Over the past 25 years, Dan Kehde has created more than 50 plays and 20 or so more librettos for composers Mark Scarpelli, Roger Ames and Robert Whitmore.  10 of his plays are currently in print by Eldridge Publishing, along with several books of early monologues and a book of scenes from his earlier acting classes.  While much of the music of the Scarpelli-Kehde musicals is available in a variety of mediums from Mark Scarpelli's Spin and Grow Productions, most all of the plays written by Dan Kehde after 2000 were produced by the Contemporary Youth Arts Company but never submitted for further publication.  The purpose of this site is to make those works available to the public in electronic form.

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     Authorized copies of all of the pieces listed below are available and may be downloaded as a pdf for the nominal price of $10.00 each.  All are legally copyrighted and are not available for reproduction without consent.  Royalties and production rights are set on a sliding scale and are negotiated by contacting cyac2001@me.com for further information.

     As you're about to discover,  most of these plays and monologues are not your average community theater fare.  All of these pieces were created in Charleston, West Virginia,  a community that not only tolerated new theater, but supported it.  Many of the actors named in the front material of each script were either trained by Kehde himself, or were exceptional talents when they auditioned.  In the first 22 years,  the Contemporary Youth Arts Company of Charleston, WV, the company founded by Kehde and his wife, was generously allowed to perform on the stage of the WVSU Capitol Center  for a nominal fee. Later it moved to Charleston Town Center where they were encouraged to build a 75 seat theater which was used until  a new space of their own, The Elk City Playhouse, was built on Charleston's artsy West Side.  

     Still, CYAC  was and continues to be a no-strings-attached theater, free from any perceived notions of community standards or funder requirements.  It was and is this artistic freedom and community support that's allowed Kehde, his collaborators and actors, to create and produce quality original pieces of theater for the past quarter century.  

The Plays and Monologues

of

Daniel S. Kehde

     Additional information about CYAC, it's current productions, schedules and projects is available at the CYAC website, cyaccharleston.com, or by contacting us directly at cyac2001@me.com.