Me Too Project, Untold Stories of Jewish Women, The Producers Circle at the Players Club, the Playbill Virtual Theatre Festival, Open Eye Theatre, the Phoenicia Playhouse, and Theater for the New City. Her published plays and musicals can be found at Leicester Bay Theatricals and Next Stage Press. Her most recent work, The Unusual Chauncey Faust, won first place in the 2025 15 Minutes of Frame Play Festival, presented at the Gene Frankel Theatre in New York.
As an academic, Coni has enjoyed teaching at various major universities, including Duquesne, Carlow, and Point Park, specializing in composition, literature and playwriting, and developing a new pedagogy that examined the stages of creative form, something she applies to her own writing as well. Website: www.awakeneddreamtheatre.com.
Social Insecurity was first produced at the Rogue Theatre Festival, New York City, in August 2025.