Drama / Characters: 14 male, 4 female
Sacrificed to powers larger than himself, Woyzeck is one of drama's first anti-heroes. He serves a German captain and makes money by allowing a doctor to experiment on him, but his deeper morality leads him to a tragic end.
Marcia Kash and Doug Hughes . Farce. Characters: 5 male, 2 female. Interior Set. Jane and Sybil are on the verge of the deal of their lives. They have rented a hotel suite for a very private showing of their "Passion Fashion Wear" lingerie. Only famous Italian designer Bruno Fruferelli is to attend. The models are booked, the champagne is on ice and the sexy samples are on display. They have anticipated every contingency, expect the arrival of their jealous husbands who have jumped to the wron...
Drama / Characters: 1 male, 1 femaleThis psychological thriller is a favorite in acting workshops. It is a mind game play. Toyer is someone who toys; he is a mass paralyzer who toys with his victims. He does not murder or rape, he seduces and them immobilizes. Following productions in Los Angles and the Actors Studio, it was produced at the Eisenhower Theatre and the Kennedy Center with Kathleen Turner and Brad Davis, directed by Tony Richardson. . "Strong stuff. . .Outlandish mind games. Riveti...
Short Play, Comedy / 3W /Unit Set
Set in the formerly oil-rich desert Southwest, this play explores the lives of two generations of women living under one roof. The story centers on Jo who, after her father dies, takes in her feisty mother. The dialogue between them and with a long-time neighbor is, at once, outrageously funny and heart-breakingly tragic. These women tear and rip into each other¿s psyche with reckless abandon and something barely resembling love. The cookies in question may or ...
An Improper Comedy / 3m, 3f / Interior Set / Anyone nutty enough to buy an old lighthouse for a summer home is looking for trouble. It comes on the double to a novelist, her estranged TV film star husband and the latest gleam in his roving eye when this unsociable triangle, along with the novelist's globetrotting journalist mother, a baffled editor and a grocery boy find themselves trapped on the top floor during the off season. Suspense spirals and comedy crackles during three days of confineme...
Play . Jean Lenox Toddie. Characters: 2 female. Bare stage or simple set. . This witty look at mother daughter relationships is a light hearted exploration of irritations and misunderstandings that build walls between a woman and her female off spring-- and the love and compassion that destroys these walls. The crisis and humor of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age are evoked in a celebration of dissonance and the harmony between mothers and daughters. With the light touch of fantasy...
Comedy / 6m, 6f
Winner! 14 DramaLogue awards including Best Production.
A black comedy about white trash! The author of Daddy's Dyin' (Who's Got the Will?) brings you a comedy that was nominated for over thirty awards during its long run in Los Angeles. When Peggy, a good Christian woman, hits her head on the sink and bleeds to death after tripping over her lover's wooden legs in a motel room, chaos erupts in Winters, Texas.
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"[This play by] the master of Texas Comedy ... is maybe funnie...
Comedy / 2m, 2f / Single Set
In Skin Deep, a large, lovable, lonely-heart, named Maureen Mulligan, gives romance one last shot on a blind-date with sweet awkward Joseph Spinelli; she's learned to pepper her speech with jokes to hide insecurities about her weight and appearance, while he's almost dangerously forthright, saying everything that comes to his mind. They both know they're perfect for each other, and in time they come to admit it.
They were set up on the date by Maureen's sister Sh...
Drama / Casting: 1m, 1f / Scenery: Interior
This fine work in the Pendragon cycle of plays enjoyed a sold out, critically acclaimed production at the world famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle betw...
Comedy Characters: 14 male, 8 female (more if desired.) . Unit set.. In a land where the rich get richer and the poor are starving, Prince John wants to cut down Sherwood Forest to put up an arms manufactory, a slaughterhouse and a tennis court for the well to do. This bawdy epic unites elements of wild farce and ancient mythologies with an environmentalist assault on the arrogance of wealth and power in the face of poverty and hunger using feeble and insane jesters, a demonic snake oil salesma...
