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Plays / Theatre
Nominated for Five 2026 Tony Awards, including Best Play
"Lindsay-Abaire has performed a valuable service, dispelling some of the ignorance that makes it so hard for too many of us to imagine how the other half lives." --Sylviane Gold (New York Times) on Good People
The Vernon Point Association could be described as a very outspoken bunch. They're known for diligently upkeeping their sanctuary--from porch railings to trash cans, no infraction goes undocumented. Still, no one is prepared for the neighbor-versus-neighbor battle royale that ensues when a newcomer makes an inconceivable suggestion: a stop sign, perched on the enclave's most picturesque block.
A raucous play journeying through big feelings, The Balusters is a modern-day satire about what happens when communities change faster than the people who reside in them.
From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who's always played by his own rules.
Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and other questions about every aspect of filmmaking from concept to script to screen. A bracing, no-holds-barred examination of the strange contradictions of Tinseltown, Bambi vs. Godzilla dissects the movies with Mamet's signature style and wit.
Winner of the 2018 Tony Award for Best Musical
After a mix-up at the border, Egypt's Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, bound for the cosmopolitan Israeli city Petah Tikvah, is stranded in a small desert town. With no transportation until the next day, the band is taken in by the locals. By morning, the lives of visitors and hosts are forever altered. Itamar Moses and David Yazbek's stunning musical adaptation of the 2007 acclaimed film finds transcendence in the surprising and tender relationships that are forged between strangers under the desert sky.
Lila, a Black cop, has been on leave from the police force ever since she shot an unarmed Black man. She's moved back in with her mother, Karen, and is drinking beer for breakfast. So when Tim, a white playwright, shows up at her door to casually inform her that his play inspired by her experience is being adapted into a movie, Lila's trauma is dragged out for speculation once again. The star of the film, his body guard, and Karen are dragged into the fight, leading to an epic metatheatrical standoff in a living room play about a living room play about gun violence, police, art, and appropriation.
Nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Picture
Winner: Best Screenplay, BAFTAs 2023
Winner: Best Screenplay, Golden Globe Awards 2023
Winner: Best Screenplay, Venice Film Festival 2022
What is he, twelve? Why doesn't he want to be friends with you no more? 1923. As shots ring out from the warring mainland, on the island of Inisherin it's the rift between old drinking pals Pádraic and Colm that leads both men to ever more alarming action.
Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about karma what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being down-and-out, passing around a bottle of wine. It ends with a kind of satori-like reaffirmation of the power of friendship, of doing good through not doing, and the intrinsic worth of the throw-away little exchanges that make up our lives. Written in 1957, the same year that On the Road was first published, and set in 1953, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate 1950s America. Kerouac's characters are working-class men and women a step away from vagrants, but not a big step. Their dialogue positively sings, suggesting jazz riffs in their rhythm and content, and Kerouac, like a master composer, arranges it to magical effect. Here is the heart and soul of the beat mentality, the zeitgeist that blossomed over the decades and eventually culminated in the counter-culture of 1960s America. It's a spirit that still lives.
Beat Generation is a play about tension, about friendship, and about karma--what it is and how you get it. It begins one fine morning with a few friends, honest laborers some of them, some close to being down-and-out, passing around a bottle of wine. It ends with a kind of satori-like reaffirmation of the power of friendship, of doing good through not doing, and the intrinsic worth of the throwaway little exchanges that make up our lives. Written in 1957, the same year that On the Road was first published, and set in 1953, Beat Generation portrays an authentic and alternate 1950s America. Kerouac's characters are working-class men and women--a step away from vagrants, but not a big step. Their dialogue positively sings, suggesting jazz riffs in their rhythm and content, and Kerouac, like a master composer, arranges it to magical effect. Here is the heart and soul of the beat mentality, the zeitgeist that blossomed over the decades and eventually culminated in the counter-culture of 1960s America. It's a spirit that still lives.
"In Beauty of the Father one of the American theater's most promising voices rings true and strong."--Lynn Jacobson, Variety
"Cruz conducts arias with his pen. He is a writer of ideas, who fills the stage with a kind of lush dramatic literature . . . Beauty of the Father brings to mind the playwright Maria Irene Fornes. Like his artistic forebear, Cruz recognizes the magic in the everyday. And he has found an astonishing language with which to describe it."--Hilton Als, The New Yorker
What will we sacrifice in the name of love? After young woman reunites with her painter father in the south of Spain, both fall in love with the same exciting young man. Beauty of the Father invokes the lyrical language of Lorca, as the great poet himself appears to the father and counsels him in his life. The play's rhythms are infused with the spirit of the Andalusian people who sing their sorrows in cante jondo, as Cruz once again creates musical poetry to honor unrequited love. Nilo Cruz won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Anna in the Tropics. Other works include Two Sisters and a Piano, Lorca in a Green Dress, Night Train to Bolina, A Bicycle Country, and Dancing on Her Knees. He is one of this country's most produced Cuban American writers.
These three plays are set in a town in Galway so blighted by rancor, ignorance, and spite that, as the local priest complains, God Himself seems to have no jurisdiction there.
"The Beauty Queen of Leenane" portrays ancient, manipulative Mag and her virginal daughter, Maureen, whose mutual loathing may be more durable than any love. In "A Skull in Connnemara," Mick Dowd is hired to dig up the bones in the town churchyard, some of which belong to his late and oddly unlamented wife. And the brothers of "The Lonesome West" have no sooner buried their father than they are resuming the vicious and utterly trivial quarrel that has been the chief activity of their lives.
