Download or read book Night is a Room TCG Edition written by Naomi Wallace and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Naomi Wallace commits the unpardonable sin of being partisan, and, the darkness and harshness of her work notwithstanding, outrageously optimistic. She seems to believe that the world can change. She certainly writes as if she intends to set it on fire."—Tony Kushner "Wallace is that unfashionable thing - a deeply political US playwright who unashamedly writes about ideas rather than feelings."—The Guardian Lauded for her topical, searing explorations of the intricate and pressing issues that affect humanity, Naomi Wallace's new work Night is a Room centers around the timeless subject of love and relationships, specifically in their tenuousness. This story of a seemingly ideal married couple is torn apart when the husband's previously unknown birth mother makes a surprise visit for his fortieth birthday. In Night is a Room, Wallace examines the heart of human connections, and the intimate challenges love can create, romantic or otherwise. Naomi Wallace's plays—which have been produced in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East—include In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Things of Dry Hours, The Fever Chart: Three Short Visions of the Middle East, And I and Silence, The Hard Weather Boating Party, and The Liquid Plain. She has been awarded the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize twice, the Joseph Kesselring Prize, the Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, an Obie Award, and the 2012 Horton Foote Award for most promising new American play.
Download or read book Evening at the Talk House TCG Edition written by Wallace Shawn and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2017-03-21 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wallace Shawn is up to his old tricks again: pricking the conscience of right-on, left-leaning theatergoers. No one does that better than this impish, idiosyncratic polymath, who, at seventy-two, still comes across as precocious—probably because we resent him flagging our complacent complicity in all the world's ills."—Variety "The play stops, but has no ending. It is for us to try to answer its bleak questions, to see what it might mean to be undeluded."—The Guardian Gathering around a table at the Talk House, an old haunt, a group of friends and theatre artists reunite after ten years to reminisce and catch-up on each other's lives. At first, the conversation is fairly run-of-the-mill: current TV shows and where their careers have taken them. Eventually, the discussion's tone takes a turn when they mention supplementing their incomes through the government-led program to enlist unemployed artists for drone strikes and carrying out violent attacks on foreign land. As is typical of Shawn's plays, the premise at once amuses and unsettles, forcing the viewer to wonder whether being too idle makes all of us complicit in the world's ongoing destruction. Wallace Shawn is a noted actor and writer. His often politically-charged and controversial plays include The Fever, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Marie and Bruce, and The Designated Mourner. With Andre´ Gregory, he co-wrote My Dinner with Andre´, in which he also starred. He adapted the classic Ibsen play A Master Builder for film.
Download or read book Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven TCG Edition written by Stephen Adly Guirgis and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2022-12-06 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Guirgis, a lifelong New Yorker and a properly profane bard of the city, is a wizard at getting language to flow hot, funny, and fast…Guirgis’s rough-cut gem of a play is rich with revelation and barbed empathy.” —Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker Stephen Adly Guirgis brings his prodigious gifts for exploring the lives of social outcasts to new heights in this play about the inner workings of a women’s halfway house in New York City, where the unmoored residents struggle with addiction, abuse, and mental illness. Between daily therapy sessions, they clash with the staff and each other, form alliances, and fall in love. Harrowing, humorous, and heartbreaking, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven roaringly brings to life the experiences of women who society has tried to shuffle out of sight and out of mind.
Download or read book Dinner with Friends TCG Edition written by Donald Margulies and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2012-07-25 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Over the past decade, Donald Margulies has written some of the most insightful works in contemporary American drama. His body of work includes The Loman Family Picnic, Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment and Collected Stories, and with each succeeding work his audiences have grown. It is no surprise that his newest work is his most critically successful yet. As with all of Margulies’s work, he is a master of observing what might be considered the ordinary moments of life and its foibles with fresh ears. Dinner with Friends is a funny yet bittersweet examination of the married lives of two couples who have been extremely close for dozens of years. Although it seems to be treading on familiar ground, Dinner keeps changing its perspective to show how one couple’s breakup can have equally devastating effects on another’s stability. "This is a smart and subtle play that understand there are no easy answers as people evolve and relationships settle into routine."—David Kaufman, Daily News "Donald Margulies has drawn one of the most complex and convincing portraits of a marriage in recent memory."—Debra Jo Immergut, The Wall Street Journal "Dinner with Friends is entertainment as succulent as it is sobering."—John Simon, New York Magazine Donald Margulies lives with his wife and son in New Haven, CT. He is the author of numerous plays, including Collected Stories and Sight Unseen.
