Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street


Stephen Sondheim - 1974
    Dunstan's Church, just a few blocks away from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, they say, he robbed and murdered more than 150 customers. To dispose of their remains, he carried them through underground tunnels to the bakery of one Mrs. Lovett a few blocks away, where they supplied the stuffing for her meat pies, the favorite mid-day repast of the lawyers who worked nearby and got their shaves from Sweeney Todd. The man you lunched with yesterday could be your lunch today!The story first appeared in 1846 as a best-selling "penny dreadful", a sensational thriller published in installments. Before the final chapters even had a chance to hit the stands, the first stage version was packing them in at the Royal Britannia Saloon. Since then, there have been numerous stage and literary versions of the story.This script has been specially commissioned by Blackstone Audio, Inc., based on the original sources of the tale.

The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds


Paul Zindel - 1964
    E. Hinton and Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher will find much to love in Paul Zindel's books.The old, converted vegetable shop where Tillie lives is more like a madhouse than a home. Tillie's mother is bitter and cruel, yet desperate for her daughters' love. Her sister suffers epileptic fits and sneaks cigarettes every chance she gets.But despite the chaos, Tillie struggles to keep her dreams alive. Tillie—keeper of rabbits, dreamer of atoms, true believer in life, hope, and the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds...Paul Zindel’s work is bestselling, critically acclaimed, and passionately embraced by generations of readers.

Millennium Approaches


Tony Kushner - 1992
    The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts). The play contains multiple roles for several of the actors. Initially and primarily focusing on a gay couple in Manhattan, the play also has several other storylines, some of which occasionally intersect.

The Teahouse of the August Moon


John Patrick - 1954
    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and the Critics' Circle Award, this is one of the most successful plays of the modern theater.

The Vagina Monologues


Eve Ensler - 1996
    They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn't stop them. Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one's ever asked them before.

Crimes of the Heart


Beth Henley - 1982
    Set in a small Mississippi town, the play examines the lives of three quirky sisters who have gathered back home. During the course of the week the sisters unearth grudges, criticize each other, reminisce about their family life, and attempt to understand their mother's suicide years earlier.

'night, Mother


Marsha Norman - 1983
    By one of America's most talented playwrights, this play won the Dramatists Guild's prestigious Hull-Warriner Award, four Tony nominations, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. 'night, Mother had its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in December 1982. It opened on Broadway in March 1983, directed by Tom Moore and starring Anne Pitoniak and Kathy Bates; a film, starring Anne Bancroft and Sissy Spacek, was released in 1986.

Spring Awakening


Steven Sater - 2007
    Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play about teenage sexuality and society’s efforts to control it, the piece seamlessly merges past and present, underscoring the timelessness of adolescent angst and the universality of human passion.Steven Sater’s plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize/Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), and a reconceived version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, which played in London.Duncan Sheik is a singer/songwriter who also collaborated with Sater on the musical The Nightingale. He has composed original music for The Gold Rooms of Nero and for The Public Theater’s Twelfth Night in Central Park.

Cymbeline


William Shakespeare - 1610
    The secret marriage of Cymbeline’s daughter, Imogen, triggers much of the action, which includes villainous slander, homicidal jealousy, cross-gender disguise, a deathlike trance, and the appearance of Jupiter in a vision.Cymbeline displays unusually powerful emotions with a tremendous charge. Like some of Shakespeare’s other late work—especially The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest—it is an improbable story lifted into a nearly mythic realm.

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."

Talley's Folly


Lanford Wilson - 1980
    Matt Friedman, an accountant from St. Louis, has arrived to plead his love to Sally Talley, the susceptible, but uncertain daughter of the family. Bookish, erudite, totally honest and delightfully funny, Matt refuses to accept Sally's rebuffs and her fears that her family would never approve of their marriage. Charming and indomitable, he gradually overcomes her defenses, telling his innermost secrets to his loved one and, in return, learning hers as well. Gradually he awakens Sally to the possibilities of a life together until, in the final, touching moments of the play, it is clear that they are two kindred spirits who have truly found each other two "lame ducks" who, in their union, will find a wholeness rare in human relationships.

Valparaiso


Don DeLillo - 1999
    It turns out to be a mock-heroic journey toward identity and transcendence. This is Don DeLillo's second play and it is funny, sharp, and deep-reaching. Its characters tend to have needs and desires shaped by the forces of broadcast technology. This is the way we talk to each other today. This is the way we tell each other things, in public, before listening millions, that we don't dare to say privately. This is also a play that makes obsessive poetry out of the language of routine airline announcements and the flow of endless information.

The Mousetrap: A Play


Agatha Christie - 1952
    Who can it be? One by one the suspicious characters reveal their sordid pasts until at the last, nerve-shredding moment the identity and the motive are finally revealed.The Mousetrap is the longest-running play in the history of London's West End

Love Letters and Two Other Plays: The Golden Age, What I Did Last Summer


A.R. Gurney - 1990
    R. Gurney has wittily captured the manners of upper-middle-class WASP America, but never as gracefully or with such dazzling economy as in Love Letters. Tracing the lifelong correspondence of the staid, dutiful lawyer Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and the lively, unstable artist Melissa Gardner, the story of their bittersweet relationship gradually unfolds from what is written--and what is left unsaid--in their letters. A smash hit both off and on Broadway, Love Letters captures Andy and Melissa with a precision of detail and depth of feeling that only Gurney can command. Two other, thematically related plays by Gurney, The Golden Age and What I Did Last Summer, are included, providing a trio of wry and affectionate paeans to love lost, found, and fleetingly glimpsed.

The Shadow Box


Michael Cristofer - 1976
    The three are attended and visited by family and close friends: Agnes and her mother Felicity, estranged further by the latter's dementia; Brian and Beverly whose martial complications are exacerbated by Brian's new lover, Mark; and Joe and Maggie, unready for the strain of Joe's impending death and it's effect on their teenage son.