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American Plays: New & Featured
TheatreBooks stocks plays in English from around the world and, of course, all
plays published in Canada. We stock and sell plays from Samuel French Ltd., Dramatists Play Service and Dramatic Publishing Co., and the leading play publishers
in Great Britain. We carry books on all aspects of theatre production, as well
as opera and dance.
If you don't find the title or playwright you are looking for, please stop by the
store and ask, or contact us at action@theatrebooks.com,
by phone at 416.922.7175, toll-free at 1.800.361.3414 or by fax at 416.922.0739.
 A House Not Meant to Stand
Tennessee Williams
Christmas 1982: Cornelius and Bella McCorkle of Pascagoula, Mississippi, return one stormy midnight from the funeral of their elder son to a house and a life literally falling apart -- daughter Joanie is in an asylum and their younger son Charlie is upstairs having sex with his pregnant, holy-roller girlfriend as the McCorkles enter. In this dark, expressionistic comedy, what he calls his "Southern Gothic Spook Sonata," Williams brilliantly chronicles the fragile state of out world. Softcover, 95 pp. $14.95.
 The Travelling Companion and Other Plays
Tennessee Williams
Collected here for the first time, these twelve plays by Tennessee Williams embrace what Time magazine called "the four major concerns of Williams' dramatic imagination: loneliness, love, the violated heart and the valiency of survival." Softcover, 311 pp. $17.95.
 Six Years
Sharr White
It is 1949 when Phil Granger finally reappears in the small Missouri town he left six years earlier for the unspeakable horrors of World War II. His wife, Meredith, is there to meet him, put him back together...and keep him home. In five scenes spanning twenty-four years of postwar life, Sharr White takes us on an intimate journey to an unspoken side of the Greatest Generation, chronicling Meredith and Phil Granger's struggles to survive together through the boom of the 1950s, the hope and unbearable losses of the 1960s, and the resounding search for redemption following the Vietnam war. Softcover, 61 pp. $11.99.
 Radio Golf
August Wilson
Set in 2997 in a storefront redevelopment office in Pittsburgh's Hill District, Radio Golf is the concluding play in August Wilson's monumental ten-play cycle chronicling African American life during the twentieth century. This bittersweet drama of assimilation and alienation in nineties America traces the forces of change on a neighborhood and its people caught between history and the twenty-first century. Softcover, 81 pp. $15.95.
 Bad Boy Nietzsche! and other plays
Richard Foreman
Richard Foreman has been leading the theatrical avant-garde in the United States and throughout the world since 1968, when he founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theater Company. This volume of plays includes: Bad Boy Nietzsche!, Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty!, Maria del Bosco, Bad Behavior, Panic! (How to Be Happy!) and King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe. Softcover, 237 pp. $19.95.
 The Little Dog Laughed
Douglas Carter Beane
Yes, we love the cinema for its great auteurs, its glorious faces and its daring images. But in this tabloid age where big stars go on Oprah and jump around like heartsick schoolboys, what we really love is all that dish! The players in Douglas Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed include a hard-driving Hollywood agent, her budding screen idol client, a sexy young drifter, and the drifter's naive, needy girlfriend. Softcover, 54 pp. $10.99.
 A Body of Water
Lee Blessing
Moss and Avis, an attractive middle-aged couple wake up one morning in an isolated summer house high above a picturesque body of water. The weather's fine, the view's magnificent. There's only one problem - neither of them can remember who they are. When a young woman named Wren arrives, information starts to flood in. But will it help? Her explanations seem only to make Moss and Avis's world - as well as ours - more terrifying. Softcover, 51 pp. $10.99.
 Flag Day
Lee Blessing
A play in two plays, Flag Day examines white/black relations in our society with an unblinking eye. The first play, Good Clean Fun, is a darkly funny office commedy pitting two workers - one black, one white - against each other as they try to complete a high-pressure project. The office racism intensifies as we learn that one of them has stolen the other's wife. The second, Down and Dirty, evokes recent white-on-black and black-on-white killings in the American South. In a style poised carefully on the edge of absurdism, we discover a man dying in a car's windshield as people argue over whether or not to save him. Softcover, 47 pp. $10.99.
 Dying City
Christopher Shinn
A year after her husband's death in Iraq, Kelly, a young therapist, confronts his identical twin brother, who shows up at her apartment unannounced. Softcover, 42 pp. $10.99.
 The Overwhelming
J.T. Rogers
As a middle-aged American academic who desperately needs to publish a book in order to gain tenure, Jack Exley leaps at the chance to go to Rwanda to write about his old college classmate Dr. Joseph Gasanam, who in the intervening years has specialized in treating children stricken by AIDS. But when Jack arrives in Kigali in early 1994, he is not only unable to find Joseph, he is unable to find anyone who will even admit to having known the Tutsi doctor. Jack and his family slowly become enmeshed in the tension and terror, the professional risks and personal betrayals, that they ultimately realize mamrk the start of a genocidal war - a horror that they can sense is coming but cannot comprehend or control. M-14, F-3. Softcover, 137 pp. $16.00.
