The Door
by Paul Elliott
Synopsis: A fifty five year old grandmother sits in her darkened apartment and refuses to answer the insistent knocking at her front door. In fact, this woman has shut herself off from everything except the one person still capable of reaching her, her teenage grandson, Justin. Now, he sits with her in the darkness, trying every trick he knows to get her to respond, to turn on the lights, to answer the door and reclaim her life. He teases. He torments. He goads. He reminds her that never once would she have let him hide away like this and he's not about to let her get away with it either. He pushes every annoying button he can push to finally get her to face her worst nightmare and what lies behind that door. She has to do it for herself. She has to do it for him. It's only at the last moment we discover that what she must face when she opens that door is the night the police came to tell her that her grandson had been savagely beaten and brutally murdered because someone thought he might have been gay.
Notes: Poignant, Relevant and Extremely Powerful, The Door is destined to be one of the most produced one act play in America. There are some doors that must be opened if we're going to ever change the way things are. The Door, is a play for the theater company that wants to make a difference in their community, that wants to open the door and shed light on a very frightening truth: Each year hundreds of our nation's youth are violently murdered simply because someone questions their sexuality. "¨