"[McDonagh is] the most wickedly funny, brilliantly abrasive young dramatist on either side of the Irish Sea.... He is a born storyteller."--"New York Times"
"The Beauty Queen of Leenane" portrays ancient, manipulative Mag and her virginal daughter, Maureen, whose mutual loathing may be more durable than any love. In "A Skull in Connnemara," Mick Dowd is hired to dig up the bones in the town churchyard, some of which belong to his late and oddly unlamented wife. And the brothers of "The Lonesome West" have no sooner buried their father than they are resuming the vicious and utterly trivial quarrel that has been the chief activity of their lives.
"[McDonagh is] the most wickedly funny, brilliantly abrasive young dramatist on either side of the Irish Sea.... He is a born storyteller."--"New York Times"
From its powerful opening scene, of a naked King Henry II praying at the tomb of Thomas Becket, to the final wrenching act of ultimate self-sacrifice, Jean Anouih's "Becket" remains a towering achievement in the history of the theatre. Winner of the Antoinette Perry Award for Best Play of the Season (1960-61), Anouih's monumental work draws from historical events in the Norman conquest of England to create a profound portrait of a man's soul - and a transcendent vision of the human spirit...
A wry, innovative reckoning with the legacy of the Salem witch trials from one of America's foremost playwrights.
Becky Nurse is an outspoken, sharp-witted tour guide at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft who's just trying to get by in post-Obama America. She's also the descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who was infamously executed for witchcraft in 1692--but things have changed for women since then...haven't they? After losing her job for calling out The Crucible in front of schoolkids, Becky visits a local witch for help. One spell leads to another, and then everything really goes off the rails. A darkly comic play about a woman coming to terms with her family's legacy and finding her voice in the "lock her up" era.
In one volume, the screenplays to two contemporary classics, directed by Richard Linklater, and starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, about the immediate and life-altering attraction between two strangers. On a train from Budapest to Vienna, Jesse, a young American student, at the end of a romance and his European trip, meets Celine, a young French woman. They are immediately attracted. Despite knowing this may be the only time they will see each other, in the next few hours in the city of Vienna, they share everything and promise to meet again. Nearly a decade later, Jesse, now a novelist on a publicity tour, sees Celine in a bookstore in Paris. Again their time is short, and they spend it reestablishing the connection they experienced on their first meeting. Romantic, poignant, understated, and often profound, these two screenplays are sure to become classics in their own right.
A stage adaptation of Katherine Boo's National Book Award-winning study of life in a Mumbai slum
India is surging with global ambition. But beyond the luxury hotels surrounding Mumbai airport lies a makeshift slum, Annawadi, full of people with plans of their own.
Zehrunisa and her son Abdul aim to recycle enough rubbish to fund a proper house. Sunil, twelve and stunted, wants to eat until he's as tall as Kalu the thief. Asha seeks to steal government antipoverty funds to turn herself into a "first-class person," while her daughter Manju intends to become the slum's first female graduate.
But their schemes are fragile; global recession threatens the garbage trade, and another slum dweller is about to make an accusation that will destroy herself and shatter the neighborhood.
For Behind the Beautiful Forevers, journalist Katherine Boo spent three years in Annawadi recording the lives of its residents. From her uncompromising book, David Hare has fashioned a tumultuous play on an epic scale.
"Mick has been the catalyst for the most messed-up, funny, smart, low-budget, loud, subversive, hilarious, mind-expanding improv shows of his time." Bob Odenkirk, star of "Better Call Saul." In this follow-up to his highly regarded book "Improvise. Scene from the Inside Out", globally acclaimed improviser, director, and instructor Mick Napier focuses on the complexities and theories of long-form improvisation. This extended form of improvisation invites performers to be inspired for at least thirty minutes by a single suggestion as they push their creativity to the limit. Napier taps into more than 30 years of experience and distills his tools for success into practical, engaging lessons: -The art of introductions and edits -Different approaches to openers -Pros and cons of the backline -Why it's okay to be funny -Finding the dominant energy -Sustaining a solid character
"A quietly devastating play...Both a perceptive drama depicting the sudden fraying of a young marriage and a nail-biting psychological thriller...Belleville is among the most suspenseful plays I've seen in years." -Charles Isherwood, New York Times
Abby and Zack, young American newlyweds, have abandoned a comfortable postgraduate life in the states for Belleville, a bustling, bohemian, multicultural Parisian neighborhood. But as secrets both minor and monumental are revealed, their fraught relationship begins to unravel. Belleville examines the limits of trust and dependency in a world where love can turn pathological and our most intimate relationships may not be what they seem.
Some things we do for those we are responsible for, some things for ourselves, and some things we do for the ancestors.
Today, it's all three!
Two plays by one of the top ten playwrights to watch and Best Provocative Playwright by the Village Voice.
(Applause Books). For over 70 years, The Best American Short Plays has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, it has identified cutting-edge playwrights who have gone on to establish award-winning careers, including Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and more. In this volume, the plays capture the struggle between "hot tempers and cold decrees." Humans love to think of themselves as rational beings well in control of their lives and surroundings from sunup to sundown, sundown to sunrise. We learn to follow rules of proper behavior and more than happily issue out advice to our friends who just can't get a handle on themselves. Restraint and order, after all, are the cornerstones of human society and civilization. The problem is that human nature bucks and bridles at every attempt to socialize and civilize. Shakespeare got it right when he penned the observation, "The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree." In those few words he has managed to capture precisely why it is so difficult to be human; if it were okay simply to let our hot tempers prevail, life would be so much easier. But cold decrees are what prevent us from self-destruction, and so we endure the struggle.