A tradition for over half a century at Avery Elementary School in Webster Groves, Missouri, the Avery Play is an annual spring production put on by parents for the community and featuring an original story, song-and-dance musical numbers, and laughs for the schoolchildren and their families. For four years, author Patrick Dorsey (God's Forge, The Champion Sky) took on the role of playwright for the annual show, writing four plays featuring his characteristic mix of parody, adventure, fantasy, and fun. The plays are easy to produce and suitable for any community group to put on, no matter how experienced or amateur the production -- all that's needed is a space to perform and performers who want to give their audience a full evening of entertainment. Featuring context and insights on each, inside are full scripts for four plays that were successfully staged by the Avery Elementary PTO, including: * Lost at Avery (2008) * Steve & Terri's Excellent Avery Play Adventure (2009) * Whatever (2010) * Shenanigans (2012) Here are the stories...Just add cast and crew, and get ready for laughs and applause as your group gets to become part of the history, the tradition, and the fun of the Avery Play

A legion of elite, monastic fighting men, the Knights Templar were the most fearsome warriors of the Crusades, writing their legend in the gory sands of the Middle East with the blood of their enemies and their own. It was they who took the Holy Land, and they who held it. Answering only to the Pope, they bowed before no king or crown. Returned from the Crusades and stationed in Paris, Brother William has grown disillusioned with the Order and plans to leave it. But as their Paris stronghold is seized by royal troops, William leads a small band of Templars in a desperate escape, fleeing with them into the night. Alternately fighting and running, struggling to understand the world that has turned on them so viciously, they cross paths with a brutalized young prostitute. Open and proud about her sins, she ushers William and his comrades toward dark truths about the city festering around them, about its rulers and the church they've sworn to defend-all in a race to escape that will leave the streets of Paris bloody.

Mysteriously flung across the void to the distant planet Mars, Captain John Carter of Virginia finds himself a captive of giant, four-armed green savages. But when he meets fellow prisoner Dejah Thoris, the beautiful alien princess of the City of Helium, he realizes the only way to protect her from the cruel green barbarians is to escape. With sword and superhuman strength born of the lesser gravity of Mars, John Carter sets out to cross the exotic and dangerous alien world and return her home, with the fate of two kingdoms and the future of the entire planet at stake The original Science Fiction epic The Legendary Planet 100th anniversary edition features beautiful digital restorations of the first edition's art.