American Plays

M to Q 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.

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.

Romance
David Mamet
It's hay fever season, and in a courtroom a judge is popping antihistamines. He listens to the testimony of a Jewish chiropractor, who's a liar, according to his anti-Semitic defense attorney. The prosecutor, a homosexual, is having a domestic squabble with his lover, who shows up in court in a leopard-print thong. And all the while, a Middle East peace conference is taking place. Masterfully wielding the argot of the courtroom, David Mamet creates a world in microcosm is which shameless fawing, petty prejudices, and sheer caprice hold sway, and the noble apparatus of law and order denegrates into riotous profanity. M-7. Softcover, 54 pp. $10.99.

Faustus
David Mamet
Known for his edgy contemporary writing style, David Mamet has brought his own perspective to the classic tragedy of Faustus. Like Marlowe's and Goethe's before him, Mamet's Faustus is a philosopher whose life's work has been the persuit of "the secret engine of the world". Mamet has fashioned a work that is at once caustic and heart-wrenching, and whose language marries the metaphysics of the traditional play to con man's patter. M4, W1. Softcover, 48 pp. $10.99.

Boston Marriage
David Mamet
From one of America's most revered and provocative dramatists comes this droll comedy of errors set in a Victorian drawing room which features an all female cast of three -- a first for the dramatist. $20.95.

Other Plays by David Mamet

• The Cabin -- $18.00
• Cryptogram -- Paperback, $14.95; Acting edition, $9.99
• Glengarry Glen Ross -- $18.50
• Goldberg Street -- $21.95
• The Old Neighborhood -- $14.00
• Oleanna $14.95.
• Reunion & Dark Pony -- $13.95
• Sexual Perversity in Chicago and The Duck Variations $19.95.
• Speed the Plow -- $21.50
• We're No Angels -- $12.00
• The Woods; Lakeboat; and Edmond -- $20.00

Screenplays by Mamet

• 5 Television Plays by Mamet -- $20.00
• Homicide -- $15.50
• House of Games -- $17.00
• The Spanish Prisoner -- $32.95
• State and Main -- $28.95

Mamet on Acting, Directing, Theatre and Film...

• The Chinaman: Poems -- $27.99
• David Mamet in Conversation -- $27.95
• Make-Believe Town: Essays and Remembrances --$15.95
• On Directing Film -- $18.99
• Three Uses of the Knife -- $14.95
• True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor -- $17.00
• Writing in Restaurants -- $16.99

On Mamet

• How Good is David Mamet, Anyway? -- $37.99
• Gender & Genre: Essays on David Mamet - by C. Hudgins, $69.95
• Weasels & Wisemen: Ethics and Ethnicity in the Work of David Mamet by Leslie Kane

Brooklyn Boy
Donald Margulies
Funny and moving, in equal measures, Brooklyn Boy is a superbly crafted tale about looking back -- not with misty-eyed nostalgia, but with a lucid sense of the present tense. In this play, Donald Margulies considers a life lived with bad decisions, wrong directions, and regrets. Brooklyn Boy is masterful work by a playwright who is fully matured and in complete control of his medium. M-4, F-3. Softcover, 94 pp. $19.95.

Two Days: Two Short Plays
Donald Marguilies
This double-cast double bill opens with Last Tuesday, which finds commuters on a train from New York to New Haven absorbed with the sometimes comical details of their lives as the horror of the outside world insistently, and shockingly, intrudes. July 7, 1994 is a haunting exploration of a day in the life of a female physician working in an inner-city health clinic. 2M, 4W, 1 boy. Softcover, 62 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.

Ascension Day
Timothy Mason
On the bank of a beautiful lake, nine teenagers pursue the typical activities of of a church-camp retreat. However, with the moon full, and hormones racing, the cries of the loons carry a message of menace and loss. Ascension Day focuses on two sisters, Faith and Charity, as they move unconsciously and inadvertently from a relationship of friendship and trust towards a rift which seems likely to be permanent. M-4, F-5. Softcover, 39 pp. $6.99.

The Sunset Limited
Cormac McCarthy
A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, "Black" and "White", as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing worldviews. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men--though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life. Deft, spare and full of artful tension, The Sunset Limited is a beautifully crafted, consistently thought-provoking, and deceptively intimate work by one of the most insightful writers of our time. Softcover, 143 pp. $17.95.

Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams
Terrence McNally
From Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally comes a powerful play about how far one will go for one's love of the theatre. In upstate New York, Lou, a drama teacher, and Jessie, a dog groomer, become obsessed with buying a derelict movie theatre and turning it into Captain Lou and Miss Jessie's Magic Theatre for Children of All Ages. Softcover, 103 pp. $17.50.

The Stendhal Syndrome -- Two Plays: Full Frontal Nudity and Prelude & Liebestod
Terrence McNally
"The Stendhal Syndrome" is named for the French novelist who experienced overwhelming corporal convulsions when witnessing sublime artistic beauty. Full Frontal Nudity explores the reaction of three American tourists to the perfection and beauty of Michaelangelo's David. In Prelude & Liebestod, a renowned conductor watches his life unravel while conducting Wagner's musical masterpiece. The two plays in this collection take as their subjects the transformative power of art. Softcover, 68 pp. $17.95.

Corpus Christi
Terrence McNally
McNally's unique view of the story of Christ. Time magazine called the play "witty but not patronizing, as sober and as cleansing as a dip in baptismal water" and named it one of the best plays of the year. $18.50.

Love! Valour! Compassion!
Terrence McNally
At a beautiful Duchess County farmhouse, eight men hash out their passions, resentments and fears over the course of three summer weekends. $9.99.

Master Class
Terrence McNally
Pyrotechnical theater -- fireworks in a contained space where Maria Callas is brought back to life in Sturm und Drang. $11.99.

The Mistakes Madeline Made
Elizabeth Meriwether
What happens if you stop showering? The Mistakes Madeline Made is a twisted and comedic coming-of-age story about a girl who develops Ablutophobia, the fear of bathing. Struggling with a soul-crushing job as a personal assistant, she wages a furious, funny war against all things complacent, pampered and clean. As her smell starts to overwhelm her co-workers and many casual lovers--a series of bad poets--the play raises the questions: Is dirty living a political act? And is clean living even possible in these times of unrest? An unlikely story of love and dirty people. 3M, 2W (doubling). Softcover, 39 pp. $10.99.

Finding Claire
Kim Merrill
After the sudden death of her adoptive mother, a rich New York City dancer embarks on a search for her birth mother's home. She longs for a family connection but ends up with a family crisis. In an impoverished farmhouse in rural upstate New York, her fifteen-year-old half-sister is pregnant - and wants to give up her baby. Her mother - a stubborn, introverted woman who carves rough rock sculptures as a way to express her frustrations - wants her to keep it. Her grandmother wants to be boss. Armed with good intentions and a desire to help her new family, the dancer arrives at their door. When she's met with a volatile mixture of envy, regret and resentment, her assumptions about identity, biological ties and what it "means" to be a mother are turned upside down. 4W. Softcover, 47 pp. $10.99.

Arthur Miller Collected Plays 1944 -1961
Tony Kushner, one of America's most acclaimed living playwrights is the editor of this inaugural volume of the collected edition of Miller's plays. This volume contains The Man Who Had All the Luck, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, An Enemy of the People, The Crucible, A Memory of Two Mondays, A View from the Bridge ( 1 Act & 2 Act Versions), and The Misfits ( a novella). Also contains a chronology, notes on the text and notes. $49.00.

Resurrection Blues
Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller's penultimate play is a darkly comic satirical allegory that poses the question: What would happen if Christ were to appear in the world today? Resurrection Blues asserts the interconnectedness of our actions and each person's culpability in world events; it is ultimately a comedic and tragic satire of precarious morals in our media saturated age. Softcover, 112 pp. $15.50.

Laughing Stock
Charles Morey
When The Playhouse, a rustic New England summer theatre, schedules a repertory season of Dracula, Hamlet and Charley's Aunt, comic mayhem ensues. Laughing Stock is a hilarious backstage farce and genuinely affectionate look into the world of the theatre. M-9, F-5. Softcover, 74 pp. $9.99.

