Broadway Bookshelf - Must Read Theater Books

Comedy, Full Length / 4m. This timely comedy by the author of Split Second and Modigliani is a tale of white collar angst in this age of corporate takeovers. The central character, Frank Daniels played in regional productions by both Kenneth McMillan and Jason Robards, is the former general counsel for a cannibalized corporation and he does not intend to go gently into forced retirement. He refuses to pack, tears up the office, and tries to get his fellow executives to decline their golden parac...

Drama, Historic, Full Length / 5m, 2f. Escape to Freedom is very useful in an educational context for both Black and White children as a tool to teach them about slavery-- and also about the importance of education. The story focuses on the boyhood of Frederick Douglass, born a slave and in later life an abolitionist and orator. Much of the plot centers on Fred's struggle to learn to read, the surest way to freedom. Eventually he attains his freedom and runs off disguised as a free sailor.

Comedy, Full Length / 6m, 4f. From acclaimed Japanese director/playwright Toshiki Okada, Artistic Director of the internationally-lauded chelfitsch Theatre Company, comes a chronicle of post-college ennui and 21st Century relationships in Japan's Lost Generation. The static lives of several self-obsessed GenX comic book store clerks are thrown out of balance by the presence of a younger female co-worker, who rightly makes them question the meaning of their lives in a shifting socio-economic land...

Drama, Full Length / 8m, 5f. This steamy, tragic tale of love, jealousy, revenge and betrayal in Haiti is by the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Comedy, Adaptation, Full Length / 6m, 6f. A highly theatrical adaptation of one of Jane Austen's greatest novels. Pledging never to marry, the mischievous Emma Woodhouse is nevertheless the "matchmaker of Highbury." Her newest project, Harriet Smith, has already received a proposal, but Emma insists she marry the eligible vicar Mr. Elton, while, an older family friend, Mr. Knightly, warns her to give up matchmaking. When Emma discovers Mr. Elton is more interested in her, she is forced to fend h...

Dramatic Comedy, Full Length / 1m. In Emergency, a Slave Ship emerges out of the Hudson River in front of the Statue of Liberty sending NYC into a frenzy. Emergency is an intricately woven, urgent, witty and moving exploration of our shared humanity and what it means to be free. An explosive play where rhythm, rhyme and remembrance rise. Through the Night is a timely and inspiring story of possibility and hope, weaving together a unique blend of humor, poetry, music, and drama. It portrays a co...

Drama, Full Length / 10m, 3f. Winner! 2008 Keene Prize for Literature Elephant's Graveyard is the true tale of the tragic collision of a struggling circus and a tiny town in Tennessee, which resulted in the only known lynching of an elephant. Set in September of 1916, the play combines historical fact and legend, exploring the deep-seated American craving for spectacle, violence and revenge. This abridged version, which runs about 40 minutes in length, is perfect for high schools looking to perf...

Drama, Full Length / 10m, 3f. Winner! 2008 Keene Prize for Literature Elephant's Graveyard is the true tale of the tragic collision of a struggling circus and a tiny town in Tennessee, which resulted in the only known lynching of an elephant. Set in September of 1916, the play combines historical fact and legend, exploring the deep-seated American craving for spectacle, violence and revenge.

Comedy, Full Length / 5m. Not long after moving to the small town of Randolphsburg, PA, uptight lawyer Joel Bixby is invited by Leo Applegate, an avuncular fast food connoisseur, to join a group of townsmen who meet in a ramshackle room at the edge of town. Leo has chosen Joel as a replacement for the late - and greatly beloved

Collection/Anthology. Strong roles for women and ample supplies of tears and laughs distinguish these short plays. This collection includes: Evelyn and the Environment 5:15 Greyhound Floating Island La Chienne in the Park Mustard Seed An Old Beagle Called Amour The Voyeur and the Widow You Don't Have to Go to Kansas City to Meet the Devil

Melodrama, Full Length / 3m, 7f. This laugh oriented, old fashioned melodrama is based on Wilkie Collins' classic and it's wild, fast and funny. It features a disreputable (and hilarious) villain who dispatches his adversaries with nefarious ease and even seals his wife in a madhouse to steal her vast fortune! He battles a wicked countess in one of the most uproarious fight scenes ever staged! When all else fails, he engineers mock funerals. But he's scared of the mysterious "woman in white" who...

