Book picks similar to
Grey Gardens by Doug Wright


plays
theatre
musicals
historical-fiction

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.

The Light in the Piazza


Craig Lucas - 2005
    The Light in the Piazza has ravishing power. It’s as if Guettel were determined to capture the golden light of Tuscany in a bottle. His lyrics are remarkable, and the book, written by Craig Lucas, is written with characteristic empathy and humor. Brilliant.” –Frank Rich“The Light in the Piazza beautifully captures the eternal allure of Italy. . . . The story wraps itself around your heart.”—Chicago Sun-Times“Sumptuous and romantic. Guettel’s music and lyrics represent a genuine expense of spirit. The Light in the Piazza offers a complex contemplation of the well-defended emptiness of every man and woman. It doesn’t want theatergoers to feel good; it wants to make them feel deeply. And it does.” –New YorkerComposer Adam Guettel, best known for his Floyd Collins, has teamed with Prelude to a Kiss playwright Craig Lucas to create a passionate and soaring new musical. Based on Elizabeth Spencer’s 1960 novella, The Light in the Piazza is the story of a young American woman whose chance encounter with a charming young Italian man in a Florentine piazza sets off a whirlwind romance, with an unsettling revelation.Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter and director. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, Reckless, Blue Window, God’s Heart, The Singing Forest and Small Tragedy. His screenplays include Longtime Companion, The Secret Lives of Dentists and The Dying Gaul, which he also directed. Mr. Lucas’ awards include the L.A. Drama Critics Award, an OBIE Award for Best Play and Best Director, and the Excellence in Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Adam Guettel is a composer/lyricist living in Seattle, where he is Artist in Residence at the Intiman Theatre. His other work includes Floyd Collins and Saturn Returns (recorded by Nonesuch Records as Myths and Hymns). Mr. Guettel’s awards include the Stephen Sondheim Award, the ASCAP New Horizons Award, and the American Composers Orchestra Award.

I Never Sang for My Father


Robert Woodruff Anderson - 1968
    Booklet bought for a college class. No internal marking. Looks "like new". Please ask if questions.

The Diviners


Jim Leonard - 1983
    platforms Winner of the American College Theatre Festival, this marvelously theatrical play is the story of a disturbed young man and his friendship with a disenchanted preacher in southern Indiana in the early 1930s. When the boy was young he almost drowned. This trauma and the loss of his mother in the same accident has left him deathly afraid of water. The preacher, set on breaking away from a long line of Kentucky family preachers, is determined not to do what h

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 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.

Next Fall - Acting Edition


Geoffrey Nauffts - 2010
    But when Luke is hospitalized in a tragic accident, Adam must come face-to-face with Luke's faith and his family.

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.

Equivocation


Bill Cain - 2009
    King James commissions Shakespeare to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot.

Sight Unseen


Donald Margulies - 1998
    Just before his works are celebrated at an exhibition in London, Jonathan journeys to the village where his former lover, Patricia, lives with her British husband, Nick. Archaeologists working on a dig, their spare existence is spent sifting through a Roman rubbish heap to discover the past. In their cold, remote house, Jonathan discovers an early painting of Patricia he'd done when they were young lovers. The subsequent struggle for the painting embodies the unreconciled passions of the past. Patricia has never forgiven Jonathan for leaving her, Nick despises Jonathan and the kind of art he produces, and Jonathan has never been able to recapture the inspiration and purity he felt when he painted Patricia. In taut scenes that dart from past to present and back, the characters are forced to deal with the unanswerable question of anti-Semitism, the legacy of the Holocaust and assimilation, the sadness of lost love, the role of the artist and the location of the human soul at the end of a ragged century.

Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies


Mike Poulton - 2014
    Son of a blacksmith, political genius, briber, charmer, bully. A man with a deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Mike Poulton's two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel's acclaimed novels 'Wolf Hall' and 'Bring Up the Bodies' is a thrilling and utterly convincing portrait of a brilliant man embroiled in the lethal, high-stakes politics of the court of Henry VIII. 'Wolf Hall' begins in England in 1527. Henry has been King for almost twenty years and is desperate for a male heir, but Cardinal Wolsey is unable to deliver the divorce he craves. Into this volatile court enters the commoner Thomas Cromwell, who sets out to achieve the King's desire, whilst methodically and ruthlessly pursuing his own reforming agenda. In 'Bring Up the Bodies', Anne Boleyn is now Queen, her path to Henry's side cleared by Cromwell. When the King begins to fall in love with Jane Seymour, Cromwell must negotiate within an increasingly perilous court to satisfy Henry, keep the nation safe, and advance his own ambitions. Hilary Mantel's novels are the most formidable literary achievements of recent times. She is the first writer to win the Man Booker Prize with consecutive novels.Adapted by Mike Poulton, the plays were premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, in December 2013, directed by Jeremy Herrin. This edition contains a substantial set of notes by Hilary Mantel on each of the principal characters, offering a unique insight into the world of the plays and an invaluable resource to any theatre companies wishing to stage them.

Passion Play (TCG Edition)


Sarah Ruhl - 2005
    Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the Easter Passion in three different eras: 1575 northern England, just before Queen Elizabeth outlaws the ritual; 1934 Oberammergua, Bavaria, as Hitler is rising to power; and Spearfish, South Dakota, from the time of Vietnam through Reagan’s presidency. In each period, the players grapple in different ways with the transformative nature of art, and politics are never far in the background, as Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan each appear, played by a single commanding actor.Sarah Ruhl’s plays include Dead Man’s Cell Phone, Eurydice, and The Clean House, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been widely produced both throughout the country and internationally, and she is the recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

Anatomy of a Suicide


Alice Birch - 2017
    For each, the chaos of what has come before brings with it a painful legacy.“I have Stayed. I have Stayed – I have Stayed for as long as I possibly can.”

The Lieutenant of Inishmore


Martin McDonagh - 2001
    The cat is reported dead when Padriac is away bombing civilian targets in Northern Ireland as a one-man splinter group and his family and friends on Inishmore desperately try to conceal the cat's death and what caused it before he returns.

Mary Page Marlowe (TCG Edition)


Tracy Letts - 2017
    In a series of elegant, nonchronological scenes spanning the years from 1946 to 2015, the play hopscotches through Mary Page Marlowe’s quiet existence as an accountant from Ohio—complicating notions of what it means to lead a “simple life.”