Download or read book Prodigal Son TCG Edition written by John Patrick Shanley and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'What I admire most is that his plays are beautifully well made, economical, sharp and coherent. He's not a misanthrope, but he's in pursuit of why people behave as badly as they do along with having a great compassion for them. That's an unusual and interesting combination.'—Tony Kushner, on John Patrick Shanley When a troubled but gifted boy from the South Bronx finds himself shipped off to a private school in New Hampshire, the adjustment to the alien environment will lead to his ultimate dissolution or redemption. Teachers in the affluent institution do not know what to make of the new boisterous student, though the challenge really lies in his self-perception. Like his most celebrated play, Doubt, the author has based this new work on his own personal experiences of growing up as a teenager in the South Bronx and his time spent at a prep school in New England. Shanley has created an elemental study of a young's man search for his place in the world. John Patrick Shanley's plays include Outside Mullingar, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Savage in Limbo, and Dirty Story, along with his "Church and State" trilogy, Doubt, Defiance, and Storefront Church. For his play Doubt, he received both the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. He has nine films to his credit, including the five-time Oscar-nominated Doubt, and Moonstruck, which received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The Writers Guild of America awarded Shanley the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing.
Download or read book Three Sisters TCG Edition written by Anton Chekhov and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This refreshingly clear and colloquial adaptation was the basis for the Wooster Group's acclaimed production Brace Up!
Download or read book Gloria A Life TCG Edition written by Emily Mann and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gloria: A Life is a unique, deeply moving performance created in the hopeful, conversational spirit of its extraordinary subject.” —Sara Holdren, New York Magazine’s Vulture “One part theater, one part consciousness-raising group therapy session, Gloria: A Life offers an experience that promises to be a more intimate recollection of Steinem’s journey, not only because it’s been singularly shaped by the hands of women.” —Noor Brara, Vogue Five decades after Gloria Steinem began raising her voice for equality and championing the voices of others, she remains a leader of the American feminist movement. Emily Mann’s new play traces the progress of Steinem’s extraordinary life, from her undercover Playboy Bunny exposé in the 1960s, through her founding of Ms. Magazine in the 1970s, to her activism in today’s women’s movement.
Download or read book August Osage County TCG Edition written by Tracy Letts and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2008 Tony Award for Best New Play. "A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and a tougher people." —TimeOut New York "Tracy Letts' August: Osage County is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original." —New York magazine “I don’t care if August: Osage County is three-and-a-half hours long. I wanted more.” –Howard Shapiro, Philadelphia Inquirer "This original and corrosive black comedy deserves a seat at the table with the great American family plays."—Time One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent history, August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest—and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed. August: Osage County has been produced in more than twenty countries worldwide and is now a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepard, Juliette Lewis, and Ewan McGregor.
Download or read book Barbecue Bootycandy TCG Edition written by Robert O'Hara and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2016-10-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Searing and sensationally funny... As raw in its language and raucous in spirit as it is smart and provocative."—The New York Times "Funny, smutty and enticingly subversive. . . . A toxically satiric portrait of American life."—Washington Post "When I told my mother that a theater was putting on my play Bootycandy, her response was, 'What?! Bootycandy? These white folks are going to let you put on a play called Bootycandy?!? Are they crazy???' And my response was, 'Yes. Yes indeed.'"—Robert O'Hara Sutter is on an outrageous odyssey through his childhood home, his church, dive bars, motel rooms, and even nursing homes. The journey uncovers characters who are at once fascinating, zany, controversial, and even a bit smutty, painting a portrait of life as a societal outlier. Based on the author's personal experience, Bootycandy is a kaleidoscope of sketches that interconnects to portray growing up gay and black. This subversive, uproarious satire crashes headlong into the murky terrain of pain and pleasure and . . . BOOTYCANDY! Robert O'Hara is a playwright and director. His play Antebellum received a world premiere production from Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, and earned him a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play. He reworked The Wiz for its revival at La Jolla Playhouse. He wrote and directed the world premiere of Insurrection: Holding History (Public Theater, Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Play). As a director, he has won an Obie Award and an NAACP Best Director Award and has worked at acclaimed theaters throughout the United States.