Mystery / 1m, 5f / Simple unit set
This psychological drama is a thinking person's Gothic thriller, a dark comedy that is both funny and frightening. On a snowy night, Inspector Ruffing is called to a remote house to investigate the headlong plunge of Patrick Roarke down the main staircase. He becomes involved in the lives of five alluring and dangerous women: Marcy, the beautiful Viennese governess with a past; Mrs. Ravenscroft, the flirtatious lady of the manor; Gillian, her charming but poss...
Romantic Farce. Nick Hall . Characters: 2 male, 2 female. Interior Set . Sir Peter, has planned a dinner for two. His companion is Viola, a young chorus girl. But he's forgotten it's his wedding anniversary-- his wife, Lady Alexandra, comes home early and aided by the butler, Medford, turns Sir Peter's evening into a shambles. Medford interrupts the dinner disguised as a policeman-- then Lady Alexandra appears in a Salvation Army uniform-- then Medford in the guise of a gypsy violinist-- and f...
Little Theatre. Mystery . Marcia Kash and Douglas E. Hughes. Characters: 3 male, 3 female . Interior Set. Six people have come in secret on Halloween to play a murder mystery game at a rustic island cottage. Invited by writer Charles Prince, they appear set for a weekend of fun until ghosts from the past begin to haunt the proceedings and it becomes clear that all is not as it seems. The game takes on a sinister dimension when guests begin to die and the remaining players realize that they are ...
Mystery Comedy / Characters: 4 males, 5 females Set Rewuirements: Interior. Peter Knight is grinding out a murder story in an old mansion where another author was murdered years before. A weird electrical storm effects a cosmic snafu and his characters come to life. There's the lovely ingenue, the trusty butler, a feisty character woman, a dauntless hero, a fascinating "other woman," the always pregnant serving girl, and the wily lawyer waiting for midnight to read the will. Peter looses control...
Comedy Drama / 13m, 4f / Int. w. inset.
Kirk Douglas played on Broadway as a charming rogue who contrives to serve a short sentence in an airy mental institution rather in a prison. This, he learns, was a mistake. He clashes with the head nurse, a fierce artinet. Quickly, he takes over the yard and accomplishes what the medical profession has been unable to do for twelve years; he makes a presumed deaf and dumb Indian talk. He leads others out of introversion, stages a revolt so that they can...
Full Length, Comedy / Characters: 3m, 2f / Interior set / A super-macho business executive suddenly has problems in the bedroom with his long-term wife and mother of his grown children. Failure in any part of his life has never been an option for him. So he recruits his wife into solving the problem through the "Live Your Fantasy" sex-therapy technique pioneered by Dr. Leopold Baumgartner. The wife discovers the dominatrix/diva that has been buried beneath the gracious hostess, and they blackmai...
Drama / 11m, 7f, 7 children / Unit set
This faithful adaptation brings the wonderful romantic novel's profoundly human characters and its expansive view of 19th century American frontier life vibrantly to the stage. The play celebrates Antonia's story and her extraordinary delight in the happenings of daily life. It moves from the raw hardships of her immigrant family's first year as settlers on the plains through her joyful and rebellious youth to her fulfillment as a farm wife and mother. ...
Full Length / Comedic Mystery / 4m, 3f / Interior
The year is 1923 and audience members are passengers on board the HMS Victoria as it crosses the English Channel. The famous Inspector Clurrot has tracked down a homicidal mastermind hiding out on board. Meanwhile, the ship is the vessel of matrimony for the Contessa Follette and John D. Rothchild - a marriage encouraged through financial need and murderous greed. But not everything is as it seems, and it turns out that the English Channel isn't...
Full Length, Drama w/music / 18m, 5f, extras /Int./5 Exts.
This German play was written in 1939 and was first produced in Zurich in 1941. In America, it was published in English right away (1941, by New Directions) but did not reach Broadway till 1963 - in a memorable production directed by Jerome Robbins and starring Anne Bancroft. It had, of course, by that time been produced to much acclaim all over the world.
When Bertolt Brecht directed the play in Munich (1950), Eric Bentley, Assista...