Comedy, Period, Adaptation, Full Length / 5m, 5f. Based on the classic story that helped to establish Edith Wharton as the first great American woman novelist, this moving play vividly brings to the stage Lily Bart's flamboyant progress through the glorious whirl of New York's high society, circa 1905, and her tragic fall. The satirical love story is staged as a series of flashbacks over her coffin. Faithful to Edith Wharton's distinct style of dialogue, this dramatic version opened to acclaim i...

Comedy, Full Length / 3m, 2f. Charlie is an out of work actor currently working as a waiter. The scene is a series of hilarious encounters in Manhattan restaurants both elegant and shabby. By changing the tablecloths in the course of the action, the basic setting of three tables and six chairs becomes another place. The action's uninterrupted and the comedy never stops. The other performers play several parts; the girl desperately trying to eat snails and oysters to please her fianc

Dramatic Comedy, Full Length / 2m, 1f. An eccentric widower, Mack has been a stay-at-home dad for twenty years, his daily existence revolving around his son Billy. Not only can't he let go, Mack's convinced he's more needed than ever. First up is pulling Billy from a dead-end copy shop job and enrollment in culinary school

Comedy, Full Length / 1m, 3f, 1 girl. Dusty and his animated friends hold a competition to find a model family based on letters written by children. The winning family will receive a visit from Dusty and will be filmed for an upcoming episode. Out of the 15,000 letters received, the producers pick Lizzie Goldberg-Jones and her family to be featured on the most popular animated PBS show in America. Her parents are exemplary role models

Drama, Mystery/Thriller, Full Length / 4m, 1f. Dust is an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Martin is an executive with money and a paunch. Zeke, a gifted young man torn down by drugs, is an ex-con with street smarts and a minimum wage position. Early one morning, in the fitness center of the Essex House, a battle-of-wills begins over the most trivial of requests. As described in The New York Times review: "Verbal sparring turns angry, posturing leads to entrenched positions, and out of nothing - out ...

Comedy, Mystery/Thriller, Full Length / 7m, 3f. 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 stay ali...

Drama, Full Length / 2m, 3f, 1 boy. Winner! 1995 Helen Hayes Awards including Best New Play. 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 prepara...

Drama, Full Length, Period / 3m, 3f, 1 boy. Frank Haynes, an earth loving farmer, has given up his hound-dogging and high times under the pressure of the family's admonition that "A man has got to get ahead." Haynes would be happy to do nothing but tend his farm and reap whatever profit it might generate. But he realizes that there are five mouths depending on him and the lure of big money available to him in a nearby big city factory too great to ignore. Set against a backdrop of the land-locke...

Drama, Full Length / 4m, 7f. In April of 1946 the elderly Alison Armitage is sitting by her window. She is certain the young man she sees leaning against his black Chevy at the end of the lane is Death and that he has come for her. What is left of the Pendragon family is waiting downstairs to see her, but she refuses to let them in. As they wait they are forced to speak to each other for the first time in years, confronting some longstanding grudges and considering some looming dilemmas. Featuri...

Musical, Comedy, Full length / 4m, 4f. At its New York City premiere, patrons stood in line in a blizzard for tickets. At its Australian premiere, every seat for every performance was sold, and one critic noted, "the performance was one of the most enjoyable I've seen . . . My only other experience of the Dracula play . . . was the one that Sir Robert Helpmann directed . . . I can honestly say I enjoyed this one much more. It exhibited a superb sense of humor." Melodic, rollicking and hilarious,...

