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The Craft of Theatre: Seminars and Discussions in Brechtian Theatre
(5/12/2012) The autobiographical account by one of German theater's great actors of his life in the theater. |
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Toyer
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Tough Cookies
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Tight Spot
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Tell Me Another Story, Sing Me a Song
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Sordid Lives
(11/19/2011) 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. . "[This play by] the master of Texas Comedy ... is maybe funnie... |
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Skin Deep
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Showtime at First Baptist
(11/19/2011) Dramatic Comedy / 6f Showtime at First Baptist is the sequel to the hugely popular and widely produced First Baptist of Ivy Gap. First Baptist of Ivy Gap's 100th anniversary picnic was a smashing success, except for one little thing: the bolt of lightning that struck the church's steeple, igniting a fire that destroyed the sanctuary and so much more. In the wake of the disaster, key women of the church - led by Edith, the pastor's take-charge wife - gather in what's left (the fellowship ha... |
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Seascape with Sharks and Dancer
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Round and Round the Mulberry Bush
(11/19/2011) ComedyCharacters: 4 male, 7 femaleSimple Set Two one-act plays by internationally known playwright Jean Lenox Toddie celebrating with poignancy and humor the struggle of the heart to find its way home. Eleven colorful characters range in age from a sassy teen, to a middle-aged professor, to an old woman waiting for a bus. What bus? The bus for which we all will wait.Plays include Did You Hear the Owl Last Night? and Once Again in Glyn Kerrie. |
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Rocket City, Alabam'
(11/19/2011) Play with Music / Characters: 6m, 3f, with doubling Rocket City, Alabam', a play with songs, captures a lost, true-life episode in the history of the American South, presenting a hushed-up story, colorful Southern characters, and several famous songs of the region- blues, spirituals and gospel. At the dawn of the Cold War, the early 1950's, a young, brash, Army major, Hamilton Pike, brings famed German rocket scientist and former Hitler employee Wernher Von Braun to Huntsville, Alabama, a cot... |
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Robin Hood
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Ravenscroft
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Rat Wives And Other Plays
(11/19/2011) Contents: Dutch Interiors French Gold Rat Wives Rhiannon The Rooky Wood |
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Quint and Miss Jessel at Bly
(11/19/2011) DramaCharacters: 2 male, 1 female. Unit Set. Peter Quint is sent by his lifelong employer, the Master of Bly, to be the servant in charge of a remote English country house where Miss Jessel has just arrived to be governess to the orphaned children of the master's brother. The ultimately deadly love triangle that results forms a darkly funny and erotic Gothic love story. These are the lovers who haunt Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Quint is brilliant, sardonic and angry, a man of great abil... |
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PIGmalion
(11/19/2011) Dramatic Comedy / 9m, 8f (cross casting and double casting possible) Inspired by Pygmalion, Shaw's classic drawing room tale of language and class division, and its musical incarnation, My Fair Lady, the play tells the story of one Eliza Doolittle-the daughter of a hardscrabble Mississippi pig farmer-who sells homemade pork rinds at the Tri-Counties Fair and Livestock Show, and dreams of someday working as a waitress at "one of those nice downtown barbecue restaurants where all the tourists g... |
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Pastiche
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Party to Murder, A
(11/19/2011) 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 ... |
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Palestrina and Other Plays
(11/19/2011) Demonology, MacNaughton's Dowry, Netherlands, The Bohemian Seacoast |
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Out of Sight... Out of Murder
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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New York
(11/19/2011) 7m, 8f / Drama / Simple Set / David Rimmer, a Pulitzer Prize finalist author for Album, originally wrote New York to raise funds for volunteer psychiatrists dedicated to helping the overwhelming number of patients psychologically affected by 9/11. Depicting the reactions of 15 individuals to the events of that day, the characters all speak to a central psychiatrist. The play has been performed at theaters, schools and colleges throughout New York and the Northeast to great acclaim,called "brilli... |
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Nana's Naughty Knickers
(11/19/2011) Farce / 3m, 5f with doubling /Interior Bridget and her Grandmother are about to become roommates. However, what Bridget saw as a unique opportunity to stay with her favorite Nana in New York for the summer quickly turns into an experience she'll never forget. It seems her sweet Grandma is running an illegal boutique from her apartment, selling hand-made naughty knickers to every senior citizen in the five borough area! Will Bridget be able to handle all the excitement? Will her Nana get a... |
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My Husband's Wild Desires
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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My First Time
(11/19/2011) 2m, 2f / Comedy / Simple Set "I remember my first sexual experience. I was alone at the time!" (Story #6509) "I still have the Metallica shirt he wore that night." (Story #23960) "File mine under clumsy and awkward!" (Story #4294) My First Time features four actors in hysterical and heartbreaking stories about first sexual experiences written by real people. In 1998, a decade before blogging began, a website was created that allowed people to anonymously share their own true stories... |
