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A PLAY BY CRAIG HOUK

HERB CLEARY MEANT NO HARM

​The Best Last Potato Salad You'll Ever Eat.

In present-day Clarksville, Tennessee, Cleary’s Delicatessen has been a beloved institution for nearly fifty years, built on family pride and Grandma Cleary’s legendary potato salad. But as business falters and a flashy new competitor opens across the street, owner Harlan Cleary pins his hopes on his socially awkward, unpredictable son Herb, who “means no harm” but keeps leaving chaos in his wake. When Herb takes liberties with the sacred potato salad recipe, a series of increasingly absurd mishaps spirals into catastrophe: food poisoning at a family picnic, bodies in the restrooms, a suspicious fire, and police at the door. As loyalties fracture and the Clearys scramble to contain the fallout, the play hurtles toward darkly comic disaster, asking how far a family will go to protect its legacy and whether good intentions are ever enough to save it.

Dark Comedy • 10 Female, 5 Male (playable by 9 actors through doubling and tripling) • Two-Act/Full Length • ~110 Mins

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CONTACT CRAIG

No presentation or production of Herb Cleary Meant No Harm, in whole or in part, is permitted without authorization from the playwright or his designated agents.

Playwright Note

There is something fascinating about institutions that outlive their purpose: a deli that insists it is still the best in town, a family that insists everything is fine, a recipe no one writes down because doing so would admit it can be replicated or improved. Herb Cleary Meant No Harm began as a meditation on legacy, on what we inherit, defend, and quietly alter when no one is looking. In Cleary’s Delicatessen, reputation does the heavy lifting; “best potato salad you’ll ever eat” is repeated until it becomes unassailable, even if no one wants to admit it tastes different or never tasted that good. Theater can feel the same. We excel at applause and encouragement, at calling work “brave” or “important,” but are less comfortable asking if it truly is. Praise becomes protective, and if we celebrate one another loudly enough, we can avoid confronting our own uncertainty. In this play, everyone means well: they support, protect, and recast disaster as misunderstanding while insisting the recipe is sacred even as it curdles. The tragedy lies not in malice but in denial, not cruelty but complicity, as blame is placed everywhere except where it belongs. We form small families, close ranks, and convince ourselves that intention outweighs outcome, that if something goes wrong it must have meant no harm. Yet that phrase lingers, suggesting meaning and consequence are not the same, and that love, poorly measured, can still be toxic. If the play makes you laugh, I hope it also leaves a faint aftertaste, something slightly off, a feeling you cannot quite name or ignore, because sometimes the most dangerous force is not an obvious villain but a shared refusal to look too closely.

Production History

None to date.

Development History

HERB CLEARY MEANT NO HARM received a public development staged reading as part of Lakewood Playhouse’s inaugural Festival of New Voices on Wed, Oct 15th, 2025.  The reading was directed by Luke Amundson, assistant directed by Sophia Reeve, stage managed by Maisha Rice, and featured the following cast: Kerry L. Bringman as Harlan Cleary, Jenifer Gillis-Rifenbery as Emma Campbell/Bernadette Sweets/Joelyn Pitzer, Joseph Grant as Clayton Barksdale, Nyah Hart as Ree Ree Tate/Tina Esposito, Asante Hayes as Herb Cleary, Cara Hazzard as Judy Boyd, Mason Hoch as Dereck Hicks/Reed Callaway, Mari Layson Roy as Erin Barnes/Sarabeth Millard, and Brie Vaughn as Arlene Daniels/Angie Cabrera.

Awards/Recognition

None to date.

Reviews/Recommendations

“Craig Houk’s delicious knack for redneck repartee is one of my absolute favorite things, and that gift is on full display here: A Robert Altman movie’s worth of diner denizens cheerfully muddle through one very peculiar day, with disturbing and hilarious results. Underneath the barbs and shenanigans, you’ll also find an allegory about institutional rot - showing how dumb ain’t harmless, and good intentions and benign neglect can allow poison to fester and grow.”

Lakewood Playhouse (Lakewood, WA - 2025)

LICENSE REQUEST

Enter "N/A" if not applicable. 

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