Download or read book Indecent TCG Edition written by Paula Vogel and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 71 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Revelatory…As intimate and immediate as a whispered secret. Vogel’s play thrums with music, desire, and fear, and it’s shrewd about the ways in which America isn’t free, and about how art does and doesn’t transcend the perilous winds of history.” —New Yorker “Superbly realized…Indecent, the powerful play by Paula Vogel, sheds an eye-opening light on a little-known time when theatrical history, Jewish culture, and the frank depiction of homosexuality intersected, with explosive results.” —New York Times “Gorgeous. Illuminating and heartbreaking. Rich in sympathy and humor, Indecent has the scope of an epic but the intimacy of a chamber piece…It celebrates and illustrates the power of theater.” —Time Out New York “A moving and fascinating play…A singular achievement… The historical perspective is vast and knowing…Has there ever been anything quite like Indecent, a play that touches—I mean deeply touches—so much rich emotion about history and the theater, anti-Semitism, homophobia, censorship, world wars, red-baiting, and oh, yes, joyful human passion?...An extraordinary play.” —Newsday “Indecent is more than a play about forbidden love: It’s about theater as a life force.” —New York Post When Sholem Asch wrote God of Vengeance in 1907, he didn’t imagine the height of controversy the play would eventually reach. Performing at first in Yiddish and German, the play’s subject matter wasn’t deemed contentious until it was produced in English, when the American audiences were scandalized by the onstage depiction of an amorous affair between two women. Paula Vogel’s newest work traces the trajectory of the show’s success through its tour in Europe to its abrupt and explosive demise on Broadway in 1923—including the arrest of the entire production’s cast and crew. Paula Vogel is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of How I Learned to Drive. Her other plays include Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, A Civil War Christmas, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and The Baltimore Waltz, among others. She has also had a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor to younger playwrights, first at Brown University and then at the Yale School of Drama.
Download or read book Passion Play TCG Edition written by Sarah Ruhl and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the "Ten Best Plays of 2008" by The New Yorker “Sarah Ruhl’s bold, inventive, and ironic triptych [is] a meditation on devotion and its appropriation by the state. . . . Ruhl is an original; a storyteller with a fine mind evolving her own theatrical idiom.”—John Lahr, The New Yorker “It’s a different kind of morality play . . . an often wondrous work . . . with [Ruhl’s] own special lyrical blend of poetry, humor and grace.”—Frank Rizzo, Variety Passion Play is Sarah Ruhl’s “biggest, most ambitious effort yet” (The New York Times), a three-and-a-half hour intimate epic, plunging the depths of the timely intersection of politics and religion. 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.
Download or read book Ripcord TCG Edition written by David Lindsay-Abaire and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A lyrical and understanding chronicler of people who somehow become displaced within their own lives…Mr. Lindsay-Abaire has shown a special affinity for female characters suddenly forced to re-evaluate the roles by which they define themselves."—New York Times Set in the Bristol Place Assisted Living Facility, this glorious and biting new comedy from David Lindsay-Abaire centers around Abby, who takes pride in her residence in one of the most coveted rooms in the rest home. Things turn sour quickly when she must take in Marilyn, a new roommate to share her precious space. In a satirical conflict of territory and control, Lindsay-Abaire spins a benign, typically mundane setting into an absurdist, colorful battleground. This high-stakes comedy examines our expectations of what it means to grow old in twenty-first century America, and what happens when a sense of possession collides with a mania of obsession. David Lindsay-Abaire's plays include Good People, Fuddy Meers, Kimberly Akimbo, Wonder of the World, High Fidelity, A Devil Inside, and Rabbit Hole, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Lindsay-Abaire wrote the book for Shrek the Musical, and the screen adaptation of Rabbit Hole starring Nicole Kidman. Lindsay-Abaire is a proud New Dramatists alum, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Juilliard School, as well as a member of the WGA and the Dramatists Guild Council.
