The fledgling friendship soon veers out of control, shattering the fragile hold that newly unemployed Ben and burgeoning alcoholic Mary have on their way of life—with unexpected comic consequences. Detroit is a fresh, offbeat look at what happens when we dare to open ourselves up to something new. After premiering at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre last year to rave reviews, Lisa D'Amour's brilliant and timely play moves to Broadway this fall.

    Escaping their lives in Manhattan, former college buddies Matt and Davis take off to the Netherlands and find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover at home. Written with an unflinching poetic beauty, Red Light Winter is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.

    Set in the 1880s at the dawn of the age of electricity and based on the bizarre historical fact that doctors used vibrators to treat 'hysterical' women (and some men), the play centers on a doctor and his wife and how his new therapy affects their entire household. In a seemingly perfect, well-to-do Victorian home, proper gentleman and scientist Dr. Givings has innocently invented an extraordinary new device for treating "hysteria" in women (and occasionally men): the vibrator. Adjacent to the doctor's laboratory, his young and energetic wife tries to tend to their newborn daughter-and wonders exactly what is going on in the next room. When a new "hysterical" patient and her husband bring a wet nurse and their own complicated relationship into the doctor's home, Dr. and Mrs. Givings must examine the nature of their own marriage, and what it truly means to love someone.This laugh out loud, provocative and touching play premiered at Berkely Rep and subsequently marked Sarah Ruhl's Broadway debut opening at the Lyceum Theatre on November 19th, 2009.

    But something more “global” appears to be at work, and in any case he is distracted from his dreary rounds of diagnosis-seeking when a more urgent tragedy befalls the family. Joseph’s father, a former steelworker, was driving home from his new maintenance job when he swerved to avoid a deer and crashed his car, landing in the hospital. A week later he died of a heart attack.The deer, it turns out, was a stuffed decoy placed there by a high school student as a prank. This enrages Joseph’s older and ailing uncle, Bill (Yusef Bulos), who is even more disgusted when it is learned that the culprit is the star of the local football team, Vin (Jonathan Louis Dent), a town hero who is given a dispensation by a judge to serve his sentence in juvenile detention after the football season has concluded. Joseph and his younger brother, Charles (Chris Perfetti) — who are both gay — are more sympathetic to Vin, an African-American boy who has grown up in a foster home, and whose chance at a professional career may be jeopardized.Gloria (Joanna Gleason), Joseph’s new boss and a book packaging expert, knows a little about career jeopardy herself. She was run out of the publishing business — and Manhattan — when she sold a memoir by a Holocaust survivor that turned out to be fictionalized. (Gloria’s story and Vin’s are inspired by actual events.)Now she latches on to the discovery that Joseph’s family, of Lebanese extraction, is distantly related to Kahlil Gibran, author of the perennial best-selling spiritual book “The Prophet.” In her hilariously addled mind — complaining about her fall from grace, she defensively remarks, “I wasn’t at the Holocaust” — she decides that a memoir by Joseph about his family’s journey will be her ticket back to the big time.Mr. Karam’s play, which runs a little less than two hours and is performed in one seamless act , may sound top-heavy with plot and character. (Did I mention that Gloria’s emotional frailty also stems from the suicide of her husband?) Some of the relationships would benefit from being fleshed out in greater detail: the integration of Gloria into the lives of Joseph and his family, for example. The play’s climax shoehorns all the elements of the story into a farcical scene that seems a little forced, funny though it is.But one of Mr. Karam’s themes is the indiscriminate nature of misfortune — one calamity does not immunize you from the next, worse one — so the multiplication of disasters roiling the characters’ lives is to the point. And he writes with such precision that even the more peripheral characters emerge as sharply drawn, multifaceted individuals.

    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.

    Set to open in New York in the fall of 2001, this work focuses on fifteen-year-old Lisa, the daughter of a prostitute, and Clint, the car thief she runs away with to escape the misery of life with her mother. But the happier times that sullenly childlike Lisa yearns for never materialize, as Clint orders her to procure young runaways for him. No one notices that these teenage girls are missing until an anonymous call to the police reports their murders. Could the caller--and the killer--be Lisa? Rebecca Gilman has created a riveting, unsentimental portrait of a young woman whose most striking quality is not her capacity for evil but the depth of her emptiness, in an environment as harsh and unyielding as the contours of her life

    A once-promising novelist, she announces to her family the imminent publication of a memoir dredging up a pivotal and tragic event in the family's history - a wound that her parents don't want reopened.Brooke has come home to draw a line in the sand and is daring her family to cross it. Her brother won't play her game; her aunt knows way too much, and her parents fall into all their old routines as they plead with her to keep their story quiet. In this family, secrets are currency and everyone is rich.In simplest terms, the play is about a girl who comes home to the desert with a story about where she is from, who her people really are, what she thinks they really are. Her parents represent an Establishment that she feels has betrayed this country. She goes to war with them, and blood is spilled.

