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Play TitlePlaywrightYear WrittenAccoladesConcord Theatricals Description
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Fat HamJames Ijames2022
2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2023 Obie Awards Special Citation; 2023 Nominee five Tony Awards, including Best Play
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright James Ijames reinvents Shakespeare’s masterpiece with his new drama, a delectable comic tragedy. Juicy is a queer, Southern college kid, already grappling with some serious questions of identity, when the ghost of his father shows up in their backyard, demanding that Juicy avenge his murder. It feels like a familiar story to Juicy, well-versed in Hamlet’s woes. What’s different is Juicy himself, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man trying to break the cycles of trauma and violence in service of his own liberation. From an uproarious family barbecue emerges a compelling examination of love and loss, pain and joy.
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The MinutesTracy Letts20222022 Nominee Tony Award for Best Play
This scathing new comedy about small-town politics and real-world power, from the author of August: Osage County, exposes the ugliness behind some of our most closely-held American narratives while asking each of us what we would do to keep from becoming history’s losers.
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Heroes of the Fourth TurningWill Arbery20192020 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
It's nearing midnight in Wyoming, where four young conservatives have gathered at a backyard after-party. 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.
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Hurricane DianeMadeleine George20192019 Obie Award for Playwriting
Meet Diane, a permaculture gardener dripping with butch charm. She’s got supernatural abilities owing to her true identity—the Greek god Dionysus—and she's returned to the modern world to gather mortal followers and restore the Earth to its natural state. Where better to begin than with four housewives in a suburban New Jersey cul-de-sac? In this Obie-winning comedy with a twist, Pulitzer Prize finalist Madeleine George pens a hilarious evisceration of the blind eye we all turn to climate change and the bacchanalian catharsis that awaits us, even in our own backyards.
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The Waverly GalleryKenneth Lonergan2018
2001 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2019 Nominee two Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Play
Gladys, the elderly matriarch of the Green family, has run an art gallery in a small Greenwich Village hotel for many years. The management wants to replace her less-than-thriving gallery with a coffee shop. Always irascible but now increasingly erratic, Gladys is a cause of concern to her daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandson, from whose point of view this poignant memory play is told. A wacky and heartrending look at the effect of senility on a family, The Waverly Gallery was a success in its premiere at New York’s Promenade Theatre, winning an Obie for legendary Eileen Heckart in the role of Gladys. Nineteen years later, the play premiered on Broadway, earning a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play and a Tony Award for 86-year-old leading actress Elaine May.
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What the Constitution Means to MeHeidi Schreck2018
2019 Finalist Pulitzer Prize; 2019 Obie Award, Best New American Play; 2019 Nominee two Tony Awards, including Best Play
Playwright Heidi Schreck’s boundary-breaking play breathes new life into our Constitution and imagines how it will shape the next generation of Americans. Fifteen-year-old Heidi earned her college tuition by winning Constitutional debate competitions across the United States. In this hilarious, hopeful and achingly human new play, she resurrects her teenage self in order to trace the profound relationship between four generations of women and the founding document that shaped their lives.
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Dance NationClare Barron20182019 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Somewhere in America, an army of pre-teen competitive dancers plots to take over the world. And if their new routine is good enough, they’ll claw their way to the top at Nationals in Tampa Bay. A play about ambition, growing up, and how to find our souls in the heat of it all.
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The Lehman Trilogy
Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power
2018
2022 five Tony Awards, including Best Play; 2019 Nominee five Laurence Olivier Awards, including Best New Play
On a cold September morning in 1844, a young man from Bavaria stands on a New York dockside dreaming of a new life in the new world. He is joined by his two brothers, and an American epic begins. 163 years later, the firm they establish – Lehman Brothers – spectacularly collapses into bankruptcy, triggering the largest financial crisis in history. Weaving together nearly two centuries of family history, this epic theatrical event charts the humble beginnings, outrageous successes and devastating failure of the financial institution that would ultimately bring the global economy to its knees. The Lehman Trilogy is the quintessential story of western capitalism, rendered through the lens of a single immigrant family.
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Skeleton CrewDominique Morisseau20162022 Nominee 3 Tony Awards, inclufing Best Play
At the start of the Great Recession, one of the last auto stamping plants in Detroit is on shaky ground. Each of the workers have to make choices on how to move forward if their plant goes under. Shanita has to decide how she'll support herself and her unborn child, Faye has to decide how and where she'll live, and Dez has to figure out how to make his ambitious dreams a reality. Power dynamics shift as their manager Reggie is torn between doing right by his work family, and by the red tape in his office. Powerful and tense, Skeleton Crew is the third of Dominique Morisseau's Detroit cycle trilogy.
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The WolvesSarah DeLappe20162017 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
CRITIC'S PICK! “The scary, exhilarating brightness of raw adolescence emanates from every scene of this uncannily assured first play by Sarah DeLappe.” – The New York Times Left quad. Right quad. Lunge. A girls indoor soccer team warms up. From the safety of their suburban stretch circle, the team navigates big questions and wages tiny battles with all the vim and vigor of a pack of adolescent warriors. A portrait of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for nine American girls who just want to score some goals.
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Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2, &3
Suzan Lori-Parks2014
2015 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 2015 Winner Obie Award for Playwriting
Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winner Suzan-Lori Parks delivers the stunning first installment of a new American Odyssey, set over the course of the Civil War. Offered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be yet another empty promise. As his decision brings him face-to-face with a nation at war with itself, the loved ones Hero left behind debate whether to escape or wait for his return…only to discover that for Hero, free will may have come at a great spiritual cost. Father Comes Home From the Wars is an explosively powerful drama about the mess of war, the cost of freedom, and the heartbreak of love, with all three parts seen in one night. Part 1 introduces us to Hero. In Part 2, a band of rebel soldiers test Hero’s loyalty as the cannons approach. Part 3 finds Hero’s loved ones anxiously awaiting his return. A devastatingly beautiful dramatic work filled with music, wit, and great lyricism, Father Comes Home From the Wars is an epic tale about holding on to who we are and what we love in a country that both brings us together and rips us apart.
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The FlickAnnie Baker20132014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting
In a run-down movie theater in central Massachusetts, three underpaid employees mop the floors and attend to one of the last 35mm film projectors in the state. Their tiny battles and not-so-tiny heartbreaks play out in the empty aisles, becoming more gripping than the lackluster, second-run movies on screen. With keen insight and a finely-tuned comic eye, The Flick is a hilarious and heartrending cry for authenticity in a fast-changing world.
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The (Curious Case of the) Watson Intelligence
Madeleine George20132014 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Watson: trusty sidekick to Sherlock Holmes; loyal engineer who built Bell’s first telephone; unstoppable super-computer that became reigning Jeopardy! champ; amiable techno-dweeb who, in the present day, is just looking for love.These four constant companions become one in this brilliantly witty, time-jumping, loving tribute (and cautionary tale) dedicated to the people—and machines—upon which we all depend.