Collection/Anthology. Short Plays include: Homesick Dr. Magic Here She Is! Negative The Adoption When I was a Little Girl and My Mother Didn't Want Me

Comedy, Short Play / The girls plan to outsmart the boys, but Uncle Clay and the boys learn what they are up to and give them a run for their money. The girls, who are from south of the Mason Dixon line, are not used to such discipline. A human and amusing play.

Comedy, Farce, Full Length / 3m, 5f. On the evening that timid librarian Cinnamon Schmidt and her mother are to entertain her fiance Hobart and his mother at serene family dinner, Cinnamon comes home in shock because she has witnessed a bank robbery and is the only one who can identify the crook. She confides her terror to chum Deedee Malone, not daring to tell her mother and then federal agent Joe Shimko arrives having gotten a tip that the robber, Orville Maddox, is en route to bump off the wi...

Comedy, Full Length / 2m, 2f. Herb has just been admitted to the hospital with a non-specific illness where his wife, Edna, confronts him regarding a will, his options, and insists he see her brother, Bruce, a high-powered attorney. Herb is reluctant, but agrees to see Bruce who, during the confrontational visit, passes out and lapses into a coma. Bruce is now hospitalized and Herb appoints himself as his watch-dog to assure the medical "idiots" don't pull the plug. Herb and Edna invite Bruce's ...

Comedy, Full Length / 3m, 5f. An award winning playwright asks what you would do if you suffered temporary amnesia and stumbled into a bed and breakfast off season only to find you were expected for the week end. That is what happens to the leading man in this delightful comedy. The attractive real estate lady calls him by one name and the housekeeper by another. A business executive and his secretary appear with a confirmed reservation and call him by another name. The executive's wife surprise...

Musical, Comedy, Full Length / 3m, 2f. A Don't Hug Me County Fair is the summer sequel to the smash hit musical comedies Don't Hug Me and A Don't Hug Me Christmas Carol! It's summer time and the Bunyan County Fair is approaching, the biggest thing that's happened in Bunyan Bay since the winter carnival snowplow parade. This year the Bunyan County Fair means one thing to Gunner and Clara Johnson, owners of a little bar called The Bunyan; The Miss Walleye Queen Competition. Bernice, the pretty wai...

Musical, Comedy, Full Length / 3m, 2f. A hilarious spoof of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. It's the smash hit sequel to the award-winning musical, Don't Hug Me. It's Christmas Eve in Bunyan Bay, Minnesota and cantankerous bar owner Gunner Johnson gets in an argument with his wife, Clara, tells her he's skipping Christmas, he storms out of the bar, goes snowmobiling across the lake, falls through the ice and goes into a coma. He comes back in his dream where he's visited by folk legend, Sven...

Musical, Comedy, Full Length / 3m, 2f. It's Fargo meets The Music Man (without the blood or the trombones). Oh, for cryin' in yer snow shoes! It's the coldest day of the year in Bunyan Bay when a slick karaoke salesman arrives at the bar and turns the locals' lives upside down. With its over the top songs and crazy characters, this Minnesota love story with singin' and stuff will have you laughing until the spring thaw! Don't Hug Me takes place in Bunyan Bay, Minnesota. Cantankerous bar owner, G...

Comedy, Full Length / 8m, 8f. Once famous mystery writers involve the audience as they apply their individual methods to solving various murders. They include a couple who write sophisticated murders, a young author of the James Bond school, a retired writer of the hard hitting method and an aging queen of the logical murder.

Comedy, Full Length / 2m, 5f. It's a hot July weekend at The Alamo, a woebegone motel that is directly across the street from a federal penitentiary in Texas. In this warm comedy, seven lonely, wise cracking characters "do time" between visits with loved ones in prison. They play cards, argue, order out for moo shu shrimp, plan a wedding and dream of love. At The Alamo, these prisoners of love take a final stand against loneliness and ultimately find freedom. Characters include the motel owner w...

