American Plays

R to S by playwright

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.

9 Parts of Desire
Heather Raffo
A portrait of the extraordinary (and ordinary) lives of a whole cross-section of Iraqi women: a sexy painter, a radical communist, doctors, exiles, wives and lovers. This book delves into the many conflicting aspects of what it means to be a woman in the age-old war zone that is Iraq. An unusually timely meditation on the ancient, the modern and the feminine in a country overshadowed by war. 9 Parts of Desire can be performed as a one-woman show or with a cast of three to nine women. Softcover, 78 pp. $10.99.

The Ice-Breaker
David Rambo
Both a science play and a love story, intellectual and romantic sparks fly when geologist Sonia Milan, a brilliant Ph.D. candidate, tracks down her mentor, Lawrence Blanchard, in seclusion in the desert Southwest. She's at a professional and personal crossroads, and wants to play a role in explaining the rapidly changing planet. He wants nothing more to do with climate science, but she persists. When the wine, firewood and night are all gone, Sonia has made unexpected discoveries, and Lawrence has confronted the past. Their world has changed, and they have to decide what to do about it. Softcover, 52 pp. $10.99.

The Lady With All the Answers
David Rambo
"Dear Ann Landers" ... For decades, renowned advice columnist Ann Landers answered countless letters from lovelorn teens, confused couples and a multitude of others in need of advice. No topic was off-limits, including nude housekeeping, sex in a motorcycle helmet, the proper way to hang toilet paper, sibling rivalries, addiction, religion and wandering spouses. Landers regaled her readers with direct, insightful and often humorously honest responses. Late on a 1975 night in Landers' Chicago apartment, an ironic twist of events confronts her with a looming deadline for a column dealing with a new kind of heartbreak: her own. As she shares her struggles to complete the column with us, we learn as much about ourselves as we do about the wise, funny, no-nonsense woman whose daily dialogue with America helped shape the social and sexual landscapes of the last half-century. 1W. Softcover, 32 pp. $10.99.

Three Plays: Night of January 16th, Ideal, Think Twice
Ayn Rand
Published together for the first time, here are Ayn Rand's three compelling stage plays. Written in 1933, and a Broadway success in 1935, Night of January 16th is presented here in it's definitive, final revised text -- a superb dramatic objectification of Ayn Rand's vision of human strength and weakness, a play famous for the author's refusal to prearrange a dramatized verdict, leaving the solution to the audience. Also included are two of Rand's unproduced plays: Think Twice (1939), a philisophical murder mystery, and Ideal (1934), the author's bitter indictment of people's willingness to betray their highest values, symbolized by a Hollywood goddess seemingly fleeing the authorities. Softcover, 291 pp. $12.99.

Almost Blue
Keith Reddin
Almost Blue is a stage noir set in a seedy rooming house. A man just out of prison trying to stay straight, a strange loner down the hall who writes pornographic greeting cards, a violent ex-con who wants to settle old scores. And of course, the beautiful woman in trouble, who messes with everybody's head. Written in a series of brutal, funny encounters, Almost Blue is a journey into the dark night, full of plot twists and sultry exchanges. Softcover, 47 pp. $10.99.

All the Rage
Keith Reddin
A blood-splattered body lies on the living room carpet at the start of All the Rage. By the end of this examination of our culture of violence, eleven characters have been killed, sent to prison or gone mad. Yes, All the Rage is a comedy. The action takes place in unnamed city today, in a series of scenes that show the interconnected lives of ten characters. They all come in contact and set a chain of violent events in motion. A modern-day Jacobean Revenge Tragedy, All the Rage gives us a picture of a world spinning out of control, as everybody has a gun and is ready to use it. 8M, 2W. Softcover, 75 pp. $10.99.

String Fever
Jacquelyn Reingold
In this comedy, Lily juggles the big issues: turning fourty, artificial insemination and the elusive scientific Theory of Everything. Lily's world includes an Icelandic comedian, her wisecracking best friend, a cat-loving physicist, her no-longer-suicidal father and an ex-boyfriend who carries around a chair. With language that is surprising, inventive and unique, String Fever is an appealing comedy populated by oddball characters. 3M, 3W. Softcover, 53 pp. $9.99.

La Gringa
Carmen Rivera
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. Once there, 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. Softcover, 84 pp. $13.99.

White People
J.T. Rogers
White People is a controversial and darkly funny play about the lives of three ordinary Americans placed under the spotlight: Martin, a Brooklyn-born high powered attorney for a white-shoe law firm in St. Louis, MO; Mara Lynn, a housewife and former homecoming queen in Fayetteville, NC; and Alan, a young professor struggling to find his way in New York City. Through heart-wrenching confessions, they wrestle with guilt, prejudice, and the price they and their children must pay for their actions. Softcover, 37 pp. $10.99.