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4000 MilesAmy Herzog20112013 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2012 Obie Award, Best New Play
After suffering a major loss while on a cross-country bike trip, 21-year-old Leo seeks solace from his feisty 91-year-old grandmother Vera in her West Village apartment. Over the course of a single month, these unlikely roommates infuriate, bewilder, and ultimately reach each other. 4000 Miles looks at how two outsiders find their way in today's world.
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Goodnight Mister TomDavid Wood20112013 Olivier Award for Best Entertainment and Family
One of the most uplifting stories ever written, Michelle Magorian’s stunning Goodnight Mister Tom is brought gloriously to life in this stage adaptation by David Wood – the UK’s “National Children’s Dramatist” (The Times). Set during the dark and dangerous build-up to the Second World War, Goodnight Mister Tom follows sad young William Beech, who is evacuated to the idyllic English countryside and builds a remarkable and moving friendship with the elderly recluse Tom Oakley. All seems perfect until William is devastatingly summoned by his mother back to London.
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Milk Like SugarKirsten Greenidge20112012 Obie Award for Playwriting
It is Annie Desmond’s sixteenth birthday and her friends have decided to help her celebrate in style, complete with a brand new tattoo. Before her special night is over, however, Annie and her friends enter into a life altering pact. When Annie tries to make good on her promise to her friends, she is forced to take a good look at the world that surrounds her. She befriends Malik, who promises a bright future, and Keera, whose evangelical leanings inspire Annie in a way her young parents have not been able to do. In the end Annie’s choices propel her onto an irreversible path in this story that combines wit, poetry, and hope.
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A Bright New BoiseSamuel D. Hunter20102011 Obie Award for Playwriting
In the bleak, corporate break room of a craft store in Idaho, someone is summoning The Rapture. Will, who has fled his rural hometown after a scandal at his Evangelical church, comes to the Hobby Lobby, not only for employment, but also to rekindle a relationship with Alex, his brooding teenage son, whom he gave up for adoption several years ago. Alex works there along with Leroy, his adopted brother and protector, and Anna, a hapless young woman who reads bland fiction but hopes for dramatic endings. As their manager, foul-mouthed Pauline, tries ceaselessly to find order (and profit) in the chaos of small business, these lost souls of the Hobby Lobby confront an unyielding world through the beige-tinted impossibility of modern faith.
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In the Next Room or the vibrator playSarah Ruhl2009
2010 Pulitzer Prize in Drama; 2010 Nominee three Tony Awards, including Best Play
In the Next Room or the vibrator play is a comedy about marriage, intimacy, and electricity. 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.
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The Elaborate Entrance of Chad DeityKristoffer Diaz 2009
2011 Obie Award, Best New American Play; 2010 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity follows the life of wrestler Macedonio Guerra. As a lifelong fan, he has followed wrestling only to become a "jobber," one who is paid to lose to bigger-name stars in the ring. Macedonio meets Vigneshwar Paduar, a young Indian man from Brooklyn, who he wants to team up with. The wrestling execs go for it, but pitch them as "terrorists" in the ring. Macedonio and Vigneshwar find a way to push the personas to the limits and say what needs to be said. Unspoken racism, politics, and courage are all woven into this play that leaves it all on the mat.
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Amazons and their MenJordan Harrison20082008 Obie Award for Outstanding Performance
The Frau used to direct beautiful films for a fascist government. Now she's trying to make a film that's simply beautiful. The Frau casts herself in the lead role of the Amazon queen Penthesilea, who falls in love with Achilles on the battlefield of the Trojan War. She recruits a man from the Jewish ghetto to play her Achilles. Her own sister, a long-suffering extra, plays all the nameless Amazons killed in the background. With chariot crashes and adoring close-ups, it all has the makings of a glamorous war. But when telegrams start to arrive from the Minister of Propaganda, it becomes impossible for the Frau to ignore the real war outside her sound stage. A darkly comedic look at the role of artists during wartime, Amazons and Their Men is inspired by the life and work of Leni Riefenstahl.
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That FacePolly Stenham20072009 Nominee Olivier Award for Best New Play
Mia is at boarding school. She has access to drugs. They are Martha's. Henry is preparing for art college. He has access to alcohol. From Martha. Martha controls their lives. Martha is their mother. This is a family at the breaking point. Mia and Henry have long been dealing with their mother's addictions, but after a prank goes wrong at Mia's boarding school, their situation goes from comically bad to utterly ridiculous. When their estranged father arrives to sort things out, they must face the reality that their well-to-do family may have combusted beyond repair.That Face is a part of the Manhattan Theatre Club spring 2010 season in New York City. The show originally played London's Royal Court in 2007 and was subsequently seen in the West End.
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Invasion!
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, Rachel Wilson-Broyles
20062011 Obie for Playwriting
Invasion! is a tornado of words, images and ideas, all centered around a magical name: Abulkasem. The play assaults our deepest prejudices about identity, race and language. At once hilarious, disturbing and poignant, this deeply subversive play deconstructs a threatening identity – the Arabic male – and forces us to confront our own cultural identity.
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BulrusherEisa Davis20062007 Finalist Pulitzer Prize in Drama
In 1955, in the redwood country north of San Francisco, a multiracial girl grows up in a predominantly white town whose residents pepper their speech with the historical dialect of Boontling. Found floating in a basket on the river as an infant, Bulrusher is an orphan with a gift for clairvoyance that makes her feel like a stranger even amongst the strange: the taciturn schoolteacher who adopted her, the madam who runs her brothel with a fierce discipline, the logger with a zest for horses and women, and the guitar-slinging boy who is after Bulrusher's heart. Just when she thought her world might close in on her, she discovers an entirely new sense of self when a black girl from Alabama comes to town. Passionate, lyrical, and chock full of down-home humor, this play is an unforgettable experience by a new, thrilling voice.
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The ThugsAdam Bock20062006 Obie Award
The Obie Award winning dark comedy about work, thunder and the mysterious things that are happening on the 9th floor of a big law firm. When a group of temps try to discover the secrets that lurk in the hidden crevices of their workplace, they realize they would rather believe in gossip and rumors than face dangerous realities.
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End of the RainbowPeter Quilter20052005 Nominee three Tony Awards
A play with music about the final years in the life of Judy Garland, "End of the Rainbow" triumphed in London's West End in 2010/2011 and on Broadway, at the Belasco Theatre, in 2012. A musical drama of Judy Garland's "come-back" concerts Christmas 1968: with a six week booking at London's Talk of the Town, it looks like Judy Garland is set firmly on the comeback trail. The failed marriages, the suicide attempts and the addictions are all behind her. At forty-six and with new flame Mickey Deans at her side, she seems determined to carry it off and recapture her magic. But lasting happiness always eludes some people, and there was never any answer to the question with which Judy ended every show: "If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh, why, can't I?" End of the Rainbow is a savagely funny drama featuring a glorious ensemble of Judy Garland hits and infused with the glamour and the melancholy of stardom. "Every note she sings, every racket she makes, every tear she sheds, every joke she cracks, every pill she pops - is conveyed with alarming honesty. This knockout portrait of a living catastrophe should not be missed." What's OPublished to tie-in with the premiere at the Sydney Opera House in July 2005
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Glorious!: The True Story of Florence Foster Jenkins, The Worst Singer in the World
Peter Quilter20052006 Nominee Olivier Award for Best New Comedy
Hilarious comedy of the worst singer in the world In 1940's New York, the performer who everyone wanted to see live was Florence Foster Jenkins, an enthusiastic soprano whose pitch was far from perfect. Known as 'the first lady of the sliding scale', she warbled and screeched her way through the evening to an audience who mostly fell about with laughter. But this delusional and joyously happy woman paid little attention to her critics, instead she was surrounded by a circle of devoted friends who were almost as eccentric as she was.