The Four of Us
Itamar Moses
From the author of Bach at Leipzig comes a new play about loyalty, integrity, and the price of success. When Benjamin's first novel vaults him into literary stardom, his friend David, a struggling playwirght, is thrilled at Benjamin's newfound success...or is he? Should Benjamin help David by using his new connections? Can David even expect such favours from his friend? More important, who should pick up the tab at lunch? Softcover, 113 pp. $15.50.

Hank Williams: Lost Highway
Randal Myler & Mark Harelik
Hank Williams: Lost Highway is the spectacular musical biography of the legendary singer-songwriter frequently mentioned alongside Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Elvis and Bob Dylan as one of the great innovators of American popular music.
M-7, F-3. Softcover, 63 pp. $12.95.

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Parallel Lives
Mo Gaffney & Kathy Najimy
In Parallel Lives, two Supreme beings plan the beginning of the world with the relish of two slightly sadistic suburban wives decorating a living room. With great wit and a feminist sensibility, this play reexamines the ongoing quest to find parity and love in a contest handicapped by capricious gods -- or, in this case, goddesses. Softcover, 134 pp. $9.99.

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 Retreat From Moscow: A Play About a Family
William Nicholson
In Retreat From Moscow, William Nicholson, the celebrated author of Shadowlands, tells the powerful story of a husband who decides to be truthful in his marriage, and of the wife and son whose lives will never be the same again. This drama shines a breathtakingly natural light on the fallout of a shattered marriage. 2M, 1W. Softcover, 114 pp. $17.00.

Goodnight Children Everywhere and other plays
Richard Nelson
A splendid collection of Richard Nelson's plays, including: Some Americans Abroad, Two Shakespearean Actors, New England, Goodnight Children Everywhere, and Franny's Way. Softcover, 419 pp. $28.95.

Intimate Apparel and Fabulation
Lynn Nottage
With her two latest plays, Lynn Nottage has created companion pieces that span one hundred years in the lives of two African-American women. Intimate Apparel is about the empowerment of Esther, a proud and shy seamstress in 1905 New York who creates exquisite lingerie for both Fifth Avenue boudoirs and Tenderloin bordellos. In Fabulation, Nottage re-imagines Esther as Undine, the PR-diva of today, who spirals down from her swanky Manhattan office to her roots back in Brooklyn. Through opposite journeys, Esther and Undine achieve the same satisfying end--one of self-discovery. Softcover, 141 pp. $20.95.

Fabulation or, The Re-Education of Undine
Lynn Nottage
Fabulation is a social satire about an ambitious and haughty African-American woman, Undine Barnes Calles, whose husband suddenly disappears after embezzling all of her money. Pregnant and on the brink of social and financial ruin, Undine retreats to her childhood home in Brooklyn's Walt Whitman projects, only to discover that she must cope with a crude new reality. Undine faces the challenge of transforming her setbacks into small victories in a battle to reaffirm her right to be. M-4, F-5 (doubling) Softcover, 56 pp. $9.99.

Crumbs From the Table of Joy and other plays
Lynn Nottage
Crumbs From the Table of Joy (F-5); POOF! (M-1, F-2); Por'knockers (M-5, F-1); Mud, River, Stone (M-5, F-2) and Los Meninas (M-4, F-5, extras). Softcover, 324 pp. $26.95.

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Triptych
Edna O'Brien
Three women -- a mistress, a wife, and a daughter -- expose their passions for the same man and confront the ways that love can simultaneously liberate and entrap. F-3. Softcover, 42 pp. $9.99.

Triptych and Iphigenia: Two Plays
Edna O'Brien
Collected here are two of O'Brien's most captivating dramatic works. Triptych (F-3) concerns three women -- a mistress, a wife, and a daughter -- who expose their passions for the same man and confront the ways that love can simultaneously liberate and entrap. In Iphigenia (M-5, F-4), O'Brien offers us an important reminder of the perils of war. Softcover, 110 pp. $17.95.

Collected Shorter Plays
Eugene O'Neill
All of O'Neill's themes and concerns find expression in his one-act plays. They are the dramatic equivalent of short stories. Here gathered in a single volume are nine one-act plays that span the playwright's career--from the early sea plays to the Expressionist masterpiece The Hairy Ape to the eerie nocturnal monologue Hughie. Included in this volume also are Bound East for Cardiff, Fog, Thirst, The Long Voyage, Home, Ile, The Moon of the Caribees and In the Zone. Softcover, 306 pp. $20.95.

