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Broadway Bookshelf - Must Read Theater Books

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Acting Editions

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'...

Gertrude Stein and a Companion Cover
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 ...

Galway Girl, A Cover
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...

Funny Money Cover
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...

Fresh Brewed: Tales from the Coffee Bar Cover
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...

Frankenstein Cover
Farnsworth Invention (11/19/2011)

Drama

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...

Farnsworth Invention Cover
The Fall of Heaven (11/19/2011)

Dramatic comedy. Cahracters: 3 male, 2 female. A hip and inventive new play by Walter Mosley, best-selling author of more than 25 books and most widely known for his popular Easy Rawlins mysteries, including "Devil in a Blue Dress". Tempest Landry, a street-wise young man living in Harlem, unexpectedly finds himself at the Pearly Gates. When Saint Peter orders him to hell, the quick-witted Tempest refuses to go. A technical loophole forces heaven to send Tempest back to Ear...

The Fall of Heaven Cover
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 ...

Elephant's Graveyard Cover
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...

Elephant’s Graveyard – Abridged Version Cover
Elephant Sighs (11/19/2011)

Comedy / 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 - Walter Deagon. Despite protesting that he's just not an organizational man, Joel finds himself mesmerized by Leo's ebullient manner and agrees to drop by - without ever asking just ...

Elephant Sighs Cover
Easter Monday (11/19/2011)

Dramatic Comedy / 2m, 1f / Interior 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-after all, he was a finalist in the Pillsbury Bake-off. Then Mack discovers that Billy, adopted from infancy, has contacted his birthmother, a Washington, DC secretary about t...

Easter Monday Cover
Drop Dead (11/19/2011)

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 ...

Drop Dead Cover
Dream of a Common Language (11/19/2011)

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...

Dream of a Common Language Cover
The Divine Sister (11/19/2011)

ComedyCharacters: 1 male, 5 femaleMultiple SetsThe 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 experiencing "visions," sexual hysteria amon...

The Divine Sister Cover
Die Mommie Die! (11/19/2011)

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...

Die Mommie Die! Cover
The Diaries of Adam and Eve (11/19/2011)

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 Diaries of Adam and Eve Cover
Dew Point (11/19/2011)

Can a woman be friends with a womanizer - even if she once dated him herself? And if your best friend wants to date the guy, do you stand in her way? The Dew Point is a play about love and marriage, sex and friendship, authenticity and blackmail...and the lies we tell in order to stay honest. "...A comedy of sexual manners whose characters are funny yet sympathetic and complexly believable...The success of this deceptively labeled "romantic comedy" lies in the way it zeroes in on the way we ...

Dew Point Cover
Degas in New Orleans (11/19/2011)

Charaters: 3 male, 6 female . One Interior/Exterior Set . A historical drama that explores Edgar Degas' scandalous visit to New Orleans in 1872. Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist painter, is torn between helping his relatives in America and pursuing a career as a painter. Fame and family obligations come to a head when he discovers he is still in love with his sister-in-law, who is now pregnant and blind. As Edgar struggles with his own ethical conundrum, he discovers that his aggress...

Degas in New Orleans Cover
Established Price (1/1/1)

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...

Established Price
Escape To Freedom (1/1/1)

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.

Escape To Freedom
Enjoy! (1/1/1)

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...

Enjoy!
Enchanted Land, An (1/1/1)

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.

Enchanted Land, An
Emma (1/1/1)

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...

Emma
Emergency & Through the Night (1/1/1)

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...

Emergency & Through the Night
Elephant's Graveyard: Abridged Version (1/1/1)

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...

Elephant's Graveyard: Abridged Version
Elephant's Graveyard (1/1/1)

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.

Elephant's Graveyard
Elephant Sighs (1/1/1)

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

Elephant Sighs
Eight Plays From The Heartland (1/1/1)

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

Eight Plays From The Heartland
Egad, The Woman In White (1/1/1)

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...

Egad, The Woman In White
Edith Wharton'S House Of Mirth, The (1/1/1)

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...

Edith Wharton'S House Of Mirth, The
Eat Your Heart Out (1/1/1)

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

Eat Your Heart Out
Easter Monday (1/1/1)

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

Easter Monday
Dusty and the Big Bad World (1/1/1)

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

Dusty and the Big Bad World
Dust (1/1/1)

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 ...

Dust
Drop Dead (1/1/1)

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...

Drop Dead
Dream of a Common Language (1/1/1)

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...

Dream of a Common Language
Dream Crust (1/1/1)

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...

Dream Crust
Dramatis Personae (1/1/1)

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...

Dramatis Personae
Dracula: The Musical? (1/1/1)

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,...

Dracula: The Musical?
Dr. Magic: Six One Act Plays (1/1/1)

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

Dr. Magic: Six One Act Plays
Double Date (1/1/1)

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.

Double Date
Don't Tell Mother ! (1/1/1)

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...

Don't Tell Mother !
Don't Say Goodbye, I'm Not Leaving (1/1/1)

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 ...

Don't Say Goodbye, I'm Not Leaving
Don't Mention My Name (1/1/1)

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...

Don't Mention My Name
Don't Hug Me County Fair (1/1/1)

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...

Don't Hug Me County Fair
Don't Hug Me Christmas Carol, A (1/1/1)

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...

Don't Hug Me Christmas Carol, A
Don't Hug Me (1/1/1)

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...

Don't Hug Me
Done to Death (1/1/1)

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.

Done to Death
Doin' Time At the Alamo (1/1/1)

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...

Doin' Time At the Alamo
Dog Park: The Musical (1/1/1)

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...

Dog Park: The Musical

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