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On the Shore of the Wide WorldSimon Stephens20052006 Olivier Award for Best Play
In Simon Stephens' stunning play something is about to happen that will change one family forever. Set over the course of nine months, ON THE SHORE OF THE WIDE WORLD is an epic play about love, family, Roy Keane and the size of the galaxy.
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The 39 Steps
Adapted by Patrick Barlow from the novel by John Buchan
2005
2008 two Tony Awards; 2007 Laurence Olivier Award, Best New Comedy; 2008 Nominee six Tony Awards, including Best Play
In The 39 Steps, a man with a boring life meets a woman with a thick accent who says she’s a spy. When he takes her home, she is murdered. Soon, a mysterious organization called “The 39 Steps” is hot on the man’s trail in a nationwide manhunt that climaxes in a death-defying finale! A riotous blend of virtuoso performances and wildly inventive stagecraft, The 39 Steps amounts to an unforgettable evening of pure pleasure!
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The Clean HouseSarah Ruhl20042005 Finalist Pulitzer Prize in Drama
After its acclaimed run at Yale Repertory Theatre, this extraordinary play by an exciting voice in the American drama was was done to equal acclaim at several major theatres coast to coast before winding up Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center, where it had an extended run. The play takes place in what the author describes as "metaphysical Connecticut," mostly in the home of a married couple who are both doctors. They have hired a housekeeper named Matilde, an aspiring comedian from Brazil who's more interested in coming up with the perfect joke than in house-cleaning. Lane, the lady of the house, has an eccentric sister named Virginia who's just nuts about house-cleaning. She and Matilde become fast friends, and Virginia takes over the cleaning while Matilde works on her jokes. Trouble comes when Lane's husband Charles reveals that he has found his soul mate, or "bashert" in a cancer patient named Anna, on whom he has operated. The actors who play Charles and Anna also play Matilde's parents in a series of dream-like memories, as we learn the story about how they literally killed each other with laughter, giving new meaning to the phrase, "I almost died laughing." This theatrical and wildly funny play is a whimsical and poignant look at class, comedy and the true nature of love.
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The HIstory BoysAlan Bennett2004
2006 Winner Tony Award, Best Play; 2005 Winner Olivier Award, Best New Play
An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form (senior) boys in a British boarding school are, as such boys will be, in pursuit of sex, sport, and a place at a good university - generally in that order. In all their efforts, they are helped and hindered, enlightened and bemused, by a maverick English teacher who seeks to broaden their horizons in sometimes undefined ways, and by a young history teacher who questions the methods, as well as the aim, of their schooling. In The History Boys, Alan Bennett raises - with gentle wit and pitch-perfect command of character - not only universal questions about the nature of history and how it is taught but also questions about the purpose of education today. Following a sold out run in London, The History Boys premiered on Broadway in April 2006 taking the Tony Award as Best Play of the Season.
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DemocracyMichael Frayn2003
2004 Nominee Olivier Award for Best New Play; 2005 Winner Tony®Award for Best Play
West Germany, 1969. Willy Brandt begins his brief but remarkable career as Chancellor. Always present but rarely noticed is Gunter Guillaume, his devoted personal assistant - and a spy for the Stasi.
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Small TragedyCraig Lucas20032004 Obie Award for Best American Play
Backstage and global politics unexpectedly collide during an amateur production of Oedipus. This powerful, timely play investigates the contemporary meaning and relevance of tragedy, launching a surprisingly funny, sharply pointed salvo directly at the heart of a generation.
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Salvage (Coast of Utopia Part 3)Tom Stoppard20022007 Tony Award for Best Play
This epic trilogy of sequential but self-contained plays vividly portrays a group of Russian intellectuals as they evolve from philosophers into revolutionaries against the backdrop of Tsarist Russia and European upheaval. Shipwreck continues the story of Michael Bakunin, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, the writer Ivan Turgenev and their circle, but as the action shifts to Paris, it is Alexander Herzen and his wife who occupy center stage. Intoxicating anticipation vanishes into dashed hopes during the revolution of 1848. For Herzen, the loss of his political illusions is overshadowed by personal disasters.
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Shipwreck (Coast of Utopia Part 2)Tom Stoppard20022007 Tony Award for Best Play
This epic trilogy of sequential but self-contained plays vividly portrays a group of Russian intellectuals as they evolve from philosophers into revolutionaries against the backdrop of Tsarist Russia and European upheaval. Shipwreck continues the story of Michael Bakunin, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, the writer Ivan Turgenev and their circle, but as the action shifts to Paris, it is Alexander Herzen and his wife who occupy center stage. Intoxicating anticipation vanishes into dashed hopes during the revolution of 1848. For Herzen, the loss of his political illusions is overshadowed by personal disasters.
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Voyage (Coast of Utopia Part 1)Tom Stoppard20022007 Tony Award for Best Play
This epic trilogy of sequential but self-contained plays vividly portrays a group of Russian intellectuals as they evolve from philosophers into revolutionaries against the backdrop of Tsarist Russia and European upheaval. Shipwreck continues the story of Michael Bakunin, the critic Vissarion Belinsky, the writer Ivan Turgenev and their circle, but as the action shifts to Paris, it is Alexander Herzen and his wife who occupy center stage. Intoxicating anticipation vanishes into dashed hopes during the revolution of 1848. For Herzen, the loss of his political illusions is overshadowed by personal disasters.
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Vincent in BrixtonNicholas Wright20022003 Winner Olivier Award for Best New Play
In 1873, at the age of 20, Vincent Van Gogh rented a room in a suburb of London while he was being groomed for a career as an art dealer in his family's business. This heralded play produced by Lincoln Center traces the transforming effects of love, sex and youthful adventure on Van Gogh's still unformed talent, portraying him as he might have been and supposing a poignant affair with his landlady that might have happened.
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King Hedley IIAugust Wilson19992000 Finalist Pulitzer Prize in Drama
Peddling stolen refrigerators in the feeble hope of making enough money to open a video store, King Hedley, a man whose self worth is built on self delusion, is scraping in the dirt of an urban backyard trying to plant seeds where nothing will grow. Getting, spending, killing and dying in a world where getting is hard and killing is commonplace are threads woven into this 1980's installment in the author's renowned cycle of plays about the black experience in America. Drawing on characters established in Seven Guitars, King Hedley II shows the shadows of the past reaching into the present as King seeks retribution for a lie perpetrated by his mother regarding the identity of his father.