Musical, Comedy, Full Length / 3m, 1f. Follow Daisy the sassy Westie through her dating adventures with Itchy, Champ and Bogie at the hippest, hottest place in town: Central Bark, where every dog has his day, and love conquers all. Daisy has promised her BFF (Best Friend Forever) she'd give the dating scene one more chance. She meets Champ the Collie, a charming but full of himself show dog; Itchy, a "humperactive" Jack Russell terrier; and Bogie, the darkly mysterious Lab/mutt who sticks his ne...

Comedy, Full Length Play, 3m, 7f. The author of I Shot My Rich Aunt sets this merry murder on a yacht in the French Riviera. The guests on board discover they are marked for a madman's murderous vengeance when Old Maid cards on which each is named and nastily described arrive. Can the malevolent mastermind be Linda Luscious, Victor Valor, bartender Margarita Martini, steward Queenie Quill, TV hostess Wendy Windy, shy secretary Portia Peck, sleazy Ritchy Raunchy, private eye Harry Hulk, math expe...

Dramatic Comedy, Full Length / 11m, 22f, 2boy(s), 3girl(s). The story of friendship between two women in their sixties is played out over the course of ten years, each year representing another reunion for Beverly Duggins and Addie Spool, two participants in a series of annual "tableaux" sponsored by the Museum of Dix, in a small city in the South. Within human diorama settings as simple as a frontier cabin porch or the cow stall of a local dairy barn, and as elaborate as the "Spit and Curl" bea...

Comedy, Full Length Play / 6m, 2f. Chris, a burnt out sixties radical, has settled in Chicago seeking obscurity as an insurance underwriter. He wants to forget his activist past, but is besieged by old cronies and unwanted new ones: a former Black militant, now a transexual city cop; his loopy ex-wife wife who speaks only the words of rock song cliches; a bomb wielding Serbian restauranteur; a former partner in radicalism who now rails agianst the "women's movement"; a prostitute who espouses th...

Drama, Full Length Play / 6m, 5f. Winner of the American College Theatre Festival, this marvelously theatrical play is the story of a disturbed young man and his friendship with a disenchanted preacher in southern Indiana in the early 1930s. When the boy was young he almost drowned. This trauma and the loss of his mother in the same accident has left him deathly afraid of water. The preacher, set on breaking away from a long line of Kentucky family preachers, is determined not to do what he does...

Comedy, Full Length Play / 1m, 5f. Nominee! Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best New Play The Divine Sister is an outrageous comic homage to nearly every Hollywood film involving nuns. Evoking such films as The Song of Bernadette, The Bells of St. Mary's, The Singing Nun, and Agnes of God, The Divine Sister tells the story of St. Veronica's indomitable Mother Superior who is determined to build a new school for her Pittsburgh convent. Along the way, she has to deal with a young postulant who is ...

Dramatic Comedy, Full Length Play / 2m, 1f. Part memory play and part commentary on present relationship, Dividends is a warm and tender play about tradition, caring, change and love. How well does any grandson really know his grandfather? Dividends explores the generation gap between a struggling young artist and his grandfather who is in the hospital near the end of his life. Even though their relationship has always been distant, Neal finds himself forced to look after Pops and he learns a gr...

Comedy, Short Play / 8m, 8f. Nursery Land characters, both human and animal, coexist in this goofy 1940s spoof of classic film noir detective stories for grown-up kids. When her triplets disappear, Mrs. Pig hires detective Jack B. Nimble. Jack and his klutzy secretary Miss Muffet suspect B. B. Wolf. Characters from Humpty Dumpty and Henny Penny to Jack and Mrs. Sprat become involved in the investigation before Jack finds the missing boys and earns a dubious award: a kiss from a pig.

