Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight: A Comedy in Three Beds


Peter Ackerman - 2000
    Ever been racially slurred in the sack? Ever been subjected to strangers yelling at you at 3am about the most intimate details of your life? Ever been to New York? Six characters from wildly different backgrounds make love, war and hysteria late one night in the cultural, sexual and generational smorgasbord that is Manhattan.

Gypsy


Arthur Laurents - 1994
    The musical tale of a domineering stage mother's inadvertent creation of a burlesque stripper, now available in paperback for the first time.

Seascape With Sharks and Dancer


Don Nigro - 1985
    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 between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose. This is an offbeat, wonderful love story. Note: The play contains a wealth of excellent monologue and scene material.

Grey Gardens


Doug Wright - 2007
    Grey Gardens is based on the 1975 Albert and David Maysles film about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's eccentric aunt and cousin. The touching and sometimes heart-wrenching musical adaptation explores the dysfunctional relationship between former socialite Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, Little Edie, as they languish in a derelict East Hampton manor, Grey Gardens. Propelled by Christine Ebersole's tour-de-force performance, the gorgeous score, and intricate lyrics, the Broadway musical has garnered much critical praise. "An experience no passionate theatergoer should miss." Ben Brantley, The New York Times

365 Days/365 Plays


Suzan-Lori Parks - 2006
    It would be about being present and being committed to the artistic process every single day, regardless of the ‘weather.’ It became a daily meditation, a daily prayer celebrating the rich and strange process of a writing life.”—Suzan-Lori Parks On November 13, 2002, the incomparable Suzan-Lori Parks got an idea to write a play every day for a year. She began that very day, finishing one year later. The result is an extraordinary testament to artistic commitment. This collection of 365 impeccably crafted pieces, each with its own distinctive characters and dramatic power, is a complete work by an artist responding to her world, each and every day. Parks is one of the American theater’s most wily and innovative writers, and her “stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous” (TIME).

The Laramie Project


Moisés Kaufman - 2001
    But for the people of Laramie–both the friends of Matthew and those who hated him without knowing him–the tragedy was personal. In a chorus of voices that brings to mind Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, The Laramie Project allows those most deeply affected to speak, and the result is a brilliantly moving theatrical creation.

Dracula


Steven Dietz - 1996
    Mysterious, gloomy castles and open graves at midnight are just two of the Gothic devices used to chilling effect in this 19th-century horror classic that turned an obscure figure from Eastern European folklore into a towering icon of film and literature.

Godspell


Stephen Schwartz - 1971
    13 selections from one of the most popular musicals ever. Includes: All Good Gifts * Bless the Lord * By My Side * Day by Day * Prepare Ye (The Way of the Lord) * and more.

Leading Ladies


Ken Ludwig - 2010
    In this hilarious comedy by the author of Lend Me A Tenor and Moon Over Buffalo, two English Shakespearean actors, Jack and Leo, find themselves so down on their luck that they are performing "Scenes from Shakespeare" on the Moose Lodge circuit in the Amish country of Pennsylvania. When they hear that an old lady in York, PA is about to die and leave her fortune to her two long lost English nephews, they resolve to pass themselves off as her beloved relatives and get the cash. The trouble is, when they get to York, they find out that the relatives aren't nephews, but nieces! Romantic entanglements abound, especially when Leo falls head-over-petticoat in love with the old lady's vivacious niece, Meg, who's engaged to the local minister. Meg knows that there's a wide world out there, but it's not until she meets "Maxine and Stephanie" that she finally gets a taste of it.

Hurlyburly & Those the River Keeps


David Rabe - 1995
    This edition contains the definitive versions of these works, a foreword in which Rabe examines the interwoven relationship of the plays, and an afterword in which he discusses the process of their construction.

As Bees in Honey Drown


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

Pterodactyls


Nicky Silver - 1994
    Emma Duncan, a hypochondriac with memory problems, and her orphaned fianc

A Little Night Music


Hugh Wheeler - 1973
    When the traveling actress performs in Fredrik's town, the estranged lovers' passion rekindles. This strikes a flurry of jealousy and suspicion between Desirée; Fredrik; Fredrick's wife, Anne; Desirée's current lover, the Count; and the Count's wife, Charlotte. Both men – as well as their jealous wives – agree to join Desirée and her family for a weekend in the country at Desirée's mother's estate. With everyone in one place, infinite possibilities of new romances and second chances bring endless surprises.

Follies


James Goldman - 1971
    For two jaded middle-aged couples, coming face-to-face with what might have been proves to be a shattering experience. The genius script by Sondheim and Goldman makes a cinematic, nightmarish hallucination of past and present blended together, employing lush era musical theatre pastiche and a deft eye for storytelling to tell not only the story of Ben, Phyllis, Sally and Buddy, but also the story of how the promise of America between the World Wars disintegrated into memory. Considered by many to be one of the best American musicals of all time, and still at the peak of form and craft. Those that saw the original Broadway production in 1971 and the all-star Lincoln Center concert in 1985 remember it as one of the most dazzling and poignant shows ever."A stunning musical…a pastiche so brilliant as to be breathtaking."—New York Daily News"Follies is utterly magnificent."—Women’s Wear DailyStephen Sondheim is the preeminent composer and lyricist of the American musical theatre. His best known works include West Side Story, Gypsy, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Company, among others. Mr. Sondheim celebrates his 70th birthday this year.The late James Goldman is best known for his play and screenplay A Lion in Winter and also was the author of Blood, Sweat and Stanley Poole and A Family Affair.

The Rimers of Eldritch


Lanford Wilson - 1967
    A mystery, really. A man has been murdered. The mystery is, who he is, who murdered him and what were the circumstances? And to solve it, Wilson looks at the outsides and insides of his tiny, Middle Western town. He looks at a middle-aging woman who falls in love with the young man who comes to work in her cafe. He looks at a coarse, nasty woman mistreating her senile mother, who is obsessed with visions of Eldritch being evil and headed for blood-spilling. He looks at a tender relationship between a young man and a dreamy, crippled girl. But Wilson sees far more than this. He is grasping the very fabric of Bible Belt America, with its catchword morality ("virgin," "God-fearing") and its capability for the vicious. He senses the rhythm of its life and the cruelty it can impose. He understands the speech patterns of its loveless gossips, its sex-hungry boys, its compassionless preachers, its car-conscious blondes." In the end his portrait of Eldritch is full length, and the truth of its revelations will be pondered long after the stage lights have dimmed and the play has ended.