Madagascar
J.T. Rogers
Madagascar is the haunting story of a mysterious disappearance that changes three lives forever. At three periods in time, three Americans find themselves alone, in the same hotel room overlooking the Spanish Steps in Rome: June, a young woman who works as a tour guide of the city's ancient ruins; Lilian, her wealthy, elegant jet-setting mother; and Nathan, a rumpled university economist and the best friend of Lilian's famous deceased husband. They each tell their individual story of how and why they are here. Their relationship to each other, what this room means to them, and why they have been called to it slowly reveal themselves. Their stories spill out, weave back and forth, becoming strands of one disquieting tale. 1M, 2W (doubling). Softcover, 43 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.

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.

Twelve Angry Men
Reginald Rose
A blistering character study and an examination of the American melting pot and the judicial system that keeps it in check, Twelve Angry Men holds at its core a deeply patriotic faith in the U.S. legal system. The play centres around Juror Eight, who is at first the lone holdout in an 11-1 guilty verdict. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong, but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by personal prejudices or bias. Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture of them, and of America at its best and worse, to emerge. Softcover, 75 pp. $13.50.

Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead
Bert V. Royal
When CB's dog dies from rabies, CB begins to question the existence of an afterlife. His best friend is too burnt out to provide any coherent speculation; his sister has gone goth; his ex-girlfriend has recently been institutionalized; and his other friends are too inebriated to give him any sort of solace. But a chance meeting with an artistic kid, the target of this group's bullying, offers CB a peace of mind and sets in motion a friendship that will push teen agnst to the very limits. Drug use, suicide, eating disorders, teen violence, rebellion and sexual identity collide and careen toward an ending that's both haunting and hopeful. 4M, 4W. Softcover, 51 pp. $10.99.

Mr. Charles, Currently of Palm Beach
Paul Rudnick
This acclaimed one act focuses on Mr. Charles -- the most joyously, fiercely, politically incorrect creature imaginable -- who confronts his audience with such provocative questions as: "What causes homosexuality?" Together, with his hunky partner Shane, he confronts every hot-button topic from gay marriage to the history of gay theatre, finally delving into the highest matters of identity and flamboyance. M-2. Softcover, $9.99.

Valhalla
Paul Rudnick
Valhalla intertwines two stories: the life of Ludwig of Bavaria, the 1880s Mad King responsible for building a series of storybook castles inspired by Wagnerian operas, and the fictional adventures of James Avery, a wild Texas teenager of the 1940s. These two iconoclasts are tracked from childhood through their deaths, and while they embody separate eras, they are ultimately revealed as time-traveling soul mates. M-4, F-2, doubling. Softcover, 76 pp. $9.99.

Dead Man's Cell Phone
Sarah Ruhl
A hallucinatory poetic fantasy play that blends the mundane and the metaphysical, the blunt and the obscure. As Dead Man's Cell Phone takes surprising twists and leaps, the lament for the supposed coziness of pre-digital culture takes on layers of nuance and contradiction. In Ruhl's new play, a woman is forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world. Softcover, 104 pp. $15.95.

The Clean House & Other Plays
Sarah Ruhl
This volume is the first collection of Sarah Ruhl's work. In the award-winning Clean House - a play of uncommon romance and unique comedy - a maid, who hates cleaning, has dreams of creating the perfect joke. This volume also includes Eurydice, Melancholy Play and Late: a cowboy song. Softcover, 411 pp. $25.00.

Cavedweller
Kate Moira Ryan
Adapted from the best-selling novel by Dorothy Allison, Cavedweller follows Delia Byrd, the forty-year-old lead singer of the "Mud Dog" whose rock-star boyfriend has just died in an accident, as she decides to leave Los Angeles and return home to rural Georgia with her teenage daughter, Cissy. M-2, F-6 (doubling). Softcover, 69 pp. $9.99.

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The Last Word ...
Oren Safdie
Henry Grunwald is a Viennese Jew who fled the Nazis and became a successful New York advertising executive. Now retired and nearly blind, Henry is determined to fulfill his lifelong dream of being a playwright. When young Len Artz, also an aspiring playwright, applies for a position as Henry's assistant, their job interview quickly expands into a fierce and intellectual debate, with Henry as the avid advocate of Eurocentrism and Len as the impassioned defender of experimentalism. This smart two-hander is a thought-provoking comedy about loyalty, dreams and the fear of failure. Softcover, 45 pp. $11.99.

Land O'Fire
Luis Santeiro
Land O'Fire is an insightful and often humorous examination of life interfered with and forever changed by association with a "superior" culture. Softcover, 60 pp. $10.99.