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CopenhagenMichael Frayn19982000 Winner Tony for Best Play
In 1941, German physicist Werner Heisenberg goes to Copenhagen to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. Together they revolutionized atomic science in the 1920s, but now they are on opposite sides of a world war. In this incisive drama by the prominent British playwright, which premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London and opened to rave reviews on Broadway (ultimately winning the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play), the two men meet in a situation fraught with danger in hopes of discovering why we do what we do.
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Pride's CrossingTina Howe19971997 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
At ninety, Mabel Tidings Bigelow insists on celebrating her daughter and granddaughter’s annual visit with an archaic croquet party. As it unfolds, she relives vignettes from the last eighty years that subtly interleave past and present to reveal the precise moments of opportunity lost and love rejected that define her life. A vibrant portrait of Mabel takes shape: her flashes of wit and humor, resilience, disappointments, youthful spunk, and geriatric willfulness. Her Boston blue-blood family expected daughters to applaud from the sidelines, but Mabel had one shining moment of achievement: she was the first woman to swim the English Channel. However, her willfulness did not extend to rejecting a socially ideal fiancé for love. Pride’s Crossing is a rewarding challenge for a talented cast.
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The Diary of Anne Frank (Adaptation by Wendy Kessleman)
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett
1997
Original: 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 1956 Tony Award for Best Play; 1956 Nominee Five Tony Awards
In this transcendently powerful new adaptation by Wendy Kesselman, Anne Frank emerges from history a living, lyrical, intensely gifted young girl who confronts her rapidly changing life and the increasing horror of her time with astonishing honesty, wit and determination. An impassioned drama about the lives of eight people hiding from the Nazis in a concealed storage attic, The Diary of Anne Frank captures the claustrophobic realities of their daily existence – their fear, their hope, their laughter, their grief. Each day of these two dark years, Anne's voice shines through: "When I write, I shake off all my cares. But I want to achieve more than that. I want to be useful and bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!" This is a new adaptation for a new generation.
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La Gringa (English)Carmen Rivera-Tirado19961996 Obie Award
La Gringa is about a young woman’s search for her identity. Mari­a Elena Garcia goes to visit her family in Puerto Rico during the Christmas holidays and arrives with plans to connect with her homeland. Although this is her first trip to Puerto Rico, she has had an intense love for the island, and even majored in Puerto Rican Studies in college. Once Maria is in Puerto Rico, she realizes that Puerto Rico does not welcome her with open arms. The majority of the Puerto Ricans on the island consider her an American – a gringa – and Mari­a considers this a betrayal. If she’s a Puerto Rican in the United States and an American in Puerto Rico, Maria concludes that she is nobody everywhere. Her uncle, Manolo, spiritually teaches her that identity isn’t based on superficial and external definitions, but rather is an essence that she has had all along in her heart. This play is published in a bilingual edition; if you are applying for licensing rights, please state which version you wish to produce.
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La Gringa (Spanish)Carmen Rivera-Tirado19961996 Obie Award
La Gringa es la búsqueda de identidad de una joven de origen puertorriqueño nacida en los Estados Unidos. María Elena decide visitar a su familia borinqueña durante las navidades y llega a Puerto Rico con gran ilusión de conectarse con ellos y con la madre patria. Aunque es su primer viaje a Puerto Rico, ella siempre ha tenido un gran amor por la isla y hasta ha estudiado la historia del país en la Universidad. Sin embargo a su llegada se da cuenta de que la isla no le da la bienvenida. La mayoría de los puertorriqueños la consideran americana – una gringa – y María Elena se siente traicionada por los suyos. María Elena llega a la conclusión de que si es puertorriqueña en los Estados Unidos y americana en Puerto Rico, en realidad no es nadie a donde quiera que vaya. Su tío Manolo, le enseña que la identidad no está basada en lo superficial o lo externo sino que es una esencia que ella ha llevado en su corazón toda su vida.
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PopcornBen Elton19961998 Olivier Award for Best New Comedy
Set in the Beverly Hills home of Oscar winning movie director Bruce Delamitri, Popcorn is a satirical comedy thriller with the firepower of a hit squad. When notorious killers Wayne and Scout interrupt Bruce's passionate introduction to Brooke Daniels, a nude model and actress, they want more than an autograph from their cinematic idol. Wayne intends to use Bruce's "art" as justification for murder. Events are disrupted by the arrival of Bruce's soon to be ex wife and spoiled teenage daughter and his producer. However, Wayne means to succeed whatever the cost.
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SkylightDavid Hare1995
2015 Tony Award, Best Revival of a Play; 2015 Nominee Olivier Award, Best Revival of a Play
Broadway and the West End applauded this intensely clear-sighted and compassionate play about a love affair. Kyra is surprised to see the son of her former lover at her apartment in a London slum. He hopes she will reconcile with his distraught, now widowed, father. Tom, a restless, self-made restaurant and hotel tycoon, arrives later that evening, unaware of his son’s visit. Kyra, who was his invaluable business associate and a close family friend until his wife discovered their affair, has since found a vocation teaching underprivileged children. Is the gap between them unbridgeable, or can they resurrect their relationship?
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Seven GuitarsAugust Wilson19951995 Finalist Pulitzer Prize in Drama
The sixth in the author's decade-by-decade exploration of the black experience in America, two of which have won Pulitzer Prizes, Seven Guitars is part bawdy comedy, part dark elegy, and part mystery. In the backyard of a Pittsburgh tenement in 1948, friends gather to mourn for a blues guitarist and singer who died just as his career was on the verge of taking off. The action that follows is a flashback to the busy week leading up to Floyd's sudden and unnatural death.
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Keely and DuJane Martin19931994 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
From the author of Talking With and Vital Signs, here is a volatile drama about abortion. Du, a right-to-life activist, and Keely, a pregnant rape victim Du is confining, transcend their circumstances and the ideological issues that separate them. Keely and Du is a mind-probing issue play with a gripping human face. Who is accountable? What is the extent of individual freedom? What are a rape victim’s rights? What are a Christian’s realities of procreation? Their passionate stories exist on the extreme edge of everyday reality.
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ArcadiaTom Stoppard1993
1994 Winner Olivier Award for Best Play; 2010 Nominee Olivier Award for Best Revival of a Play
Arcadia moves back and forth between 1809 and the present at the elegant estate owned by the Coverly family. The 1809 scenes reveal a household in transition. As the Arcadian landscape is being transformed into picturesque Gothic gardens, complete with a hermitage, thirteen year-old Lady Thomasina and her tutor delve into intellectual and romantic issues. Present day scenes depict the Coverly descendants and two competing scholars who are researching a possible scandal at the estate in 1809 involving Lord Byron. This brilliant play moves smoothly between the centuries and explores the nature of truth and time, the difference between classical and romantic temperaments, and the disruptive influence of sex on our life orbits- the attraction Newton left out.