Comedy/Drama / 3 m. / Simply suggested sets
Charles Durning, Dan Lauria and James Handy starred at Westport Country Playhouse of this portrait of up and coming Mafia soldiers: Bobby who does as he's told and never questions the legendary Boss and Max who is haunted by the screams of people they've killed. They whack the wrong guy in Grand Central Station and are seen driving to Vermont to confess their error. Short scenes chronicle the drive; settings en route are easily suggested with set pi...
Dramatic Comedy / 1m, 1f / Winner of the John Gassner Playwriting Contest and the Princeton Players One Act Playwrighting Contest. This is a story of a zestful, youthful courtship. She is 68 and he is 79. They put their moves on each other in a minuet that is a joy to behold. Published with A Scent of Honeysuckle
Dramatic Comedy. . Characters: 2 male, 1 female. Interior Set. Thomas Hanratty, lifelong resident of Hell's Kitchen and once the most dangerous white cab driver in New York, was blinded eight years ago in a drunken accident and is fading into a routine of self pity and alcohol. His bartender and only friend, who was partly responsible for the accident, is moving to Vermont with a new lady friend, but he can't abandon Tom. He recruits an unattractive, slightly handicapped volunteer reader from...
Drama / 2m, 1f / Using a cast of three to play 40 sharply drawn characters, this bold work of penetrating intelligence is based on the fanciful, explosive idea that a German Chancellor might, as an act of redemption, invite six million Jews to Germany and promise them citizenship and jobs. A resulting scenario unfolds that explores the effects of the policy on Jews and Gentiles with widely varying outlooks: an out of work Jewish dock worker from Massachusetts who brings his Irish wife and his so...
Comedy / 3m, 3f / Areas / La Gringa is about a young woman's search for her identity. María Elena Garcia goes to visit her family in Puerto Rico during the Christmas holidays and arrives with plans to connect with her homeland. Although this is her first trip to Puerto Rico, she has had an intense love for the island and even majored in Puerto Rican Studies in college. Once María is in Puerto Rico, she realizes that Puerto Rico does not welcome her with open arms. The majority of the Puerto Rica...
Comedy / Characters: 3 males, 5 femalesSet Requirements: Interior. The marriage of Rupert and Sarah is on the rocks and their friends Charles and Madge, both of whom are lawyers, agree to handle the divorce. After the curtain has been up a few minutes, Rupert forgets his lines, has a brain storm and threatens to kill Charles in full view of the audience because he's been having an affair off stage, with Rupert's real wife, Madge. Quite true as it happens. The rest of the cast try to ignore the i...
Comedy / 1m, 1f / This delightful comedy which starred the authors on Broadway is about Theda Blau, a failed actress, health food nut, analysand and would-be playwright who wants to find love and success in New York, and Vito Pignoli, a hugely successful TV commercial director. By holding him hostage in her apartment on a snowy Christmas Eve, she somehow manages to convince him to be her partner both in on the page and off.
Comedy. Billy Van Zandt and Jane Milmore. Characters: 3 male, 3 female. Single set. This wild bedroom farce involves infidelity, double standards, midnight rendezvous and a hungry bear. Danny and Kathy halt their night of sultry passion when Kathy reveals she is dating another man. Paul and Jennifer play a mad slapstick scene of frustration because she is reluctant to cheat on her husband. Bill and Mary, a couple about to celebrate their twenty ninth wedding anniversary are at odds: Mary yearn...
Comedy / 2f / Estelle Parsons and Lucie Arnaz starred on Broadway in this charmer set in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Grace, a feisty 90 year old cancer patient, has checked herself out of the hospital and returned to her beloved homestead cottage to die alone. The volunteer hospice worker who appears with the pain medication Grace willfully left behind is a Harvard MBA recently transplanted to this rural backwater from New York. Glorie is tense, unhappy and guilt ridden, her only child having been...
Little Theatre . Comedy. Flip Kobler and Cindy Marcus . Characters: 3 male, 3 female . Interior Set . Bethany is bright, strong, independent, beautiful and has zero self esteem. She has brought her finance, Floyd, and his mother, Verna, up to her cabin in the woods, the site of the hunting accident that killed Chance, her first husband. Much to her consternation, he or rather, his ghost is still there. Only Bethany can see him, so Floyd and Verna think she is crazy as she frantically tries to ge...
