Laughing Wild and Baby with the Bathwater: Two Plays


Christopher Durang - 1989
    In Laughing Wild, two comic monologues evolve into a man and a woman’s shared nightmare of modern life and the isolation it creates. From her turf battles at the supermarket to the desperate clichés of self-affirmation he learns at his “per­sonality workshop,” they run the gamut of everyday life’s small brutalizations until they meet, with disastrous inevitability, at the Harmonic Convergence in Central Park.

Harvey


Mary Chase - 1944
    Dowd starts to introduce his imaginary friend Harvey, a six and a half foot rabbit, to guests at a dinner party, his sister, Veta, has seen as much of his eccentric behavior as she can tolerate. She decides to have him committed to a sanitarium to spare her daughter, Myrtle Mae, and their family, from future embarrassment. Problems arise, however, when Veta herself is mistakenly assumed to be on the fringe of lunacy when she explains to doctors that years of living with Elwood's hallucination have caused her to see Harvey also! The doctors commit Veta instead of Elwood, but when the truth comes out, the search is on for Elwood and his invisible companion. When he shows up at the sanitarium looking for his lost friend Harvey it seems that the mild-mannered Elwood's delusion has had a strange influence on more than one of the doctors. Only at the end does Veta realize that maybe Harvey isn't so bad after all.

Stage Door


Edna Ferber - 1926
    The scene is Mrs. Orcutt's boarding house, where the hopes and ambitions of sixteen young women are revealed in scenes of entertaining comedy. Contrasted with this are the cases of the girl without talent and the elderly actress whose days are over. The central plot has to do with courageous Terry Randall, who fights against discouragement to a position in the theater where we are sure she will conquer. One of her fellow aspirants gives up in despair, one gets married, and one goes into pictures, but Terry, with the help of idealistic David Kingsley, sticks to her guns.

Eurydice


Sarah Ruhl - 2003
    Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. With contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story.

My Fair Lady


Alan Jay Lerner - 1956
    Higgins wagers that he can pass her off as a Duchess in a matter of weeks. But what will become of Eliza when the bet is over? This edition of ‘My Fair Lady’ includes the complete script and a selection of black and white stills from the Oscar-winning film starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison.

The Revolutionists


NOT A BOOK
    Playwright Olympe De Gouge, assassin Charlotte Corday, and former queen (and fan of ribbons) Marie Antoinette, and Haitian rebel Marianne Angelle hang out, murder Marat, loose their heads, and try to beat back the extremist insanity in revolutionary Paris. This grand and dream-tweaked comedy is about violence and legacy, feminism and terrorism, art and how we actually go about changing the world. It a true story. Or total fiction. Or a play about a play. Or a raucous resurrection that ends in a song and a scaffold.

The Way of the World


William Congreve - 1700
    With Mirabell? You call my blood into my face with mentioning that traitor. She durst not have the confidence. I sent her to negotiate an affair, in which if I'm detected I'm undone. If that wheedling villain has wrought upon Foible to detect me, I'm ruined. O my dear friend, I'm a wretch of wretches if I'm detected.

The Music Man: A Musical Comedy


Hal Leonard Corporation - 1957
    18 vocal selections from the Broadway classic, including: Gary, Indiana * Goodnight, My Someone * Marian the Librarian * Pick-A-Little, Talk-A-Little/Goodnight Ladies * Seventy Six Trombones * Till There Was You * The Wells Fargo Wagon * Ya Got Trouble * and more.

Auntie Mame


Jerome Lawrence - 1960
    Besides being the source for one of America's most popular musicals, AUNTIE MAME set a standard for Broadway comedy that's been sought after ever since. "Auntie Mame was a handsome, sparkling, scatterbrained and warm-hearted lady who brightened the American landscape from 1928 to the immediate past by her whimsical gaiety, her slightly madcap adventures and her devotion to her young nephew, who grew up to be Patrick Dennis. Through fortunes that rose and fell and a pleasant but brief marriage to a likable Southerner, who had the bad luck to tumble down from the Matterhorn, Auntie Mame's chief concern was that nephew, whom she raised [the play's] central figure is a woman of spirit, innate kindness and undefeatable courage " NY Post.

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot


Stephen Adly Guirgis - 2005
    This latest work from the author of Our Lady of 121st Street "shares many of the traits that have made Mr. Guirgis a playwright to reckon with in recent years: a fierce and questing mind that refuses to settle for glib answers, a gift for identifying with life's losers and an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk. [Guirgis brings to the play] a stirring sense of Christian existential pain, which wonders at the paradoxes of faith" (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).

Dark of the Moon


Howard Richardson - 1972
    The superstitious townspeople resent their happiness and their subsequent meddling ends in violence and tragedy. This play was proclaimed a Broadway hit.

Wonder of the World: Trade Edition


David Lindsay-Abaire - 2002
    The New York production featured knockout performances by Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Sedaris. Ben Brantley, in the "New York Times" wrote "clearly, Mr. Lindsay-Abaire hasn't lost his playfully wicked eye, equally appalled and affectionate . . . his style both embraces and spoofs the All-American appetite for spiritual lift, sitcom perkiness, and slimy tabloid prurience." A firm believer in destiny-and inspired by a Marilyn Monroe movie-Cass leaves her husband and boards a bus to Niagara Falls, where she hopes to meet the unknown man she believes herself fated to end up with. Along the way toward the inevitable climax on the brink of the waterfall, she checks items off her list of "things to do in life," and takes the audience on an often moving, always hilarious journey.

Dr. Faustus


Christopher Marlowe
    Two different versions of the play were published in the Jacobean era, several years later. The powerful effect of early productions of the play is indicated by the legends that quickly accrued around them—that actual devils once appeared on the stage during a performance, "to the great amazement of both the actors and spectators", a sight that was said to have driven some spectators mad.

The Pillowman


Martin McDonagh - 2003
    His tricks and turns have a purpose. They are bridges over a deep pit of sympathy and sorrow, illuminated by a tragic vision of stunted and frustrated lives.' Fintan O'Toole, Irish TimesMartin McDonagh's searingly brilliant new play premi�res at the National Theatre, London in November 2003.

The Tale of the Allergist's Wife and Other Plays: The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset


Charles Busch - 2000
    Of his latest play, The New York Times has written, "Uproarious ... wall-to-wall laughs ... Mr. Busch has swum straight into the mainstream and stays comfortably afloat there." Busch is the author of such plays as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom -- one of the longest-running plays in Off-Broadway history -- and Psycho Beach Party, a cross between Gidget and Spellbound. After a successful Off-Broadway run at New York City's Manhattan Theater Club, Busch moves to Broadway with The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, a hilarious comedy about a self-absorbed Upper West Side doctor's wife whose life is devoted to mornings at the Whitney, afternoons at the Museum of Modern Art, and evenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her world is shaken and transformed when a childhood friend makes an unexpected visit.