PLAYS & BOOKS
Daniel Tobias tells stories that make hearts race, make people laugh, and stay with audiences long after the lights go up. He is the Lambda Literary Finalist author of the debut novel The Next and the recipient of Broadway World’s 2022 Rockland/Westchester Regional Award for Best Play.
Daniel’s plays are written with a guiding principle: maximum impact at minimum production cost. Known for their laugh-out-loud humor, suspense, and emotional depth, his plays enthrall audiences with bold storytelling while remaining nimble and easy to stage.
He is also the creator of the children’s series Backstage Benny, an adventurous and touching journey available in audiobook format, and he continues to explore new frontiers of performance with the forthcoming radio play thriller Scope.
PLAYS
POOR PEOPLE PROBLEMS
A SCREWBALL ROM-COM FOR THE ETHICALLY COMPROMISED
A scandal-scorched conservative billionaire hires a crusading progressive to ghostwrite his redemption memoir. The arrangement? Transactional. The tension? Combustible. The attraction? Career-ending.
Poor People Problems is a champagne-soaked screwball romantic comedy with the diamond-cut wit of Present Laughter, Born Yesterday, and Adam's Rib that uncorks power, ideology, and the dangerous thrill of falling for the worst possible person.
5 actors
2 Acts
One set
DEAD NEIGHBORS
A MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY
Josh, a struggling actor from the Bronx, moves in with his Columbia-professor boyfriend and inherits a circle of dazzling Ivy League friends who dismiss him as the comic relief. When the downstairs neighbor is found dead inside a locked bathroom, his wife’s apparent suicide begins to look like murder…and then a third victim collapses at Josh’s door. As the friends turn amateur sleuths, the evidence closes in on an appalling possibility: one of them must be the killer.
The investigation ricochets through a blackout-drunk production of Macbeth, Eleven Madison Park, an AA meeting, four cases of rum, a German armed with a Mauser Luger…and a pan of lasagna. While the intellectuals compete to display their brilliance, Josh realizes that saving his relationship depends upon seeing what they dismiss. Armed only with an actor’s toolset and Bronx bravado, Josh discovers that every joke hides a clue…and the killer has made one fatal mistake: mistaking Josh for the fool.
Dead Neighbors is a breakneck, laugh-driven fair-play whodunit that dares audiences to solve the murders by intermission.
Don’t laugh. You’ll miss the clues.
6 actors
2 acts
1 set with minimal fly-ins
BE STILL BE SILENT
When two friends tear up an autistic boy’s ticket to the most anticipated Broadway premiere of the season, what follows is a slow-burning unraveling of loyalty, complicity, and the theater world’s uneasy definition of inclusivity and accessibility.
With razor-sharp humor and moments of quietly devastating emotional truth, Be Still Be Silent features a circle of friends you’ll want to share drinks with…until you absolutely don’t.
Wickedly funny, unsettlingly honest, and deeply relevant, this play asks: when the curtain rises, who shouldn’t be in the room?
5 actors
1 set
Can be performed with or without an intermission
SCOPE
A ONE-ACT THRILLER
On a sunny afternoon in Bryant Park, NYC, Rose celebrates her son’s birthday…when she receives a phone call. A chilling voice warns her that her son is locked in the crosshairs of a long-range rifle. The trigger will be pulled unless Rose can force her husband to flip his vote on the Senate floor. Can Rose outmaneuver this impossible situation?
SCOPE is a fast, heart-pounding, relentless political thriller: taut, provocative, suspenseful, and searing.
4 actors
60 minutes in length
No set required
NOT EVEN A MOUSE
A GOTHIC THRILLER IN TWO ACTS
On a snowy Christmas Eve, a housewife finds herself held captive in her own kitchen - cornered by a calculating political schemer with secrets to bury and nothing to lose. With only her intellect, instincts, and command of the domestic space, she must navigate a deadly game of strategy…before the night turns fatal.
NOT EVEN A MOUSE is a taut, gothic thriller that reframes the kitchen not as a place of comfort, but as a crucible of survival. With biting elegance, crackling tension, and an audacious Shyamalan-style twist, the play upends everything we think we know at the end of Act I to reveal a far more dangerous game in Act II.
Both a chilling holiday suspense tale and a feminist reckoning, NOT EVEN A MOUSE explores power, perception, and the cost of underestimating another.
6 actors
1 set
Performed with an intermission
10-minute scenes
Ten-minute scenes contain the architecture of a full play: the setup of a clear conflict, rising tension, a climax, and a resolution...but all within an intensely limited frame. This constraint and economy are both the challenge and the joy of the ten-minute format.
High Farce • 4 Actors • 2 chairs and a banner is all the set that’s required
A blackout-drunk actor staggers through an off-off-Broadway performance of Macbeth while Reginald, a repressed Ivy League literature professor, watches for the fourth time…helplessly in love yet still unable to say hello. Jill, Reginald’s terminally rational friend, launches an intervention armed with critical thinking, four cocktails, and…um…let’s call it marital advice. As Macbeth deteriorates, Jill goes full Lady M, and Reginald hurls himself off the romantic cliff, Shakespeare becomes the only language two men this catastrophically mismatched can speak fluently. By the curtain, falling in love may be the least obscene thing happening.
Drama • 3 Actors • 1 table + 3 chairs
“La Migra” is a wrenching scene of two husbands at an immigration interview and the one mistake that could effect the rest of their lives.
Comedy • 2 Actors • No set required
During a tense walk through Central Park, Bryant attempts to course-correct Joan’s socially obnoxious behavior. Quickly escalating, their discussion soon threatens their entire friendship.
Comedy • 2 Actors • No set required
Deborah, a billionaire’s anxious wife with a carefully curated reputation, starts to spiral out of control moments before a fundraiser after hearing rumors about her husband. This is a self-contained excerpt from Daniel Tobias’ play “Poor People Problems.”
PROSE
THE NEXT
BY RAFE HAZE
Writing under the pen name Rafe Haze, Daniel Tobias was a Lammy Finalist for best Gay Mystery in 2015 for his debut novel “The Next,” a tale of a deeply depressed New Yorker who works his way to the light by investigating the mysteries of his past and his courtyard neighbors.
“Possibly the best book I’ve read in years.
The initial frenetic, unpleasantly acerbic state of our narrator has its origin in a damaged past which is unveiled little by little throughout the book. The sympathetic cop who reaches out to him has his own complex reasons for the way he is, and the chemistry of those two characters together - which encompasses both recognition and acceptance of each other’s weaknesses as well as their strengths - is unbelievably attractive. The mystery itself is beautifully constructed and interlocks seamlessly with the story of our protagonists’ lives - the one story line moves the other forward in a very natural way, leading both to quite satisfactory conclusions. This was the surprise read of the Awards for me, and it is undoubtedly a winner. I look forward to reading more from this author.”