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Two Trains RunningAugust Wilson1992
1992 Finalist Pulitzer Prize in Drama; 1992 Nominee four Tony Awards, including Best Play
Memphis Lee's coffee shop lies in Pittsburgh's Hill District, a neighborhood on the brink of economic development. The restaurant serves as a hangout for a host of regulars: a local intellectual, an elderly man who imparts the secrets of life as learned from a 322-year-old sage, an ex-con, a numbers runner, a laconic waitress who slashed her legs to keep men away, and a developmentally disabled man who was once cheated out of a ham. With Chekhovian obliqueness, the author reveals simple truths, hopes and dreams, creating a microcosm of an era and a community on the brink of change.
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Conversations with My FatherHerb Gardener19921992 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
From the award-winning author of I'm Not Rappaport and A Thousand Clowns comes a powerful and funny play about three generations of a Jewish family on the Lower East Side. Incorporating autobiographical elements, Eddie Goldberg's story dramatizes what it's like to melt as well as simmer in American society while it encompasses the universals of relations between fathers and sons.
51
Lost in YonkersNeil Simon19911991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 1991 four Tony Awards, including Best Play
By America's great comic playwright, this memory play is set in Yonkers in 1942. Bella is thirty-five years old, mentally challenged, and living at home with her mother, stern Grandma Kurnitz. As the play opens, ne'er-do-well son Eddie deposits his two young sons on the old lady's doorstep. He is financially strapped and taking to the road as a salesman. The boys are left to contend with Grandma, with Bella and her secret romance, and with Louie, her brother, a small-time hoodlum in a strange new world called Yonkers.
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Out of OrderRay Cooney19911991 Olivier Award Winner, Best Comedy
When Richard Willey, a government junior minister, plans to spend the evening with Jane Worthington, one of the opposition's typists, things go disastrously wrong in this hugely successful sequel to Two into One.
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Lettice and LovagePeter Shaffer19901990 Nominee Tony Award, Best Play
Lettice Duffet, an expert on Elizabethan cuisine and medieval weaponry, is an indefatigable but daffy enthusiast of history and the theatre. As a tour guide at Fustian House, one of the least stately of London’s stately homes, she theatrically embellishes its historical past, ultimately coming up on the radar of Lotte Schon, an inspector from the Preservation Trust. Neither impressed or entertained by Lettice’s freewheeling history lessons, Schon fires her. Not one to go without a fight, Lettice engages the stoic, conventionial Lotte in a battle to the death of all that is sacred to the Empire and the crown. This hit by the author of Equus and Amadeus featured a triumphant, award-winning performance by Dame Maggie Smith in London and on Broadway.
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Death and the MaidenAriel Dorfman19901992 Sir Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season
Tony award-winning Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman starred on Broadway in this political thriller. Set in an unnamed country that is, like the author's native Chile, emerging from a totalitarian dictatorship, the play explores the after effects of repression on hearts and souls. Paulina Escobar's husband Gerardo is to head an investigation into past human rights abuses. A Dr. Miranda stops at Escobars' to congratulate Gerardo. Paulina overhears them speaking and is convinced that Miranda supervised her prison torture sessions. She ties him to a chair and conducts her own interrogation, gun in hand. Escobar doesn't know whether to believe his distraught wife or his persuasive new friend. This white knuckle thriller is a rivetting intellectual and emotional tug of war.
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Racing DemonDavid Hare19901990 Olivier Award for Best Play; 1996 Nominee Tony Award for Best Play
Forming the first part of the David Hare Trilogy (which also comprises Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War), Racing Demon focuses on the Church of England. A disparate body, the Church now finds itself attracting unwanted publicity, wracked by the dissension of its members on matters of doctrine and practice and at odds with the government. In this climate, the Reverend Lionel Espy and his team of clergymen struggle to make sense of their mission in South London, as the arrival of a zealous young curate intensifies their personal and professional problems.
56
Single SpiesAlan Bennett19881990 Olivier Award Best Comedy
This unusual double bill of one act plays is about two of the most celebrated spies of modern times: Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Single Spies won the 1990 Olivier Award, Best Comedy. It includes An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution .
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The Piano LessonAugust Wilson1987
1990 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 1990 Nominee Tony Award for Best Play, 2023 Nominee for Best Revival of a Play
It is 1936, and Boy Willie arrives in Pittsburgh from the South in a battered truck loaded with watermelons to sell. He has an opportunity to buy some land down home, but he has to come up with the money right quick. He wants to sell a piano that has great importance to his family, but he shares ownership with his sister Berniece, and the piano sits in her living room. Berniece has already rejected several offers, because the antique piano is covered with beautiful carvings detailing the family’s rise from slavery. Boy Willie argues that the past is past, but Berniece proves to be more formidable than he anticipated.
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Talk RadioEric Bogosian19871988 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama
Barry Champlain, Cleveland's controversial radio host, is on the air doing what he does best: insulting the pathetic souls who call in the middle of the night to sound off. Tomorrow, Barry's show is going into national syndication and his producer is afraid that Barry will say something that will offend the sponsors. This, of course, makes Barry even more outrageous. Funny and moving, off beat, outrageous and totally entrancing, Talk Radio had a long run at New York's Public Theatre starring the author.
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Broadway BoundNeil Simon1986
1987 Pulitzer Prize in Drama; 1987 Nominee four Tony Awards, including Best Play
Part three of Neil Simon's acclaimed autobiographical trilogy finds Eugene and his older brother Stanley trying to break into the world of show business as professional comedy writers while coping with their parents' breakup and eventual divorce. When their material is broadcast on the radio for the first time, the family is upset to hear a thinly-veiled portrait of themselves played for laughs.
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The Normal HeartLarry Kramer19852011 Tony Award, Best Revival of a Play
A searing drama about public and private indifference to the AIDS plague and one man's lonely fight to awaken the world to the crisis, The Normal Heart was based on Kramer's real-life experience. Produced to acclaim in New York, London and Los Angeles, the play centers on Ned Weeks, a gay activist enraged at the indifference of public officials and the gay community. While trying to save the world from itself, Ned confronts the personal toll of AIDS when his lover dies of the disease.
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FencesAugust Wilson19851987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2010 Tony Award, Best Revival of a Play
This sensational drama starred James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson, a former star of the Negro baseball leagues who now works as a garbage man in 1957 Pittsburgh. Excluded as a black man from the major leagues during his prime, Troy's bitterness takes its toll on his relationships with his wife and his son, who now wants his own chance to play ball. Revived in 2010 starring Denzel Washington in the lead role.