Jerome Bixby's "Man from Earth"
Richard Schenkman
After history professor John Oldman unexpectedly resigns from the University, his startled colleagues impulsively invite themselves to his home, pressing him for an explanation. But they're shocked to hear his reason for premature retirement: he claims that he must move on because he is immortal, and cannot stay in one place for more than ten years without his secret being discovered. M-6, F-3. Softcover, 65 pp. $11.99.


What Makes Sammy Run?
Budd Schulberg
Softcover, 303 pp. $33.00.

Everything Will Be Different: A Brief History of Helen of Troy
Mark Schultz
Teenage Charlotte's beautiful mother is dead, and in the midst of her own grief and her father's unwillingness to cope, she turns for comfort to the story of Helen of Troy, convinced that beauty, desire and fame can help her bring her mother back and punish the world that took her away in the first place. M-4, F-2. Softcover, 63 pp. $9.99.

God's Ear
Jenny Schwartz
Throught the skillfully disarming use of cliched language and homilies, this inventive and carefully crafted drama explores with subtle grace and depth thew way the death of a child tears one family apart, while at the same time showcasing the talents of a promising young writer. Softcover, 158 pp. $16.50.

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.

Dirty Story and Other Plays
John Patrick Shanley
This collection of plays by Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Patrick Shanley includes Where's My Money?, Sailor's Song, and Dirty Story. Softcover, 180 pp. $24.95.

Defiance
John Patrick Shanley
Defiance is set on a United States Marine Corps base in North Carolina in 1971. Two officers, one black and one white, are on a collision course over race, women and the high cost of doing the right thing. This new work is about power, love and responsibility - who has it, who wants it and who deserves it. 5M, 1W. Softcover, 58 pp. $10.99.

Sailor's Song
John Patrick Shanley
Sailor's Song is an extravagant romantic seaside story decorated with dance. In the tradition of Gene Kelly and Eugene O'Neill, who should have worked together but never did, this stylistically daring love story give us a cynical man and a true believer who battle over beautiful women and the power of love. M-2, F-3 (doubling). Softcover, 43 pp. $9.99.

Doubt
John Patrick Shanley
John Patrick Shanley's riveting new play is a provocative parable about truth and consequences, set in St. Nicholas, a Catholic church and school in the Bronx. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, Doubt raises more questions than it answers, and it will leave the thoughtful reader with much to ponder long after they've raced through its 58 engrossing pages. Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. M-1, F-3. Softcover, 58 pp. $18.95.

13 by Shanley
John Patrick Shanley
Thirteen short, thought provoking plays by the author of Moonstruck. $16.95.

The Fever
Wallace Shawn
While visiting a poverty-striken country far from home, the unnamed narrator of The Fever is forced to consider the political persecution that may be occurring just beyond a traveller's hotel window. By doing this, a pampered conscience is awakened in a profoundly dramatic way. The Fever is an eloquent meditation on whether it's possible to live in an ethical relationship with others in the world. Softcover, 67 pp. $17.95.

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.

Kicking A Dead Horse
Sam Shepard
Hobart Struther has ridden into the middle of nowhere, on a holy mission, only to have his horse choke to death miles away from civilization. As Hobart examines his life he digs deep into his own history, unearthing truths about his past while still struggling to find the answers he needs. Kicking a Dead Horse is an invigorating addition to the works of, one of America's most innovative playwrights. Softcover, 67 pp. $13.95.

The God of Hell
Sam Shepard
Frank and Emma are a quiet, respectable couple who raise cows on their Wisconsin farm. Soon after they agree to put up Frank's old friend Haynes, who is on the lam from a secret government project involving plutonium, they're visited by Welch, an unctous government bureaucrat from hell. His aggressive patriotism puts the trio on the defensive, transforming a heartland American household into a scene of torture and promoting a radioactive brand of conformity with a dangerously long half life. M-3, F-1. Softcover, 98 pp. $17.00.

Great Dream of Heaven: Stories
Sam Shepard
In these eighteen terse stories Sam Shepard is at his best, exercising his gifts for diamond-sharp physical description and effortless dialogue in stories that recall the themes he has explored with such singular intensity in his work for the theatre. Hardcover, 142 pp., $30.00.

Tooth of Crime (Second Dance)
Sam Shepard
In Tooth of Crime, an aging rock star exists in a world in which entertainment and street warfare go hand in hand. Hoss must defend himself against Crow, a newcomer who battles him for fame. Combining musical styles and intense dialogue in an unconventional musical fantasy, Sam Shepard's thrillingly innovative rock drama riffs eloquently on rising stars and fading legends, and rock lived and died for. Softcover, 96 pp. $17.00.

