This Won't Take Long is being produced as part of the 2006 New York City Fringe Festival. A mentally challenged man is questioned by two detectives investigating the disappearance of a young girl. John Henry Taylor may know something about the crime, but his capacity to understand the situation makes his information unreliable. The play depicts just how easily a man can confess to a crime he might have had nothing to do with. It also illustrates how the police themselves can get pulled into the same process and lose control of it.

"A few years ago, I read an article in the New York Times about Earl Washington, Jr., a forty year-old black man who’d been in prison for seventeen years after being convicted of the rape and murder of a young mother. The Innocence Project had just had the sentence overturned, based on new DNA evidence. Washington had been manipulated into confessing to the crime by overzealous detectives. Washington has an I.Q. of about 69, which made it difficult for him to fully comprehend just what was happening to him. He knew nothing of the crime, but eagerly regurgitated information the detectives had unknowingly supplied during questioning.

This struck me as a perfect situation for a timely and dramatic play. This Won’t Take Long is more about the nature of being questioned about a crime than the issue of guilt or innocence. Is Henry trying too hard to help? Is he telling them what they want to hear? If so, does it necessarily mean that he knows nothing of the crime? Henry may indeed be guilty, or he may not even know the girl. If the police are manipulating him, are they aware of it? These cases are all too common, and DNA evidence is now proving over and over how these "open and shut" verdicts were actually terrible miscarriages of justice."

David M. Korn, playwright