62
Lend Me a TenorKen Ludwig19852010 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play, two additional Tony Awards
Winner of 3 Tony Awards and 4 Drama Desk Awards, Lend Me A Tenor is set in September 1934. Saunders, the general manager of the Cleveland Grand Opera Company, is primed to welcome world-famous singer Tito Merelli, known as Il Stupendo, the greatest tenor of his generation, to appear for one night only as the star of the opera. Tito arrives late, and through a hilarious series of mishaps, he is given a double dose of tranquilizers and passes out. His pulse is so low that Saunders and his assistant Max believe he’s dead - and in a frantic attempt to salvage the evening, Saunders persuades Max to get into Merelli's costume and fool the audience into thinking he's Il Stupendo. Max succeeds and lives up to his idol, but Merelli regains consciousness and gets into the identical costume, ready to perform. Now two opera singers are running around in the same costume and two women are running around in lingerie, each thinking she is with Il Stupendo. A sensation on Broadway and in London's West End, this madcap, screwball comedy is guaranteed to leave audiences teary-eyed with laughter.
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BenefactorsMichael Frayn19841986 Nominee Tony Award for Best Play
This long-running hit starred Sam Waterston on Broadway as an urban architect whose attempts to improve humanity by the environments he creates, only leads to chaos when the high-rise boom goes bust and two close friends are caught in the cross-hairs.
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HurlyburlyDavid Rabe19841985 Nominee Tony Award for Best Play
This riveting drama took New York by storm in a production directed by Mike Nichols and starring William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Judith Ivey, Christopher Walken, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, and Jerry Stiller. Characters nose-deep in the decadent, perverted, cocaine culture that is Hollywood, pursuing a sex-crazed, drug-addled vision of the American Dream. Later stage and screen incarnations have attracted such actors as Ethan Hawke, Meg Ryan, Sean Penn, and Kevin Spacey.
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Biloxi BluesNeil Simon19841985 Winner Tony Award for Best Play
The second in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Neil Simon's trilogy which began with Brighton Beach Memoirs and concluded with Broadway Bound. When we last met Eugene Jerome, he was coping with adolescence in 1930's Brooklyn. Here, he is a young army recruit during WW II, going through basic training and learning about Life and Love with a capital 'L' along with some harsher lessons, while stationed at boot camp in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1943.
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Ma Rainey's Black BottomAugust Wilson1984
1985 NomineeThree Tony Awards, including Best Play; 2016 Winner Olivier Award for Best Revival of a Play
It's 1927 and Ma Rainey, the "Mother of the Blues," is recording new sides of old favorites in a rundown studio in Chicago. Fiery and determined, Ma Rainey fights to retain control over her music, while her cocky trumpet player Levee dreams of making his own name in the business. More than music goes down in August Wilson's riveting portrayal of rage, racism, self-hatred and exploitation.
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Glengarry Glen RossDavid Mamet1983
1983 Olivier Award, Best New Play; 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2005 Tony Award, Best Revival of a Play
Revived on Broadway in 2005 and 2012, this masterpiece of American drama also became a celebrated film starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, and Alan Arkin.
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Noises OffMichael Frayn19831982 Olivier Award, Best Play; 1984 Nominee Tony® Award, Best Play
"The most dexterously realized comedy ever about putting on a comedy. A spectacularly funny, peerless backstage farce. This dizzy, well-known romp is festival of delirium." - The New York Times
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Painting ChurchesTina Howe19831984 Finalist Pulitzer Prize in Drama
Gardner and Fanny Church are preparing to move out of their Beacon Hill house to their summer cottage on Cape Cod. 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.
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"Master Harold"... and the BoysAthol Fugard19821982 Nominee Tony Award, Best Play
Loosely autobiographical, this searing coming-of-age story is considered by many to be Fugard’s masterpiece. A white teen who has grown up in the affectionate company of the two Black waiters who work in his mother’s tea room in Port Elizabeth learns that his viciously racist, alcoholic father is on his way home from the hospital. An ensuing rage unwittingly triggers his inevitable passage into the culture of hatred fostered by apartheid.
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Jitney ("August Wilson's Jitney")August Wilson19822017 Winner Tony Award for Best Play Revival
Set in 1970 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh that is served by a makeshift taxi company, Jitney is a beautiful addition to the author's decade-by-decade cycle of plays about the Black American experience in the 20th century.
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Top GirlsCaryl Churchill19821983 Obie Award for Best Play
Marlene has been promoted to managing director of a London employment agency and is celebrating. The symbolic luncheon is attended by women in legend or history who offer perspectives on maternity and ambition. In a time warp, these ladies are also her co-workers, clients, and relatives. Marlene, like her famous guests, has had to pay a price to ascend from proletarian roots to the executive suite: she has become, figuratively speaking, a male oppressor, and even coaches female clients on adopting odious male traits. Marlene has also abandoned her illegitimate and dull-witted daughter. Her emotional and sexual life has become as barren as Lady Macbeth's.
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A Soldier's PlayCharles Fuller19811982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2020 Tony Award, Best Revival of a Play
In a segregated Louisiana army camp in 1944, Vernon C. Waters, the sergeant of a Black company, has been murdered. Captain Taylor, the white C.O., worries the murderer may be a white officer or the local Klan. Richard Davenport, a Black captain, is assigned to investigate. Taylor, fearing the assignment of a Black investigator means the case is to be swept under the rug, attempts to discourage Davenport. But Davenport perseveres, discovering deep-seated hatred and corruption among the the men in the company. Despite each soldier's motive for the killing, Davenport eventually solves the case, revealing a truth more shocking than the murder itself.
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Children of a Lesser GodMark Medoff19801980 Tony Award for Best Play
After three years in the Peace Corps, James, a young speech therapist, joins the faculty of a school for the deaf, where he is to teach lip-reading. He meets Sarah, a school dropout, totally deaf from birth, and estranged both from the world of hearing and from those who would compromise to enter that world. Fluent in sign language, James tries, with little success, to help Sarah, but gradually the two fall in love and marry. At first their relationship is a happy and glowing one, as the gulf of silence between them seems to be bridged by their desire to understand each other's needs and feelings, but discord soon develops as Sarah becomes militant for the rights of the deaf and rejects any hint that she is being patronized and pitied. In the end the chasm between the worlds of sound and silence seems almost too great to cross…but love and compassion hold the hope of reconciliation, and a deeper, fuller understanding of differences that, in the final essence, can unite as well as divide.
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True WestSam Shepard1980
1983 Finalist Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 2000 Nominee three Tony Awards, including Best Play
This American classic explores alternatives that might spring from the demented terrain of the California landscape. Sons of a desert-dwelling alcoholic and a suburban wanderer clash over a film script. Austin, the achiever, is working on a script he has sold to producer Sal Kimmer when Lee, a demented petty thief, drops in. He pitches his own idea for a movie to Kimmer, who then wants Austin to junk his bleak, modern love story and write Lee's trashy Western tale.
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Torch Song TrilogyHarvey Fierstein19791983 Winner Tony Award for Best Play for Torch Song Trilogy
Torch Song Trilogy is constructed of three moving plays told over three acts: International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First! The life of Arnold Beckoff, a torch song-singing, Jewish drag queen living in New York City is dramatized over the span of the late 1970s and 1980s, through Stonewall, the AIDS crisis, and other ground-breaking milestones for the LGBT community. Told with a likable, human voice, Arnold struggles through love, disease, and the challenges of child-rearing. In the tradition of The Normal Heart and The Pride, and one of the pre-cursors for the seminal Angels in America, this award-winning and popular work broke new ground in the theatre: "At the height of the post-Stonewall clone era, Harvey challenged both gay and straight audiences to champion an effeminate gay man's longings for love and family."