Drama / 2f / This extraordinary play won first prize at both the Edinburgh Festival and the Theatre Festival in Sydney, Australia, as well as the Vita Award in South Africa as Best Play. The play begins just after the death of Gertrude Stein. Her ghost returns to Alice B. Toklas and the genesis and development of their relationship is richly portrayed. Mr. Wells has truly captured the feeling, art, music and literature of Paris of those years, when Pablo and Ernest and Henri and all of Gertrude'...
Drama / Characters:1 male, 1 femaleScenery: Interior. A couple sit at opposite ends of a table reminiscing about their life together. Each has a point of view and they rarely address each other directly. They are young to begin with, then middle aged, then old, then one dies. The anecdotes they relate are both humorous and tragic. Their lives seem wasted, yet the wife's muted final gesture of affection conveys a love that endured through years of bickering. A critical success in London, Ireland ...
Little Theatre. Farce . Ray Cooney . Characters: 6 male, 2 female. Never has this master of farce been frenetically funnier. Henry A. Perkins, a mild mannered C.P.A, accidently picks up the wrong briefcase one full of money. Henry assumes it is illicit cash and he decides to keep it. Knowing that the former owner must have his briefcase, he rushes home to book one way fares to Barcelona. He tells his confused wife to leave everything behind; if she doesn't like Barcelona, they can go to Bali...
Drama / Character: 4 male, 4 femaleScenery: Interior. Victor Frankenstein, a brilliant young scientist, returns to his Swiss chateau to escape a terrible pursuer. No one can shake free the dark secret that terrifies him: not his mother, nor his fiancee, nor his best friend. Even the pleading of a gypsy girl accused of murdering Victor's younger brother falls on deaf ears, for Victor has brought into being a creature made from pieces of the dead. The creature tracks Victor to his sanctuary to dem...
Comedy / Characters: 7 male, 3 female Scenery: Interior . A cast of has been actors plan to revive their careers in Drop Dead!, a potboiler murder mystery directed by "Wonder Child of the Broadway Stage" Victor Le Pewe (a psychotic eye twitching megalomaniac). At the dress rehearsal the set falls, props break, and the producer and an actor are murdered. During the opening night performance, the murders continue. The remaining thespians must save the show and their careers, solve the mystery and ...
Drama / 2m, 3f, 1m child / This intriguing work produced at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre and in New York was inspired by an actual incident: women were banned from the artists' dinner to plan the first Impressionist painting exhibit in 1874, even though works by women were to be shown. In the play, the dinner is at the home of Victor, a successful artist, and Clovis, an artist who no longer paints. After helping with the preparations and being excluded from the dining room, Clovis devises a "w...
Comic melodrama. . Little Theatre. . Characters: 3 male. 3 female. . Interior set. . Newly revised! This comic melodrama evokes the 1960's movie thrillers that featured such aging cinematic icons as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Lana Turner and Susan Hayward. Faded pop singer, Angela Andrews, is trapped in a corrosive marriage to film producer, Sol Sussman. In her attempt to find happiness with her younger lover, an out of work TV star, Angela murders her husband with the aid of a poison...
Comedy . Characters: 1 male, 1 female . Exterior Set. Originally broadcast on American Playhouse, this delightful adaptation is set in a Victorian garden and is structured as a series of diary entries by Adam and Eve. The play also works as a reader's theatre piece. At first, Adam is puzzled by the new arrival in the garden and he is suspicious of her disturbing appetite for fruit. Eve, believing herself to be some sort of experiment, is curious about another experiment in the garden, perhaps s...
The Sound of Music was the last – and most successful – collaboration of two giants of the musical theater, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Enjoying a long run on Broadway and then transformed into a major hit film--recently reissued in a 40th anniversary edition on DVD with new footage – The Sound of Music remains among the most produced musicals by professional and amateur companies around the world.
This book tells the full story of the making of the show, from the first rough ideas...
One of America's most powerful and original dramatists, August Wilson offered an alternative history of the twentieth century, as seen from the perspective of black Americans. He celebrated the lives of those seemingly pushed to the margins of national life, but who were simultaneously protagonists of their own drama and evidence of a vital and compelling community. Decade by decade, he told the story of a people with a distinctive history who forged their own future, aware of their roots in an...