    Alternating between their New York City apartment and a smoke-filled music club, Clifford narrates the story of his broken family and the decline of jazz as popular entertainment. Clifford recalls the key moments in his life, such as the day when he, fresh out of college, picked up his first unemployment check and was congratulated by Gene and his band mates. Gene's music career on the big band circuit ultimately crumbles with the advent of Elvis and rock-n-roll. Terry begs him to get a nine-to-five job to support the family, but Gene refuses to enter the "straight world" of regular paychecks, mortgages and security. For Gene, who knows jazz better than his own son, music is not just a job; it's his life. Their marriage slowly dissolves and young Clifford is witness to it all. As things worsen, Clifford assumes the role of parent and throws the hopeless Gene out of his mother's apartment. When an adult Clifford visits Gene in a rundown jazz club after years of separation, he requests that the old man play his mother's favorite song, the old standard "Why was I Born?" Clifford then asks, "Dad, why was I born?" It becomes Clifford's last, heart-breaking plea for his father's love.

    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.

    Gardner, once a famous poet, now is retired. He slips in and out of senility as his wife Fanny valiantly tries to keep them both afloat. They have asked their daughter, Mags, to come home and help them move. Mags agrees, for she hopes as well to finally paint their portrait. She is now on the verge of artistic celebrity herself and hopes, by painting her parents, to come to terms with them and they with her. Mags triumphs in the end as Fanny and Gardner actually step through the frame and become a work of art ineffable and timeless.

    Frank Rich in "The New York Times" wrote about "Prelude," "It is rare to find a play so suffused with sorrow that sends one home so high." Also included are "Missing Persons," "a truly intelligent play, one that is literary and heartfelt, beautifully written...a well-crafted, moving story, a dramatic rarity in these or any times "("New York Post"), and "Three Postcards," an offbeat and uniquely imaginative free form musical play. Craig Lucas is also the author of "Reckless and Blue Window" and "What I Mean Was." He lives in Putnam Valley, New York.

    DramaFull LengthCast: 3 men, 1 woman: 4 totalSetting: EXTERIORTHE STORY: Tracing the legacy of war through three generations of a Puerto Rican family, the play focuses on nineteen-year-old Elliot, a recently anointed hometown hero who returns from Iraq with a leg injury and a difficult question: Will he go back to war a second time? While on leave, Elliot learns the stories of his father and grandfather who served in Korea and Vietnam before him.

    And then one night, he awakens to find that he no longer believes in God. This crisis of faith propels an ordinary middle-aged man into an extraordinary journey of self-discovery. This wickedly funny and spiritually complex play examines the effects of one man s awakening on himself and his family.

    He has written to Rick to say that, as long as he is alive, "you will have somebody on Earth who will do anything for you," so Willum is delighted when Rick shows up unexpectedly at his apartment on the night of his thirty-fourth birthday party. But his delight soon fades as it becomes apparent that Rick is a hopeless "nerd," a bumbling oaf with no social sense, little intelligence, and even less tact. Rick stays on and on, his continued presence among Willum and his friends leading to one uproarious incident after another, until the normally placid Willum finds himself contemplating violence, a dire development which, happily, is staved off by the surprising "twist" ending of the play.

    . . Dying City is a political play and also a psychodrama about what Arthur Miller called the politics of the soul. It’s about public conscience and private grief, and real and symbolic catastrophes.”?The New York Observer “Anyone who doubts that Mr. Shinn is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today need only experience the . . . sophisticated welding of form and content that is Dying City.”?The New York Times In Christopher Shinn’s new play Dying City, a young therapist, Kelly, whose husband Craig was killed while on military duty in Iraq, is confronted a year later by his identical twin Peter, who suspects that Craig’s death was not accidental. Set in a spare downtown-Manhattan apartment after dark, scenes shift from the confrontation between Peter and Kelly, to Kelly’s complicated farewell with her husband Craig. Shinn’s creepy, sophisticated drama?infused with references to 9/11 and the war in Iraq?explores how contemporary politics and recent history have transformed the lives of these three characters. Christopher Shinn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and lives in New York. His plays include Where Do We Live, Other People, What Didn’t Happen, and On the Mountain, which have been widely produced in New York, across the United States, and in London. He is the recipient of an OBIE Award in Playwriting, as well as the Robert S. Chesney Award. He teaches playwriting at The New School for Drama.