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AmadeusPeter Shaffer19791981 Winner Tony® Award, Best Play
In the court of the Austrian Emperor Joseph II, Antonio Salieri is the established composer. Enter the greatest musical genius of all time: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Salieri has given himself to God so that he might realize his sole ambition, to be a great composer. Mozart is a foul-mouthed, graceless oaf who has that which is beyond Salieri’s envious grasp: Genius.
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The Elephant ManBernard Pomerance1979
1979 Winner Tony® Award for Best Play; 2015 Nominee Four Tony® Awards, including Best Revival of a Play
The Elephant Man is based on the life of John Merrick, who lived in London during the latter part of the nineteenth century. A horribly deformed young man – the victim of rare skin and bone diseases – he becomes the star freak attraction in traveling sideshows. Found abandoned and helpless, he is admitted to London’s prestigious Whitechapel Hospital. Under the care of celebrated young physician Frederick Treves, Merrick is introduced to London society and slowly evolves from an object of pity to an urbane and witty favorite of the aristocracy and literati, only to be denied his ultimate dream – to become a man like any other.
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PlentyDavid Hare19781983 Nominee Tony Award for Best Play
Originally produced in London by the National Theatre and later on Broadway, this cinematic drama by one of England's most celebrated contemporary playwrights reaped praise when produced by Joseph Papp and starring Kate Nelligan. Post war history is seen through the life and loves of a former French Resistance fighter; Susan Traherne, now disaffected and cynical, marries a conventional career diplomat and proceeds to wreck both their lives. Later filmed with Meryl Streep in the role of Susan.
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Chapter TwoNeil Simon19771978 Nominee Tony Award for Best Play
Recent widower, writer George Schneider, is encouraged by his younger brother Leo to start dating again. This sends George into even more depression after a series of bad matches. Then Leo comes up with Jennie Malone, and she's a keeper. Still, it's a bumpy trip on the road to Dreamland for these not-so-young lovers. George and Jennie stumble on, overcoming both their hesitation on the rebound and emotional neediness. In a hilarious, farcical subplot, Leo has a fling with Faye, Jennie's neurotic married friend.
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The Shadow BoxMichael Cristofer19771977 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, 1977 Tony Award for Best Play
In this compelling dramatic triptych, three terminal cancer patients dwell in separate cottages on a hospital's grounds. The three are attended and visited by family and close friends: Agnes and her mother Felicity, estranged further by the latter's dementia; Brian and Beverly, whose marital complications are exacerbated by Brian's new lover, Mark; and Joe and Maggie, unready for the strain of Joe's impending death and its effect on their teenage son.
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American BuffaloDavid Mamet1977
2022 Nominee Four Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Play; 1984 Nominee Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play
This volatile drama, which starred Robert Duvall in its original production, has been revived on Broadway several times,including productions starring Al Pacino and John Leguizamo. The 2022 Broadway revival features Laurence Fishburn, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss. In a Chicago junk shop, three small-time crooks plot to rob a man of his coin collection, the showpiece of which is a valuable “Buffalo nickel.” These high-minded grifters fancy themselves businessmen pursuing legitimate free enterprise. But Donny, the oafish junk shop owner, Bobby, a young junkie Donny has taken under his wing, and “Teach,” a violently paranoid braggart, are merely pawns caught up in their own game of last-chance, dead-end, empty pipe dreams.
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The Crazy Locomotive (the madman and the nun)
CS Druer, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Daniel Gerould
19771977 Obie Award
Startling discontinuities and surprises erupt throughout these avant-garde landscapes by Poland's outstanding modern dramatist where duchesses and policemen, gangsters and surrealist painters, psychiatrists and locomotive engineers wander in and out, kill one another, and carry on philosophical conversations at the same time.When a small band of outcasts and super villains hijack a locomotive engine, they determine to race it full-throttle into an oncoming train in order to experience the very Mystery of Existence, but will their high-speed adventure send them headlong into another dimension, or are they only heading for disaster? In a world full of disguises where nothing is what it seems and people change identities at the drop of a hat – who and what will survive the ultimate judgment? Combining the drama and thrill of pulp fiction and early cinema with the sensuality and suspense of the tango, The Crazy Locomotive will have audiences on the edge of their seats.
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Donkey's YearsMichael Frayn19762007 Olivier Award for Best Play
This zany, hilarious farce was a London hit and won the West End Theatre Best Comedy Award of the year. At a reunion dinner at a "lesser college" of an "older university" are a number of graduates now in their early forties and mostly in responsible, influential positions. All starts smoothly with conventional greetings and old boy reminiscences. A slightly discordant note is struck by Snell, a man of such insignificance that everyone has forgotten him, and continues to forget him from one moment to the next. As the night goes on, the college port causes behavior surprising in those in positions of political, academic or spiritual authority. Into the resulting bear garden stumbles Lady Driver, the Master's wife who is short sightedly searching for the lost love of her youth. The insignificant Snell sees in her the chance to make up for all the opportunities of undergraduate life he missed before.
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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf
Ntozake Shange1976
2022 Nominee Seven Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Play; 1977 Winner Obie Award for Distinguished Production; 1977 Nominee Two Tony Awards, including Best Play
Capturing the brutal, tender and dramatic lives of contemporary Black women, for colored girls... offers a transformative, riveting evening of provocative dance, music and poetry.
86
The Gin GameD.L. Coburn19761978 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
This winner of the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which originally starred Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn and was later revived with Julie Harris and Charles Durning, uses a card game as a metaphor for life. Weller Martin is playing solitaire on the porch of a seedy nursing home. Enter Fonsia Dorsey, a prim, self-righteous lady. They discover they both dislike the home and enjoy gin rummy, so they begin to play and to reveal intimate details of their lives. Fonsia wins every time, and their secrets become weapons used against one another. Weller longs for a victory to counter a lifetime of defeats, but it doesn’t happen. He leaves the stage a broken man, and Fonsia realizes her self-righteous rigidity has led to an embittered, lonely, old age.
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The RitzTerrence McNally19751975 Winner Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play
Terrence McNally’s hilarious farce is set in a gay bathhouse in the mid-1970s. When Gaetano Proclo, a hapless, middle-aged, overweight, very married man takes it on the lam from his mafioso brother-in-law, Carmine Vespucci, he ducks into “The Ritz” – the last place anyone would look for him. What he encounters there sets the scene for an old-fashioned, door-slamming farce, albeit with towel-clad men, bumbling detectives and Googie Gomez, an over-the-top, would-be Bette Midler looking for her big break.