 The Voysey Inheritance
Harley Granville-Barker & David Mamet
For generations, the Voysey family business has been secretly skimming money from its clients' accounts. When Edward, designated to take over the firm from his aging father, discovers the embezzlement that has been keeping his relatives in a life of luxury, he must weigh the trappings of wealth and the imperative to preserve his family's good name against the better principles of his conscience. But moral righteousness turns to self-protection when he comes to understand fully the consequences of his "inheritance." One hundred years after the first publication of The Voysey Inheritance, David Mamet resurrects Harley Granville-Barker's classic investigation into the capitalist soul in this brilliant adaptation. Softcover, 58 pp. $10.99.
 The Rules of Charity
John Belluso
Loretta thinks she is a machine. Her father, Monty, seeks independence and a place in history. Will Loretta learn the secret she needs to hear? Will Monty forgive her for a slap across the face that broke the rules? A play about the body, love and contradiction. Softcover, 58 pp. $10.99.
 Almost, Maine
John Cariani
On a cold, clear, moonless night in the middle of winter, all is not quite what it seems in the remote, mythical town of Almost, Maine. As the northern lights hover in the star-filled sky above, Almost's residents find themselves falling in and out of love in unexpected and often hilarious ways. Knees are bruised. Hearts are broken. But the bruises heal, and the hearts mend - almost - in this delightful midwinter night's tale. Softcover, 75 pp. $10.99.
 Beauty of the Father
Nilo Cruz
This play by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Nilo Cruz is set in Andalusia, Spain, where the restless ghost of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca still wanders the streets and converses with the living. Beauty of the Father is about a young American girl who travels to this part of the world to meet her estranged father and becomes romantically involved with his Moroccan companion. This passionate triangle explores the conflict between love and sacrifice. Softcover, 52 pp. $10.99.
 Bhutan
Daisy Foote
Bhutan follows a New England family's ups and downs after the death of their father. Frances wonders how she ended up here. Her mother is driving her crazy. Her aunt is stalking a married man. Her brother is in prison. She dreams of Bhutan but can barely find the kitchen door. Softcover, 46 pp. $10.99.
 Doubt, A Parable
John Patrick Shanley
In this brilliant and powerful drama, Sister Aloysius, a Bronx school principal, takes matters into her own hands when she suspects the young Father Flynn of improper relations with one of the male students. Softcover, 54 pp. $10.99.
 Five Course Love
Gregg Coffin
Three actors play fifteen different characters in five different restaurants on the hunt for one true love. The evening begins at Dean's Old-Fashioned All-American Down-Home Bar-B-Que Texas Eats, where a blind date goes charbroiled wrong. One after another, each couple at each restaurant have their turn, and come what may, the results are both humorous and touching. Softcover, 53 pp. $10.99.
 Food For Fish
Adam Szymkowicz
Bobbie drops the pages from his novel into the Hudson River. They tell the story of three sisters: Sylvia, Barbara, and Alice, who are going to bury their father - when they get around to it. Meanwhile, Bobbie goes out each night kissing strangers, and Sylvia goes out each night looking for Bobbie. A story of unrequited love, missed connections and a novel in a bottle. Softcover, 67 pp. $10.99.
 Nerve
Adam Szymkowicz
Nerve is a dark comedy about falling into a relationship on the first date. Elliot has never had an online date before...at least not one that showed up. Susan has had far too many but would prefer not to discuss them. When they meet in a bar one night, all their personality flaws are revealed, along with a puppet, some modern dance and a desperation that may or may not be love. Softcover, 41 pp. $10.99.
 Fran's Bed
James Lapine
Fran's Bed asks the question: What constitutes life? As Fran lies comatose in a hospital room, her husband and two daughters are forced to decide her fate, but in so doing, discover things about her and about themselves that they might have preferred to leave unexamined. The play, told with wit and compassion, does not simplify the intellectual, political and emotional issue of a person's right to life. Softcover, 60 pp. $10.99.
 Levittown
Marc Palmieri
When Kevin returns early from yet another college, he learns that his deeply troubled sister is about to be married. With renewed hope, he attempts to reconcile his family with the abusive father who left them years before. Amidst the thin walls of their Levittown home, the members of this beleaguered family are forced to confront a concealed history, the self-destructive nature that has plagued them for generations, and the failure of faiths onto which they have desperately held. Softcover, 58 pp. $10.99.
 A Nervous Smile
John Belluso
A wealthy New York couple, strained to the breaking point by caring for their severely disabled daughter, Emily, weigh their own happiness against that of their child - with shocking consequences. Emily's lyrical poetry, the couple's disintegrating marriage, and the appraisals of the outside world frame the narrative of this insightful play. A Nervous Smile is a brutal portrait of love, lust and despair set against Belluso's fiery brand of social satire. Softcover, 37 pp. $10.99.
