Draft Dodging: A Sitcom Crossover In Two Acts

This play stages a familiar academic transaction that is rarely treated as a transaction, the shared draft that arrives as trust and is too often metabolized as opportunity. Rather than handling draft misuse through detection fantasies or after-the-fact grievance, the piece treats the shared document as a live ethical site where permission, credit, and relational safety are negotiated (or quietly violated) in real time, often through ordinary gestures that can be plausibly narrated as harmless. The domestic worlds of Archie Bunker, Fred Flintstone, and Samantha Stephens collide with the bureaucratic agency of "The Doc" and "Version History," producing a comic but precise ethics workshop in which infrastructure is not background but actor. The refrain "Access is not ownership" operates as both rule and dramaturgical hinge, returning across scenes as temptation intensifies, boundaries blur, and the whisper-network consequences of appropriation become legible as an ecosystem response rather than a personal vendetta. The result is a performable pedagogy, designed for table-read, orientation, or faculty development, in which the audience is invited to feel how quickly good intentions become leakage, how easily "help" becomes portability, and how trust is built, or broken, one click at a time.