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My Antonia
(11/19/2011) 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. ... |
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Murderous Crossing
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Mother Courage and Her Children
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Milk
(11/19/2011) Dramatic Comedy Characters: 3 male, 3 female. Rural New England, just before Reagan's second term. Meg and Ben are a creditor away from losing their family farm. To the rescue flies a high-powered businessman - in a private chopper no less - offering a tidy sum for a taste of farm life and the pure, raw milk that goes with it. Even before locavores roamed the earth, "back to the land" was hardly as simple as its promise; livestock and humans aren't known for behaving as expected. And ... |
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Men in Suits
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Love Town
(11/19/2011) Comedy 5m, 3f, Possible Cast Expansion / Interior Sea Spray is a charming beach town, perfect for romantic getaways and cliff-side proposals. While tourists walk around with stars in their eyes, the locals take their lumps and watch their relationships fray and fizzle. Karl is a self-professed good guy who bought the little village dream for his wife, only to have her run off with the town aromatherapist. Now he's stuck with a quaint souvenir shop he never wanted, and the vengeful impulse ... |
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A Little Something for the Ducks
(11/19/2011) 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 |
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Light Sensitive
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Lebensraum
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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La Gringa (English Version)
(11/19/2011) 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 Ri... |
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Kindly Leave the Stage
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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It Had to be You
(11/19/2011) 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. |
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Israel Horovitz New Shorts
(11/19/2011) Dramatic Comedy / Flexible casting: 2-5m, 2-5f This brilliant collection of Horovitz's newest one-act plays can be mixed and matched to form several "theme" evenings. For example, nine of these plays formed the highly-successful off-Broadway show "Israel Horovitz's New Shorts": The Bridal Dance, Affection In Time (The Prologue), The Fat Guy Gets The Girl, Beirut Rocks, The Audition Play, The Hotel Play, Cat-Lady, Inconsolable and The Race Play . Additionally, six of these plays were joined to... |
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The Irish Curse
(11/19/2011) Comedy5mWhat "The Irish Curse" is - and how it manifests itself - is the raw centerpiece of this wicked, rollicking and very funny new play. From its blistering language to its brutally honest look at sex and body image, The Irish Curse is a revealing portrait of how men, and society, define masculinity. In doing so, it dares to pose the fundamental question that has been on the minds of men since the beginning of time: "Do I measure up to the next guy?" Size matters to a small group of Iris... |
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Having a Wonderful Time, Wish You Were Her
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Grace & Glorie
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Ghost of a Chance
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Gertrude Stein and a Companion
(11/19/2011) 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'... |
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Galway Girl, A
(11/19/2011) 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 ... |
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Funny Money
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Fresh Brewed: Tales from the Coffee Bar
(11/19/2011) Fresh Brewed is a collection of eleven plays, all of which take place in a coffee bar, all of which use the same set of two small tables and four chairs, and all of which can be performed by two male and two female actors in various combinations from a monologue to two quartets. If all of the plays are performed in one evening, there should be no black outs between plays. Simply changing the composition of the cast can signal the audience of movement between plays. On the hand, each play is writ... |
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Frankenstein
(11/19/2011) 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... |
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Farnsworth Invention
(11/19/2011) Drama<p>Characters: 15 male, 3 femaleIt's 1929. Two ambitious visionaries race against each other to invent a device called "television." Separated by two thousand miles, each knows that if he stops working, even for a moment, the other will gain the edge. Who will unlock the key to the greatest innovation of the 20th century: the ruthless media mogul, or the self-taught Idaho farm boy? The answer comes to compelling life in The Farnsworth Invention, the new play from Aaron Sorkin, creator of Th... |
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Elephant's Graveyard
(11/19/2011) Winner of the 2008 Keene Prize for Literature Winner of the 2008 David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award Characters: 10m, 3f, flexible casting (Roles may be played by any race or gender except when specified.) / Drama 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 ... |
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Elephant’s Graveyard – Abridged Version
(11/19/2011) Drama / 10m, 3f -casting may vary / Simple Set Winner of the 2008 Keene Prize for Literature Winner of the 2008 David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award 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 abri... |
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