Download or read book Water by the Spoonful Revised TCG Edition written by Quiara Alegría Hudes and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2017-07-10 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “How many plays make us long for grace? Water by the Spoonful by Quiara Hudes is such a rare play; it is a yearning, funny, deeply sad and deeply lyrical piece, a worthy companion to Hudes’s Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue. The play infects us with the urge to find connection within our families and communities and remains with us long after we’ve left the theater.” –Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of How I Learned to Drive “Hudes’s writing is controlled and graceful. Each of the play’s 15 short scenes is perfectly balanced, the language both lyrical and lucid.” –Richard Zoglin, Time “For a drama peopled by characters who have traveled a long way in the dark, Water by the Spoonful gives off a shimmering, sustaining warmth. Ms. Hudes writes with such empathy and vibrant humor about people helping one another to face down their demons that regeneration and renewal always seem to be just around the corner.” –Charles Isherwood, New York Times Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Water by the Spoonful is “a rich, brilliant montage of American urban life that is as dazzling to watch as it is difficult to look away from” (Associated Press). Somewhere in Philadelphia, Elliot has returned from Iraq and is struggling to find his place in the world. Somewhere in a chat room, recovering addicts forge an unbreakable bond of support and love. The boundaries of family and community are stretched across continents and cyberspace as birth families splinter and online families collide. Water by the Spoonful is a heartfelt and poetic meditation on lives on the brink of redemption and self-discovery during a time of heightened uncertainty, “as startling and innovative and human on the page as on the stage” (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author). Hudes’s cycle of three plays began with Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (Pulitzer Prize finalist) and concludes with The Happiest Song Plays Last. Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Water by the Spoonful, the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue. Her other works include Barrio Grrrl!, a children’s musical; 26 Miles; Yemaya’s Belly and The Happiest Song Plays Last, the third piece in her acclaimed trilogy. Hudes is on the board of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which produced her first play in the tenth grade. She now lives in New York with her husband and children.
Download or read book Mary Jane TCG Edition written by Amy Herzog and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The most profound and harrowing of Ms. Herzog’s many fine plays.” —Jesse Green, New York Times Armed with medicines, feeding tubes, and various medical equipment, Mary Jane is a single mother and indefatigable force when it comes to caring for her young, sick child. A moving play about the stalwart endurance of a devoted mother, Mary Jane demonstrates the prevailing strength of the human will when fueled by unconditional love.
Download or read book Linda Vista TCG Edition written by Tracy Letts and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Letts is a master of pitch-dark comedies that measure the grisliest depths of human behavior…Linda Vista is very funny, equally unsettling…An inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy.” —Ben Brantley, New York Times Fifty-year-old Wheeler is moving into his own apartment after a nasty divorce. With a blend of humor and humanity, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Tracy Letts demonstrates the ultimate midlife crisis: the bewildering search for self-discovery once you’ve already grown up.
Download or read book Speech Debate TCG Edition written by Stephen Karam and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2017-07-24 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “You might think a play that grapples with serious modern social issues—homophobia, teenage alienation, the limits of online privacy—would have no room for a warbling Abraham Lincoln doing an interpretive dance. But then you might not expect to encounter a piece of theater as ingenious and cannily plotted as Stephen Karam’s Speech & Debate. It is a suspenseful tale that fuses keen-eyed civic critique with riotous and even campy humor.” – Celia Wren, Washington Post “Hilarious...Speech & Debate’s real accomplishment is its picture of the borderland between late adolescence and adulthood, where grown-up ideas and ambition coexist with childish will and bravado...We never feel we’re being educated, just immensely entertained.” – Caryn James, New York Times “A provocative play...A lot of shows about teens ring inauthentic. Not this one.” – Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune “Stephen Karam’s savvy comedy is bristling with vitality, wicked humor, terrific dialogue, and a direct pipeline into the zeitgeist of contemporary youth.” – David Rooney, Variety In this unconventional dark comedy, three misfit high school students in Salem, Oregon form a unique debate club, complete with a musical version of The Crucible, an unusual podcast, and a plot to take down their corrupt drama teacher. With his signature wit, Karam traces the cohort’s attempts to fend off the menace of encroaching adulthood with caustic humor and subversive antics. Stephen Karam’s plays include The Humans (Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist), Sons of the Prophet (Pulitzer Prize finalist), and Speech & Debate. His adaptation of The Cherry Orchard premiered on Broadway for the Roundabout Theatre Company.
Download or read book Thom Pain based on nothing Revised TCG Edition written by Will Eno and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “It’s sad, isn’t it? The dead horse of a life we beat, all the wilder, all the harder the deader it gets. On the other hand, there are some nice shops in the area.” Thom Pain has come to a certain point in his life. Maybe you have too. His entire existence is ordinary; but that ordinariness is a revelation and a wonder and a curiosity. To him at least. He’d better hope so. It’s all he has (except maybe a dictionary and an old love letter). Comic and disturbing, this provocative monologue charts one man’s anguished journey from shattered childhood dreams and trauma to the tenuous, if guarded, optimism of adulthood, told in dangerous intimacy by a voice loaded with wry humor and deceptive charm.