Melodrama, Full Length / 3m, 7f. This play tells in laughable style the tear jerking story of Nellie Lovelace, an innocent country girl. Munro, the viper, has a wife in Ida Rhinegold, belle of the New Haven Music Halls, but that does not prevent him from pursuing Nellie and tearing her from the arms of her dying mother (whom he has poisoned). Nor does it prevent him from driving Adam Oakhart, the blacksmith's son, to drink, from blackmailing rich Mrs. Asterbilt, or from bewitching her daughter, ...

Melodrama, Full Length / 3m, 3f. A comic melodrama that evokes the 1960

Dramatic Comedy, Full Length / 1m, 1f. Mark Twain's The Diaries of Adam and Eve is a uniquely American theatre piece, funny, beautiful, and deeply moving. Twain's Garden of Eden bursts with wit, laughter and the lyric poignance of the first love and the first loss. David Birney has crafted a light-hearted look at the world's first love story through the eyes of America's greatest humorist, Mark Twain. The Diaries is a uniquely American theatre piece. It was first produced for PBS American Playho...

Musical, Full Length / 6m, 7f. A rip roaring country and western rendition of the Jesse James saga that even had New York critics stomping their feet to the music. Jesse James is seen as a frustrated Southerner at the end of the Civil War, hamstrung by Northern limits imposed on the losers' personal freedom. He turns to bank and train robbery, ultimately to be done in by his pal, Bob Ford, for the sake of reward and publicity.

Drama, Full Length Play / 9f. A remote priory is the center for local missionary activity. It is winter and the nuns are preparing for the burial of a deceased sister. As they are singing the Miserere, a warm wind rushes through the chapel and the dead nun sits up in her coffin and laughs! Thus begins for the community of nuns a week of terror, voodoo, suspicion, diabolical possession and attendant horrors.

Melodrama, Full Length Play / 11m, 3f. Winner! Tony

Dramatic Comedy, Full Length Play / 5m, 10f, 2girl(s). An extra-terrestrial "invasion" of the suburban, middle-class community of Susqua Creek Acres, Pennsylvania places its human residents and visitors under sudden house-bound quarantine. Secrets get revealed, conflicts erupt and recede, long festering wounds are dressed, and friendships and relationships terminated or reinstated. Offering the rare opportunity for large ensemble casting, A Delightful Quarantine presents audiences with the inter...

Drama, Full Length Play / 6m, 5f. Winner! VCCA Award to Au Vilar France; Winner! Sewannee Writers Fellowship; Winner! Squaw Valley Fellowship; Winner! Invitation to Contemporary Theatre, London; Finalist! University Interscholastic League Texas competition for new plays Heralded by Southern Repertory Theatre as a star of their 25 year season, Degas in New Orleans explores the inner turmoil and conflict of Edgar Degas, the great French Impressionist painter, as he visits his New Orleans family to...

Collection/anthology. Contents: Broadway Macabre Creatures Lurking in the Churchyard Deflores Doctor Faustus Gogol The Irish Girl Kissed in the Rain Wolfsbane

Comedy, Short Play / 3m, 1f. This funny and bittersweet play catches a moment in the life of Troy Watkins, an indecisive single woman in her thirties who lives alone in New York City. She meets an intriguing stranger in the park, a man who looks like a tramp but obviously is well educated. What has reduced him to his current state? Drugs? Financial difficulties? Crime? As they share thoughts and get to know each other, Troy decides to trust him. Is she right or wrong? The answer lies in a very f...

Comedy, Full Length Play / 2m, 2f. When an escaped convict, an anxious bride, a scheming new husband, and a suspicious attorney all convene at Grandpa's house--it doesn't take long for Grandpa to realize he has to reschedule his golf game. This lively combination of uproarious comedy and terrifying murder mystery revolves around the uncanny resemblance between escaped convict Tony and recent bridegroom Prescott (both played by the same actor). Newlywed Ashley's desperate attempt to figure out wh...