88
Same Time, Next YearBernard Slade19751975 Nominee Tony Award for Best Play
One of the most popular romantic comedies of the century, Same Time, Next Year ran four years on Broadway, winning a Tony® Award for lead actress Ellen Burstyn, who later recreated her role in the successful motion picture. It remains one of the world’s most widely produced plays. The plot follows a love affair between two people, Doris and George, married to others, who rendezvous once a year. Twenty-five years of manners and morals are hilariously and touchingly played out by the lovers.
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The Taking of Miss JanieEd Bullins19751975 Obie Award for Playwriting and Direction
The Taking of Miss Janie tells the story of a decade as the youth of the 1970s undergo their individual experiences. Bullins's play presents a group of college students who struggle to find their place in society. While some of the characters face the problems of interpersonal relationships, others try to find a viable way to cause social and political change. Everyone begins the decade with hope, energy, and a sense of purpose; however, these qualities are quickly diffused as they each confront their personal responsibility for whatever change comes next.
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Sexual Perversity in ChicagoDavid Mamet19741976 Obie Award for Best New American Play
The Obie award-winning Sexual Perversity in Chicago "takes funny and painful digs at the fantasies and distances of the contemporary sexual game," according to The New York Times. Two male office workers, Danny and Bernie, are on the make in the swinging singles scene of the early 1970s. Danny meets Deborah in a library, and soon they are lovers as well as roommates. The other couple, Bernie and Joan, seem to have the politics of sex down pat, but are as confused as their more naive counterparts. After much comic drama, the two men end as they started, talking a good game in the local bar.
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Living TogetherAlan Ayckbourn19732009 Tony Award for Best Play
Annie, the Cinderella of the family, lives in the shabby Victorian vicarage type house where the family was brought up. Reg, her brother, and his wife Sarah come to stay for a week end so that she may go away for a "rest". The general idea is that Annie ought to pair off with Tom. But for this week end it is Norman, the raffish assistant librarian husband of Annie's sister Ruth, with whom she planned to go. They were to meet secretly but Norman turns up early. When Annie calls the whole thing off Norman decides to stay on at the house and gets roaring drunk.
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Round and Round the GardenAlan Ayckbourn19732009 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play
In this play, Sarah's desperate attempts to have a nice, civilized week end culminate, not surprisingly, in disaster. Ruth, Norman's wife, is summoned but Norman still contrives to cause havoc involving, finally, all three women. Matters are not helped by such events as the slow thinking Tom mistaking Ruth's intentions during a conversation they have together. Eventually the horrific week end draws to a close. The four visitors depart, but even at the last moment Norman manages, deliberately or not, to wreck all plans by driving his car into Reg's. Back they all troop, now facing having to stay. Norman finds himself spurned by all three women and is left protesting with injured innocence that he only meant to make everyone happy.
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Table MannersAlan Ayckbourn19732009 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play
In this play, Annie has arranged to spend an illicit weekend with her sister Ruth's husband Norman, and for this reason, suitably disguised, has asked her elder brother Reg and his wife Sarah to look after their widowed mother and the house. As it happens the seduction, thought or planned, by each of the six characters never takes place either.
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The River NigerJoseph A. Walker19731973 Winner three Tony Awards including Best Play
Originally performed by the Negro Ensemble Company and winner of the Obie and later the Tony Award as Best Play of the season, The River Niger is a surging drama about a Harlem family whose son returns from the Air Force not the hero anticipated. His association with a militant group abroad has been infiltrated by a police informer who brings the unrest of South Africa to their door.
95
DaHugh Leonard19731978 Winner Tony Award for Best Play
Middle-aged assimilated American Charlie returns home to his native Dublin to sort through and come to terms with his relationship to this thoroughly beguiling, maddening presence in his life: "Da." Reminiscence gives way to memory and illusion as an adolescent "Charlie Then" is brought back from the past, while the man who is "Charlie Now" grapples with his own mortality and the part of his life that will always be the irrasicible "Da." A great success in its original Broadway production, subsequent revivals have proven this play a classic.
96
The Karl Marx Play
Rochelle Owens and Galt MacDermot
19731973 Nominee Obie Award for Best New Play
From the author's note: "This play evolved out of investigations of the circumstances and events, factual and imaginary, of the life of Karl Marx... a man with a mission, surrounded by his loving, demanding, maddening family and friend, Frederick Engels."
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That Championship SeasonJason Miller1972
1973 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; 1973 winner two Tony Awards, including Best Play; 1973 nominee five Tony Awards
Following their annual custom, five men – a high-school basketball coach, now retired, and four members of the team that he guided to the state championship twenty years earlier – meet for a reunion. The occasion begins in a lighthearted mood but gradually, as the pathos and desperation of their present lives are exposed and illuminated, the play takes on a rich power of rare dimension.One former player is now the inept mayor of the town and facing a strong challenge for re-election. Another, the frustrated principal of the local high school, is his ambitious campaign manager. A third, now a successful (and destructive) bsinessman, is wavering in his financial support of the mayor, while the fourth is a witty but despairing alcoholic. As the evening progresses, all that these men were – and have become – is revealed and examined with biting humor and saving compassion. In the end, self-preservation, abetted by the unconscious cynicism and bigotry of their coach, draws them together. But they are lost, morally bankrupt men, holding onto fraudulent dreams that have poisoned their present lives, robbing them of a future that was once so rich in promise.
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Sticks and BonesDavid Rabe19711972 Tony Award for Best Play
A savagely comic portrait of an archetypal, middle class family – Ozzie, Harriet, David and Rick – falling apart. When David comes back from the war blinded, he is pursued by furies that haunt him. Wanting to return their son to normal, Ozzie offers camaraderie, while Harriet cooks and bakes the foods he once loved, and shares her faith in her beloved religion. But David grows even more vengeful. Ozzie feels the foundation of his world crumbling. In a darkly hilarious scene, a Catholic priest called in to give his blessing is, ingeniously, rebuffed by David. Finally, Ozzie and Harriet break under the pressure, for it seems David is about to turn their home into his nightmare. It's up to guitar-playing, fudge-eating Rick to save the day and allow the family to return to their cherished status quo with a tidy, ritualistic atrocity all their own.
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Old TimesHarold Pinter19712013 Nominee Olivier Award for Best Revival of a Play
"What am I writing about? Not the weasel under the cocktail cabinet ... I can sum up none of my plays. I can describe none of them, except to say: that is what happened. This is what they said. That is what they did." - Harold Pinter. Deeley and his wife Kate are visted by Anna, an old friend of Kate's, who they haven't seen in over 20 years. Anna launches into recollecting memories of concerts and other bohemian haunts the two women shared while young and living together in London. When the memories become more than just stories and prove to be a tool to vie for Kate's attention, Deeley also begins to bring up stories that are almost too clear to be true. However it's Kate's memory that gives the play it's shocking conclusion.
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Approaching SimoneMegan Terry19701969 Obie Award for Best Play
Simone Weil, a French girl of Jewish extraction whose death in 1943 was caused primarily by self-imposed starvation, is the subject of this striking theatrical exploration into the nature of faith and spirituality. Approaching Simone gives fascinating insights into this extraordinary woman who was later canonized as a saint.