The Foreigner


Larry Shue - 1985
    When others begin to speak freely around him, he not only becomes privy to secrets both dangerous and frivolous, he also discovers an adventurous extrovert within himself.

This is Our Youth


Kenneth Lonergan - 1999
    His hero-worshipping friend Warren has just impulsively stolen $15,000 from his father, an abusive lingerie tycoon. When Jessica, a mixed-up prep school girl, shows up for a date, Warren pulls out a wad of bills and takes her off, awkwardly, for a night of seduction. A wildly funny, bittersweet, and moving story, This Is Our Youth is as trenchant as it was upon its acclaimed premiere in 1996.

I Hate Hamlet


Paul Rudnick - 1991
    The Story: Andrew Rally seems to have it all: celebrity and acclaim from his starring role in a hit television series; a rich, beautiful girlfriend; a glamorous, devoted agent; the perfect New York apartment; and the chance to play Hamlet in Central Park. There are, however, a couple of glitches in paradise. Andrew's series has been canceled; his girlfriend is clinging to her virginity with unyielding conviction; and he has no desire to play Hamlet. When Andrew's agent visits him, she reminisces about her brief romance with John Barrymore many years ago, in Andrew's apartment. This prompts a seance to summon his ghost. From the moment Barrymore returns, dressed in high Shakespearean garb, Andrew's life is no longer his own. Barrymore, fortified by champagne and ego, presses Andrew to accept the part and fulfill his actor's destiny. The action becomes more hilarious with the entrance of Andrew's deal-making friend from LA, spouting the laid-back hype of the Coast and offering Andrew a fabulous new TV deal worth millions of dollars. The laughs are nonstop as Andrew wrestles with his conscience, Barrymore, his sword, and the fact that he fails as Hamlet in Central Park.

Over the River and Through the Woods


Joe DiPietro - 1999
    His parents retired and moved to Florida. That doesn't mean his family isn't still in Jersey. In fact, he sees both sets of his grandparents every Sunday for dinner. This is routine until he has to tell them that he's been offered a dream job. The job he's been waiting for - marketing executive - would take him away from his beloved, but annoying, grandparents. He tells them. The news doesn't sit so well. Thus begins a series of schemes to keep Nick around. How could he betray his family's love to move to Seattle for a job, wonder his grandparents? Well, Frank, Aida, Nunzio, and Emma do their level best, that includes bringing the lovely - and single - Caitlin O'Hare as bait.

Laundry and Bourbon


James McLure - 1981
    Book by McLure, James

Eleemosynary


Lee Blessing - 1998
    As the play begins, Dorothea has suffered a stroke, and while Echo has reestablished contact with her mother, it is only through extended telephone conversations, during which real issues are skirted and their talk is mostly about the precocious Echo's single-minded domination of a national spelling contest. But, in the end, after Dorothea's death, both Artie and Echo come to accept their mutual need and summon the courage to try, at last, to build a life together-despite the risks and terrors that this holds for both of them after so many years of alienation and estrangement.

All My Sons


Arthur Miller - 1947
    Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went on to make lots of money. In a work of tremendous power, a love affair between Keller's son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Herbert's daughter, the bitterness of George Keller, who returns from the war to find his father in prison and his father's partner free, and the reaction of a son to his father's guilt escalate toward a climax of electrifying intensity.Winner of the Drama Critics' Award for Best New Play in 1947, All My Sons established Arthur Miller as a leading voice in the American theater. All My Sons introduced themes that thread through Miller's work as a whole: the relationship between fathers and sons, and the conflict between business and personal ethics.

An American Daughter


Wendy Wasserstein - 1998
    She is the wife of a professor and the owner of a lovely house in Georgetown. She is also the president's nominee for Surgeon General. When the media discovers that once, long ago, she failed to respond for jury duty, this relatively minor misstep is portrayed as a serious moral lapse. A good friend uses the incident to make a point, scarcely thinking of the implications, and Lyssa must suffer the consequences. From that moment on, Lyssa Dent Hughes sits helplessly as the press investigates her family and friends, shattering her privacy, her career, and her world. Wendy Wasserstein's trenchant humor and sizzling dialogue combine with biting political commentary to produce a masterful, and topical, drama.

Look Back in Anger


John Osborne - 1957
    He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England.First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life."

Aunt Dan and Lemon


Wallace Shawn - 1985
    Lemon tells the audience about the overwhelming influence in her life of her parents' friend "Aunt Dan," an eccentric, passionate professor whose stories and seductive opinions enthrall Lemon from the time she is a young girl. The relationship that develops between Lemon and Aunt Dan and the conversations that went on in a small house on the bottom of an English garden form the focus of this play about political orientation and the allure of certain ideas-even if they lead to murder. A forceful play exposing the banality of society's evil, Aunt Dan & Lemon explores the ease with which good and bad become reconciled in the human mind.

Lend Me a Tenor


Ken Ludwig - 1986
    So the impresario's diminutive assistant blacks up and goes on as Otello. The tenor awakens, dons his costume, and thence follows a hilarious comedy involving two Otellos, a volatile Italian wife, an outrageous bellhop and a cynical impresario.

As Bees in Honey Drown


Douglas Carter Beane - 1998
    Book annotation not available for this title.

The Cherry Orchard


Anton Chekhov - 1903
    Their estate is hopelessly in debt: urged to cut down their beautiful cherry orchard and sell the land for holiday cottages, they struggle to act decisively. Tom Murphy's fine vernacular version allows us to re-imagine the events of the play in the last days of Anglo-Irish colonialism. It gives this great play vivid new life within our own history and social consciousness.

Our Town


Thornton Wilder - 1938
    This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the small village of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned and most frequently performed play.

Closer


Patrick Marber - 1997
    Closer is hailed as one of the best plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."