Playwright and filmmaker Patrick Flynn has turned his Concord Theatricals Off Off Broadway Short Play Festival-winning play The Ferberizing of Coral into a short film with producer Maureen Monterubio. A finalized release plan is not yet announced, but Flynn and Monterubio plan on putting it into the festival circuit.
The movie stars Theo Stockman (American Psycho, American Idiot) and Mitzi Akaha (Chaperone, The Looming Cloud) as new parents stressed out over getting their newborn baby to sleep through the night. In their living room armed with their trust baby monitor, suddenly they begin hearing things much more shocking than a baby's cries.
Flynn says the play version, which won the short play festival in 2018 and has since been produced at theatres nationwide, was purely a farce, but this film version allowed him to add some new colors.
"The important question for me was 'Why make it into a movie?,'" says Flynn. "I think that's a question a lot of playwrights forget to ask when adapting their work. The play is a farce, and a really fun one. But the movie allowed us to make the story more of a thriller and mine the comedy from a totally different direction. And once we had that idea, Maureen and I were off and running."
The film was funded via a crowdfunding campaign via Seek&Spark last year, and was shot in NYC in October 2024. The cast also features Carly Ciarrocchi (Weird But True), Negin Farsad (Fake the Nation), and Clint McElroy (The Adventure Zone).
The stage version of The Ferberizing of Coral debuted at the 2016 DC Source Festival and was brought back in 2017 for an encore run as one of the festival's Best of 10 Minute Plays.