Buried Child
Sam Shepard
A sense of madness greets Vince and his girlfriend as they arrive at the squalid farmhouse of Vince's hard-drinking grandparents, who seem to have no idea who he is. Nor does his father, Tilden, a hulking former All-American football player, or his uncle, who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw. Only the memory of an unwanted child, buried in an undisclosed location, can hope to deliver this family from its sin. M-5, F-2. Softcover, 120 pp. $17.00.

Love and Happiness
Julian Sheppard
A fast-paced comedy with something for the whole family and with a little extra for fans of Arthur Murray, Leibniz and the NRA. This play tells the story of sixteen-year-old Allen and his attempt to end his mother's relationship with a new man, which propells him through a series of events and dissapointments that will either ruin his life or reunite him with his mother like they have never been before. Softcover, 48 pp. $10.99.

Things We Want
Jonathan Marc Sherman
A dirty, sexy suicide comedy. Three adult brothers are living together once again in their childhood apartment, struggling to redefine themselves while pursuing their desires and coping with the void left behind by their parents' deaths. Drastic shifts in their dynamics occur after a neighbor names Stella ecomes a part of their lives. A sweet and sour look at the illusions we have about what makes us happy -- and what is within our power to change. Softcover, 57 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.

Beautiful Child
Nicky Silver
Harry and Nan's lives are turned upside down when their adult son, Issac, comes home and reveals a secret. An art teacher and painter, Issac has fallen in love and is having an affair with one of his students -- an 8-year-old boy named Brian. Beautiful Child is a cheerfully demented examination of love and morality. M-2, F-3. Softcover, 52 pp. $9.99.

The Collected Plays of Neil Simon
Volume IV
Neil Simon
Includes: Rumors; Lost in Yonkers; Jake's Women; Laughter on the 23rd Floor; London Suite. $21.00.

Work Song: Three Views of Frank Lloyd Wright
Eric Simonson & Jeffrey Hatcher
In this new play about the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, audiences get a good look at the master builder at three distinct phases of his life and career. Each part of the play has its own style: a multi-scene "epic" style covering three decades of part one; a compressed "country weekend" comedy a la Chekhov for part two; and a single setting for part three's final encounter between Wright and a young couple living in one of his earliest houses built half a century before, played out in real time. The play also allows for a development in the play's design that mirrors the architectural ideas of Wright himself. WORK SONG is about a man who wanted to create the perfect home for the American family but could never build one for himself. 6M, 2W (4 extras). Softcover, 83 pp. $10.99.

House Arrest & Piano: Two Plays
Anna Devere Smith
In the provocative and, at times, bitterly funny play House Arrest, Smith examines the relationships between a succession of American presidents and their observers in and out of the press. In Piano, Smith casts her gaze back a century as she follows the tangled lines of race, sex and exploitation in a prosperous Cuban household on the eve of the Spanish-American War. House Arrest Various Characters; Piano 8M, 6W. Softcover, 281 pp. $20.00.

The Farnsworth Invention
Aaron Sorkin
It's 1929. Two ambitious visionaries race against each other to invent a device called "television." Separated by two thousand miles, each knows that if he stops working, even for a moment, the other will gain the edge. Who will unlock the key to the greatest innovation of the 20th century: the ruthless media mogul, or the self-taught Idaho farm boy? Softcover, 101 pp. $11.99.

Direct from Death Row the Scottsboro Boys
Mark Stein
Despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the nine Scottsboro Boys were arrested and convicted for the rape of two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931. Putting on their own vaudeville show, The Scottsboro Boys use songs, a magic act, a ventriloquist act, skits and soft shoe to convey the tawdry show that their case became. M-7, F-2 (flexible casting). Softcover, 73 pp. $9.99.

Underpants
Carl Sternheim & Steve Martin
Steve Martin's hilarious reinterpretation of Carl Sternheim's 1910 comedy, is scathing examination of our fascination with fame, our reliance on gender roles, and our enslavement by sex. M-4, F-2. Softcover, 152 pp. $15.95.

Rock 'N' Roll
Tom Stoppard
Rock 'n' Roll spans the years from 1968 to 1990 from the double perspective of Prague, where a rock 'n' roll band comes to symbolise resistance to the Communist regime, and of Cambridge where the verities of love and death are shaping the lives of three generations in the family of a Marxist philosopher. Softcover, 118 pp. $22.95.

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.

Deflowering Waldo
Adam Szymkowicz
Waldo is having a bad day, He's afraid of crowds, spiders, skyscrapers, flowers, brown soap and sex. His father won't stop being Scottish. His therapist wants to seduce him. His ex-girlfriend could spontaneously combust at any moment. And the new woman in his life seems to want something else completely. Will he manage to find true love - or at least mow the lawn? 2M, 4W. Softcover, 39 pp. $10.99.

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Last modified December 28, 2009.
Please note that all prices are in Canadian dollars. All prices are subject to change without notice.