A Chorus Line, the biggest Broadway hit of its generation, is returning to Times Square in a major fall 2006 revival. The show is based on a remarkable series of taped discussions made in the mid 1970s with some of the top "gypsies" (veteran Broadway dancers), many of whom went on to play characters based on themselves in the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning musical. In many ways, On the Line: The Creation of "A Chorus Line" is a continuation of the show itself. In this collective oral history, the 19...
WE BOMBED IN NEW LONDON tells the true story of one man's tenacious plight to get his musical mounted. From its romantic inception to its eventual demise and then the score's resurrection in cabarets and recordings, this book takes you on a journey through the ups and downs of the theatrical world with all its excitement, disappointment, laughter and hope. Packed with memorabilia, including rare photos and interviews, this book documents composer/lyricist Brian Gari's minute by minute developmen...
Rent can be characterized as a Tony- and Pulitzer-winning rock musical and film, but it can be described also as an ensemble experience that just kept growing. Nobody can describe that deeply human process better than actor Anthony Rapp, who played video artist Mark Cohen in both the Broadway play and the movie. His heartwarming personal memoir shows the continuity between the musical's genesis and the emotional lives of the artists workshopping it. With You takes you backstage and into the hea...
The year 1599 was crucial in the Bard's artistic evolution as well as in the historical upheavals he lived through. That year's output—Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and (debatably) Hamlet—not only spans a shift in artistic direction and theatrical taste, but also echoes the intrigues of Queen Elizabeth's court and the downfall of her favorite, the Earl of Essex. Like other Shakespeare biographers, Columbia professor Shapiro notes the importance of mundane events in Shakespeare's art, st...
The World of Theatre is the first introduction to theatre book to truly focus on diversity and globalism, integrating coverage of multicultural, international and experimental theatre throughout. Theatre is presented as a global and multicultural form that reflects both traditional and evolving world views. While the American commercial theatre and European forms are central to the text, alternative theatres are placed side by side for comparison and contrast in each chapter, thus avoiding the s...
For 40 years, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were the most acclaimed stage actors in America. From 1928 (six years after their marriage) until their retirement in 1960, they appeared only togethermost notably in drawing-room comediesperfecting the subtle team playing that became their hallmark. In this comprehensive biography, Brown, theater professor at Western Illinois University, meticulously documents the couple's lives. Describing the perishable art of stage performance (the Lunts made few f...
Wicked is not just a musical, it is a phenomenon. Every week 15,000 people pack New York+s Gershwin Theatre to see the show. The most successful musical on Broadway in 2004, Wicked is based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Gregory Maguire. It tells the story of Elphaba, the headstrong Wicked Witch of the West, and Glinda, the good witch, growing up in the Land of Oz. The show has cast a spell on fans, many of whom return for second and third viewings. In 2005, the show begins an exte...
Bryer and Davison, co-editors of The Actor's Art, collect interviews with leading lyricists, composers, librettists, producers and directors who created the masterpieces of late 20th-century musical theater. Conversations with talent like Kander and Ebb, Susan Stroman, and Harold Prince shed light on the various ways to combine music and dance, which resulted in hits such as Cabaret, The Producers and Fiddler on the Roof, respectively. Each interview includes a brief bio and an appraisal of triu...
Presents rare information on traveling circus, minstrel, opera, and Toby shows.
This collection of essays explores an understudied but pervasive aspect of American theatre: theatre on the road, from minstrel shows and Toby shows to contemporary African American theatre, 19th-century circus rail travel, and small-town opera houses.
The challenges in gathering and compiling data on these ephemeral productions, from such far-flung sources as railroad schedules and weather reports, minutes f...
New York Then/New York Now—a collection of essays, memoirs, interviews, commentary, and plays—contemplates New York City’s history and future as a center for groundbreaking theatrical forms and ideas. Featuring the work of theater artists, producers, and critics, this special issue of Theater is concerned with the ideas and practicalities of making theater in and for New York within specific historical, political, and economic contexts. The first section, “New York Then,” reflects on the emerge...
