For its upcoming ‘Bad Theater Night,’ One Night Stand Theater’s Jim O’Leary and playwrights Linda Berry and Vanessa Bowie talk backstage disasters, audiences behaving badly and the joys of writing short.

For 16 years, One Night Stand Theater has been building an evening around a single theme, corralling a handful of short plays from a rotating cast of (mostly) Colorado playwrights and staging them just once. For the final show of the year in October, the theme turns the format on itself: “Bad Theater Night” gathers nine short pieces about everything that can go wrong onstage and off. Topics range from a bad-audience-member skit to a story built around the line John Wilkes Booth was waiting for the audience to laugh at when he shot Abraham Lincoln.

Ahead of the Oct. 4 show at Aurora’s Vintage Theatre, I spoke with One Night Stand’s artistic director and host, Jim O’Leary, along with playwrights Linda Berry and Vanessa Bowie (who writes under the pen name V.B. Rankin), about how the company puts these evenings together and what drew each of them to a theme built on theatrical disaster. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did One Night Stand Theater get started, and how has it evolved?

O’Leary: It started about 16 years ago as an attempt to build a production company rather than a traditional theatre group. Our first show was a staged reading of a local playwright’s full-length play. After that, we did an evening of Shakespeare monologues framed like a talk show, and from there it settled into the format we still use: seven to nine short plays for one night, all built around a theme. We started at Lakewood, moved into Vintage’s old space downtown, and have stayed with Vintage as our partner since it relocated to Aurora. We do five shows a year, skipping Christmas, every two months.

How do you find plays and decide what makes the cut?

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O’Leary: We publicize the theme on Facebook and our website and send it to a list of about 150 playwrights who’ve worked with us before or found their way to us. We had to pull off a couple of national submission sites a few years ago because we were getting hundreds of scripts; now we lean toward Colorado writers, though any writer can get on the list. Playwrights can submit up to three plays. For this show we had 65 submissions, read by three volunteer producers who rate them, and I read every single one myself. Our only hard rule is one act or shorter — in practice they run anywhere from two to 30 minutes. This time we ended up with nine because several of them are closer to skit length.

The theme practically invites parody. Did you have to steer people away from just writing bad plays?

O’Leary: Yes — some writers thought we wanted their actual bad plays, and we had to clarify that’s not it at all. We wanted stories about bad theater: bad actors, bad directors, backstage disasters, that kind of thing. So there are characters in these plays exhibiting all those bad traits, but the plays themselves aren’t meant to be bad.

How do you decide what order the plays go in?

O’Leary: We grade everything for quality first, then have to make sure we’re not running two plays that tell essentially the same story back to back. After that, we try to sequence it so the evening makes logical sense, opening with something that sets up the theme and closing with something that feels like a natural endpoint. This time we open with Linda’s “Sorry,” about an audience behaving badly, since that felt like the right place to start, and we close with John Busser’s piece about an improv actor being interrogated over a murder that happened mid-scene. Casting and rehearsal schedules sometimes force me to reshuffle everything in between, though — I set this lineup about a week and a half after we picked the plays, then had to move pieces around once I knew who was actually available.

How do you handle casting, since these shows come together so fast?

O’Leary: We don’t hold auditions anymore. We tried it once for a whole season, but this whole company grew out of the staged-reading model, so we mostly cast from actors we already trust. A lot of our current cast are people who saw a past show and later asked if they could be considered next time, and I usually say yes.

We also have what we call the 7Night Standers, a designation one of our producers, Beth Foster, came up with for anyone who’s done seven shows with us — they get a bio posted on our website. Linda, Leroy Leonard and Tami Canaday are all 7Night Standers; some have been with us 10 to 15 years. Even with familiar faces, casting rarely goes the way I picture it. This time we had a Russian femme fatale role that three different actors wanted, and I could only use one of them — something to keep in mind the next time we need a Russian femme fatale.

Vanessa, tell us about your play, “Sockdologizing Old Man-Trap.”

Bowie: It’s based on a true story about the unintended power of a punchline. The title is the line from Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin that got the biggest laugh of the night at Ford’s Theatre in 1865 — the laugh John Wilkes Booth was waiting for to cover the sound of his shot. It’s only about four minutes long, written in an oratory style using slang I pulled from actual 1800s sources, so dense that a modern audience won’t know half the words — the theatrical equivalent of a kid’s slang nobody over 30 understands.

Linda, what inspired “Sorry”?

Berry: Mine is about the audience behaving badly — people crawling over you, spilling drinks, talking or singing along, answering their phones. It’s not based on one specific incident, just years of accumulated bad theatergoing behavior. I usually discard my first few ideas for a theme because I assume everyone else will think of them too, and that’s how I landed on this one.

What draws each of you to writing and producing such short work?

Bowie: I’m in the sandwich generation with young kids and an aging parent, so a 10-minute play is about all the time I have right now. The other appeal is that if it’s bad, at least it’s only 10 minutes.

Berry: A friend in the Colorado dramatists group once said he’s never seen a play that couldn’t stand to be shortened, and I agree. Writing tight and making every word count is good discipline.

O’Leary: For me it’s the chance to present seven, eight or nine playwrights in one night. Full productions almost always go to full-length plays, so this gives short-form writers a stage they wouldn’t otherwise get — about 35 different playwrights across a year. I think of it as the “Laugh-In” of theater: if you don’t like one piece, it’s over in a few minutes and something completely different follows.

Does turnout depend on the theme?

O’Leary: It does, even though some of our regular playwrights insist it doesn’t. We get our biggest crowds for what I’d call dangerous but warm themes — dark, but not disturbing. A “Witch’s Brew” show in October packed the house, and a show called “Dogs and Cats Living Together,” about pets, drew a surprising number of people too. I figured everyone loves pets, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll come see a play about them.

Past themes have run the gamut, including “The Ten and a Half Commandments,” “Friends, With Friends Like These,” a conspiracy-themed show in April and “Stages of Love” in February, which pulled about 120 submissions — more than we could handle, partly because a New York submissions site had picked us up without asking. We had to write and ask them to take us down. We’re pretty much a Colorado secret again these days, by design.

What’s next for One Night Stand Theater?

O’Leary: This is our last show of the year, so the next one is in February, then every two months after that. We’ll likely do another old-time-radio show sometime next year — audiences love it, but it’s hard to put together, so we only do it every couple of years. We’re already planning the 2027 season, partly from themes audience members suggest during our intermission fishbowl drawing.