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.

The Designated Mourner


Wallace Shawn - 1996
    The three characters are the eponymous designated mourner, Jack; his wife, Judy; and Judy's erudite father, Howard. Despite a passionate bond with her father, Judy is drawn to Jack, whose taste in cultural forms follows a disturbing path. When Jack abandons both Judy and Howard, he continues his riveting societal free-fall into a world of gleeful savagery. Other works by Wallace Shawn are "A Thought in Three Parts," "Our Late Night," "Marie and Bruce," "My Dinner With Andre" (co-written with Andre Gregory), "Aunt Dan and Lemon," and "The Fever."

Heroes of the Fourth Turning


Will Arbery - 2019
    They've returned home to toast their mentor Gina, newly inducted as president of a tiny Catholic college. But as their reunion spirals into spiritual chaos and clashing generational politics, it becomes less a celebration than a vicious fight to be understood. On a chilly night in the middle of America, Will Arbery's haunting play offers grace and disarming clarity, speaking to the heart of a country at war with itself.

A Dream Play


August Strindberg - 1901
    As Strindberg himself wrote in his Preface, he wanted “to imitate the disjointed yet seemingly logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist.”Caryl Churchill’s spare and resonant new version was first staged at the National Theatre, London, in a production by Katie Mitchell, where A Dream Play was called “fresh, new and magical” (Telegraph).Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a novelist and playwright from Stockholm, Sweden. His plays include Miss Julie, The Father, To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Pelican. In 1912 Strindberg's birthday was marked by a torchlight procession through Stockholm, where his radical journalism had earned him the title of ‘people’s writer.’

Fires in the Mirror


Anna Deavere Smith - 1993
    Derived from interviews with a wide range of  people who experienced or observed New York's 1991  Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The  Mirror is as distinguished a work of  commentary on current Black-White tensions as it is a  work of drama.

Dancing at Lughnasa


Brian Friel - 1990
    In a house just outside the village of Ballybeg live the five Mundy sisters, barely making ends meet, their ages ranging from twenty-six up to forty. The two male members of the household are brother Jack, a missionary priest, repatriated from Africa by his superiors after twenty-five years, and the seven-year-old child of the youngest sister. In depicting two days in the life of this menage, Brian Friel evokes not simply the interior landscape of a group of human beings trapped in their domestic situation, but the wider landscape, interior and exterior, Christian and pagan, of which they are nonetheless a part.

The 39 Steps


Patrick Barlow - 2009
    Taking place only months before the outbreak of World War One (and written during the conflict) it focuses on Hannay’s attempts to warn the government of an unfolding plot to steal Great Britain’s military plans. Throughout the book Hannay must escape from German spies and the British police, who falsely believe that he has murdered the very man who revealed the plot to him. The book would prove incredibly popular upon its release and has been cited as the first “man-on-the-run” style story which has been re-used in films in literature ever since. The novel itself has been adapted for the screen no less than four times.

Love! Valour! Compassion!


Terrence McNally - 1995
    McNally later adapted the script for the 1997 film of the same name.

School Girls; or, the African Mean Girls Play


Jocelyn Bioh - 2018
    But the arrival of Ericka, a new student with undeniable talent and beauty, captures the attention of the pageant recruiter – and Paulina's hive-minded friends. This buoyant and biting comedy explores the universal similarities (and glaring differences) facing teenage girls across the globe.

You Got Older


Clare Barron - 2015
    "You Got Older" is a tender and darkly comic new play about family, illness, and cowboys - and how to remain standing when everything you know comes crashing down around you.

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.

Born Yesterday: Comedy in 3 Acts


Garson Kanin - 1951
    A "dumb blonde" chorus girl, mistress of a tycoon-gangster diddling in D.C., gets an education from a reporter for The New Republic, and blossoms into a very fair lady.

The Heidi Chronicles


Wendy Wasserstein - 1988
    Gradually distancing herself from her friends, she watches them move from the idealism and political radicalism of their college years through militant feminism and, eventually, back to the materialism that they had sought to reject in the first place. Heidi's own path to maturity involves an affair with the glib, arrogant Scoop Rosenbaum, a womanizing lawyer/publisher who eventually marries for money and position; a deeper but even more troubling relationship with a charming, witty young pediatrician, Peter Patrone, who turns out to be gay; and increasingly disturbing contacts with the other women, now much changed, who were a part of her childhood and college years. Eventually Heidi comes to accept the fact that liberation can be achieved only if one is true to oneself, with goals that come out of need rather than circumstance. As the play ends she is still "alone," but having adopted an orphaned baby, it is clear that she has begun to find a sense of fulfillment and continuity that may well continue to elude the others of her anxious, self-centered generation.

J.B.: A Play in Verse


Archibald MacLeish - 1958
    J.B. won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1959 & the Tony Award for best play. More important, the play sparked a national conversation about the nature of God, the meaning of hope & the role of the artist in society.

Picnic


William Inge - 1953
    The one house belongs to Flo Owens, who lives there with her two maturing daughters, Madge and Millie, and a boarder who is a spinster school teacher. The other house belongs to Helen Potts, who lives with her elderly and invalid mother. Into this female atmosphere comes a young man named Hal Carter, whose animal vitality seriously upsets the entire group. Hal is a most interesting character, a child of parents who ignored him, self-conscious of his failings and his position behind the eight ball. Flo is sensitively wary of temptations for her daughters. Madge, bored with being only a beauty, sacrifices her chances for a wealthy marriage for the excitement Hal promises. Her sister, Millie, finds her balance for the first time through the stranger's brief attention. And the spinster is stirred to make an issue out of the dangling courtship that has brightened her life in a dreary, minor way.