Eric Olson

A father builds a myth around his daughter to keep her from the truth. The myth works, until it doesn't.

Set in and around a VFW hall in rural Texas, Waving Flags examines how family myth gets weaponized, and what it takes to survive the person who aimed it at you. One actor never appears live onstage.

Orlando Short Play Festival, selected (original 10-min version) · Iowa Stage Theatre Company · NewWorksLab staged reading · June 15, 2026

A wedding chapel replaces spoken vows with evidence of behavior, and marriage, performance, adulthood and public ceremony collide.

Five people: a warm but procedural chapel employee; an older digital influencer and her longtime partner, a former intern, who must marry in secret because of her public stance on marriage, then release the footage on their own terms to control the story; and a younger couple, devoted followers, who have tracked them to the chapel hoping to beat them to the video. What begins as a comic administrative shortcut becomes a pressure system for questions about marriage, performance, adulthood, and whether being witnessed is the same as being known.

Six actors. Eighteen roles. One dining room. The same dinner happens three times.

Three different families gather for a meal no one particularly wants. A wildfire burns in the canyon below. The actors rotate through the generational roles (suburban delusion, paranoid absurdity, burned-out entertainment) as the pressure builds to the same moment in every scene: the mother demands to know what the family thinks of her terrible cooking. Someone cracks. Confessions spill. The one lie that survives is the only one that matters.

Palm Springs International Playwriting Festival, finalist

A hired stand-in is sent to propose to a woman on a client's behalf, and falls in love with her himself.

A man who works for a company that stages impersonators for the personal events of the wealthy arrives costumed as another man to propose for the client who hired his company, and falls for the woman instead. Then the client comes back, and romantic-comedy hijinks ensue, asking whether genuine emotion can survive being performed as something else.

Palm Springs International Playwriting Festival, finalist · Iowa Stage Theatre Company, staged reading

Two men at lunch. One invents stories to make life sound interesting.

The other can't stop looking for connection. Neither may be talking to the person they think they are.

Desert Theatre League, Best Original Short Play