A Moon for the Misbegotten
Eugene O'Neill
This is the sequel to O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. Moon picks up eleven years after the original as Jim Tyrone grasps at his last chance at love under the full moonlight. Josie Hogan, the play's exuberant heroine, tries to lift the stake of guilt and sorrow from Tyrone's heart as she allows herself to hope again for love. Softcover, 149 pp. $16.95.

The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O'Neill
The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on any of their dreams, and on Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams. Softcover, 219 pp. $16.95.

Eugene O'Neill: Early Plays
Eugene O'Neill
Now collected for the first time in a single volume, this selection of Eugene O'Neill's seminal early work was written between 1914 and 1921 and produced for the stage between 1916 and 1922: seven one-act plays (The Moon of the Caribbees, Bound East for Cardiff, In the Zone, The Long Voyage Home, He, Where the Cross is Made, and The Rope) and five full-length plays (Beyond the Horizon, The Straw, Anna Christie, and the classics The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape). Softcover, 395 pp. $18.00.

A Touch of the Poet & More Stately Mansions
Eugene O'Neill
A Touch of the Poet (M-7, F-3) and More Stately Mansions (M-10, F-3) -- the only 2 plays in Eugene O'Neill's never-completed 11-part series about the psychological and economic account of American life -- are brought together for the first time in this paperback edition. Softcover, 568 pp. $23.95.

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.

Betrayed
George Packer
Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country's religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America's project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it by aiding the U.S. forces constituted a small minority. On a cold, wet night in January 2007, George Packer met two such Iraqi men in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel in central Baghdad to hear their stories and those of other Iraqis working as translators and additional key personnel for the U.S. military and occupation authorities. Based on Packer's account in The New Yorker, betrayed is a riveting and morally complex drama that explores in the Iraqis' own words the ways in which we have already abandoned them. Softcover, 108 pp. $14.50.

Humana Festival 2002
The Complete Plays
Tanya Palmer and Amy Wegener
Softcover, 397 pp. $29.95.

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.

365 Days/365 Plays
Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks wrote a play a day for a whole year. 365 Days/365 Plays will world premiere in a simultaneous and shared grassroots theatre festival involving hundreds and hundreds of theatres and countless artists around the country. Softcover, 409 pp. $24.95.

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 Triangle Factory Fire Project
Christopher Piehler
Saturday, March 25, 1911, 4:45pm. A fire breaks out in the Triangle Waist Factory off downtown Manhattan's Washington Square, and in the space of 28 minutes, 146 people, mainly young immigrant girls, have died. This play uses eyewitness accounts, court transcripts and other archival material to create a dramatic moment-by-moment account of this historic fire and the social upheaval that followed. Softcover, 72 pp. $9.99.

Life is Short
Craig Pospisil
This hilarious collection of short plays is a comical look at relationships from childhood to old age. Some are charming and light, others are dark and absurdist, but all eight gleefully portray people at their worst. Includes: Class Conflict, On the Edge, Whatever, Double Wedding, Infant Morality, A Mother's Love, The American Dream Revisited, and The Last December. Softcover, 71 pp. $9.99.

The Dream of Chief Crazy Horse
David Pownall
An epic play written to be performed by children, The Dream of Crazy Horse covers ten thousand years in the history of the American Indian. Joined in his dream by his old opponent General Crook, Chief Crazy Horse narrates the brutal history of North America, from the crossing to the new world, through the European colonisation of the sixteenth century, to the American Indian's place in popular culture and the legend of the West. Softcover, 77 pp. $19.95.

The Dirty Talk
Michael Puzzo
In Michael Puzzo's comedy The Dirty Talk, Lino and Mitch, an outrageously mismatched pair of strangers find themselves stranded in a hunting cabin - in the mountains of New Jersey - during a ferocious storm. Unable to leave, we gradually find out these men aren't exactly here by mere happenstance. During their tumultuous day together, the two explore what defines being a man, the value of emotional intimacy, the lies we tell each other and most devastatingly the lies we tell ourselves. Softcover, 34 pp. $10.99.

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Last modified May 28, 2008 .
Please note that all prices are in Canadian dollars. All prices are subject to change without notice.