 On The Line
Joe Roland
Three lifelong friends take on management, the union and ultimately each other when a strike wreaks havoc on their working-class town. Along the way they have to negotiate mobs of angry first graders, bat-wielding bartenders, no-neck corporate shills and the North American Free Trade Agreement. Lines are drawn, crossed and double crossed in the raw, powerful and often hilarious story about loyalty, love and the crippling power of unbending principles. Softcover, 50 pp. $10.99.
 Pig Farm
Greg Kotis
On a struggling pig farm, Tom and Tina (with the help of Tim, their hired hand) fight to hold onto everything they own - namely, a heard of fifteen thousand restless pigs. Dumping sludge into the river has driven Tom to drink, and Tim seems to have caught Tina's eye, but when Teddy, a gun-toting officer of the Environmental Protection Agency arrives to inspect the operation, life on the farm explodes, implodes, then explodes again. Not literally, of course, but...you get the idea. From the quirky and comical mind that brought you Urinetown. Softcover, 63 pp. $10.99.
 A Place at Forest Lawn
James Bontempo & Luke Yankee
Friendship is the tie that binds in this bittersweet and candid look at remembered love, forgotten promises, living with choices and dying with dignity. The play follows the reconciliation of Clara, a cantankerous old lady, and her devoted best friend, Gertrude. A Place at Forest Lawn surprises with humour, comforts with insight and charms with intriguing characters. Softcover, 53 pp. $10.99.
 Savages
Anne Nelson
Based on a true story, Savages takes place in 1903, a few years after the United States invaded the Philippines to free them from the Spanish colonial rule. But American troops now finds themselves fighting a long, costly war against the people they originally came to liberate. Anne Nelson treats all of her characters with sympathy and touches of humour. The play's fusion of meticulously researched U.S. military history with Asian mysticism yields a spellbinding vision of war and its casualties. Softcover, 67 pp. $10.99.
 The Treatment
Eve Ensler
This two-character drama delves into the layers of power, fear and intimacy that exist between a traumatized soldier (and former military interrogator) and the female psychologist colonel who is assigned to give him routine treatment. The Treatment is a blunt exploration of torture, accountability and a soldier's "duty" to commit atrocities in the name of democracy. Softcover, 33 pp. $10.99.
 When The World Was Green (A Chef's Fable)
Joseph Chaikin & Sam Shepard
A hauntingly lyrical memory play, When The World Was Green is steeped in the elliptical, poetic style for which Shepard is justly celebrated. With only two characters, an old man who was once a superb chef, and a young reporter who comes to interview him in the prison where he has been locked up for many years after poisoning a man he mistook for his cousin. Softcover, 34 pp. $10.99.
 Wrecks and Other Plays
Neil LaBute
Can someone honestly love a person they have deceived for thirty years? This is the central question behind Wrecks, Neil LaBute's latest foray into the dark side of human nature. Meet Edward Carr: adoring father, successful businessman, grieving widower. In this concise powerhouse of a play, LaBute limns the boundaries of love, exploring the extent of what society will accept as opposed to what the heart will desire. This volume also features a collection of rarely staged short plays, including Liars Club, Coax, and Falling in Like. Softcover, 123 pp. $17.50.
 4 Plays by Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, The Emporor Jones and The Hairy Ape are the four plays that make up this quartet of classic plays by Eugene O'Neill. They are testament to the unique and extraordinary talent of America's greatest modern dramatist. Softcover, 317 pp. $8.99.
 Christmas Belles
Nicholas Hope, Jessie Jones & Jamie Wooten
A church Christmas program spins hilariously out of control in this Southern farce about squabbling sisters, family secrets, a surly Santa, a vengeful sheep and a reluctant Elvis impersonator. Softcover, 60 pp. $10.99.
 Luminescence Dating
Carey Perloff
Luminescence Dating is a thriller about a lost statue, a lost son, an ancient mystery and a love affair between two desperately mismatched people. Angela Hart has spent the better part if her career searching for a voluptuous naked Aphrodite sculpted by Praxiteles in the fourth century B.C.E. and has lost to history. Ultimately the statue is never found, but the heat generated by the search yields its own delicious rewards! Softcover, 56 pp. $10.99.
 The Moment When
James Lapine
The Moment When follows five people as their lives intertwine and seperate. Steven, an artist, meets the writer Alice at a fashionable New York party hosted by Paula, a legendary literary agent. Paula's young assistant, Dana, introduces herself to Alice and Steven, and the courses of the next fifteen years of their lives are set in motion. The play marks those moments in our lives that may pass unnoticed, but determine who we become. Softcover, 63 pp. $10.99.
 Sherlock Holmes: The Final Adventure
Steven Dietz
The world's greatest detective has seemingly reached the end of his remarkable career when a case presents itself that is too tempting to ignore. The King of Bohemia is about to be blackmailed about a notorious photograph, and the woman at the heart of this crime is the famous opera singer, Irene Adler. In this spirited, fast-moving adaptation, Steven Dietz presents Holmes at the height of his powers - surrounded by all the elements that fans of his exploits have come to expect: danger, intrigue, wit, humour and surprise. Softcover, 67 pp. $10.99.
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