TCG Books

Series introduction by John Lahr with individual volumes introduced by Laurence Fishburne, Tony Kushner, Romulus Linney, Marion McClinton, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Phylicia Rashad, Ishmael Reed, and Frank Rich.

"No one except perhaps Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater." --John Lahr, The New Yorker

"Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story. . . . For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned."--Tony Kushner

August Wilson's Century Cycle is "one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken." (The New York Times) With it, Wilson dramatizes the African American experience and heritage in the twentieth century, with a play for each decade, almost all set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Wilson's extraordinary lifework--completed just before his death in October 2005--is presented here for the first time in its entirety.

"Art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired. Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American. . . . The cycle of plays that I have been writing since 1979 is my attempt to represent that culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves. 

The characters in the plays still place their faith in America's willingness to live up to the meaning of her creed. It is this belief in America's honor that allows them to pursue the American Dream even as it remains elusive. . . . They shout, they argue, they wrestle with love, honor, duty, betrayal; they have loud voices and big hearts; they demand justice, they love, they laugh, they cry, they murder, and they embrace life with zest and vigor. . . . In all the plays, the characters remain pointed towards the future, their pockets lined with fresh hope and an abiding faith in their own abilities and their own heroics."--August Wilson

Titles included in the set:

Gem of the Ocean 

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone 

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 

The Piano Lesson 

Seven Guitars 

Fences 

Two Trains Running 

Jitney 

King Hedley II 

Radio Golf 

“iHo is a vast, rich work of public-intellectual engagement. . . The values built into this beautifully inquiring play operate outside of common dramatic economies. Kushner’s carefully organized labor of love is a spur to the active mind.”—Adam Feldman, Time Out New York

Gus Marcantonio, a retired longshoreman, summons his adult children home to the family’s Brooklyn brownstone to discuss his recent decision to commit suicide. With his trademark mix of soaring intel­lect, searing emotion, and biting wit, Kushner unfurls an epic tale of revolu­tion, radicalism, family, love, sex, politics, real estate, unions, and debts both unpaid and unpayable.

This volume gathers sixty years of essays, speeches, and manifestos by the founding mother of the resident professional theatre movement. As a founder and artistic director of the flagship Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and chair of New York University’s Graduate Acting program, the late Zelda Fichandler changed the where and how of the American theatre. The Long Revolution gathers Fichandler’s most prescient writing about that movement, ranging over such topics as The Institution as Art-Work, the Profit in NonProfit, Race and a Deepening Aesthetic, and Creativity and the Public Mind. It also includes intimate portraits of artists with whom she frequently collaborated and director’s notes from the major productions that defined her vision. Celebrated as the defining architect and builder of the most sweeping transformation of twentieth-century American theatre, her brilliant writing reestablishes Fichandler as one of its most expansive and provocative thinkers.

Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, James Ijames' Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare's masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbecue in the American South.

Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Drama.

Juicy—a young, queer, Southern man, who is grappling with questions of identity—is visited by the ghost of his father (Pap) at his mother’s wedding/family barbecue. Pap demands that Juicy avenge his recent murder. How will Juicy, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man, trying to break a cycle of trauma and toxic masculinity, avenge his father’s premature death? Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare’s masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbeque in the American South.

This book is a guide to one hundred plays addressing the most urgent and important issue of our time: the climate crisis

100 Plays to Save the World is a book to provoke as well as inspire—to start conversations, inform debate, challenge our thinking, and be a launchpad for future productions. Above all, it is a call to arms—to step up, think big, and unleash theatre’s power to imagine a better future into being.

Each play is explored with an essay illuminating key themes in climate issues: Resources, Energy, Migration, Responsibility, Fightback, and Hope.

100 Plays to Save the World is an empowering resource for theatre directors, producers, teachers, youth leaders, and writers looking for plays that speak to our present moment.

2023 Tony Award winner for Best Musical!

“Flawless… A work of singular distinction, one for which the word ‘remark­able’ is an understatement. Arbery is a greatly talented writer who has given us a drama as exciting and challenging—nay, daring—as any new play I’ve ever reviewed.” —Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

Finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Night. Wyoming. Four young conservatives have gathered to toast the newly inducted pres­ident of their tiny Catholic college. Their reunion spirals into spiritual chaos and clashing generational politics, becoming less a celebration than a vicious fight to be understood. On a dark night, in the middle of America, Will Arbery’s haunting play speaks to the heart of a country at war with itself.

This special edition of the international hit play Prima Facie features the definitive version of the award-winning script, together with colour photos and exclusive additional content, giving you a fascinating behind-the-scenes insight into the making of the production and the issues it explores.

In the play, Tessa is a young, brilliant barrister who has worked her way up from working-class origins to the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and winning. But when an unexpected event forces her to confront the patriarchal power of the law—where the burden of proof and morality diverge—she finds herself in a world where emotion and integrity are in conflict with the rules of the game.

After acclaimed productions in Australia and winning the Australian Writers’ Guild Award for Drama, Prima Facie received its European premiere in a sold-out run at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London’s West End in 2022 starring Jodie Comer in her West End debut. It was named Best New Play at both the 2023 Olivier and WhatsOnStage Awards. A filmed version, released in 2022, went on to become the highest-grossing event cinema release ever in the UK.

This edition, published alongside Prima Facie’s Broadway transfer in 2023, includes contributions from writer Suzie Miller, actor Jodie Comer, director Justin Martin, producer James Bierman and other key members of the creative team, letting you go deeper into the world of the play. There are also essays on the legal context and how the play has become a vehicle for change in attitudes towards the treatment of female victims of sexual assault.

"Kirkwood is the most rewarding dramatist of her generation.” —Independent

Noah and Celeste Quilter met on a blind date organized by a newspaper, fell in love, got married and had a baby. But from the very earliest days of their relationship, they were under surveillance. And when they started a fight for their future, they never guessed it would cost them their lives.

In a modern world where reality is whatever we imagine it to be, how do we know the stories we tell ourselves are true? What happens when there's only one person in the whole world you can truly trust?

Rapture is a slippery thriller about love, power, and belief which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2022, directed by Lucy Morrison. It was promoted under the title That Is Not Who I Am by Dave Davidson, a pseudonym.

Summer, 1827. In a red barn in Suffolk, Maria Marten awaits her lover. A year later, hidden in a grain sack under the floor of the barn, Maria's body is found, barely identifiable—and the manhunt begins.

The Red Barn Murder had all the hallmarks of a classic crime drama: a missing body, a country location, a disreputable squire and a village stuck in its age-old traditions. But whilst sending shockwaves throughout the country, Maria's own story was lost.

The Ballad of Maria Marten rediscovers her story, bringing it back to vivid, urgent life. Beth Flintoff's thrilling play was first performed by an all-female cast in a production by Eastern Angles in July 2018. Subsequent national tours were produced with Eastern Angles by Matthew Linley Creative Projects in association with the Stephen Joseph Theatre.

A double-volume of plays by acclaimed playwright Will Arbery that explore communities of outsiders who strive to help one another persevere in the face of despair.

In this two-play volume, acclaimed playwright Will Arbery explores the dynamics within tight-knit communities of outsiders working together to persevere against despair, whether intimate or cosmic. From wildly different angles, Corsicana and Evanston Salt Costs Climbing both examine the shape-shifting specters of grief, the pull of desire and dreams, and the universal human need for receiving and giving care.

“A deceptively simple flavor-bomb of a new comedy about survival, second chances, and digesting whatever life serves up.” —Naveen Kumar, Variety

With a chance at reclaiming their lives, the formerly incarcerated people working at Clyde’s, a roadside sandwich stop, strive hard to overcome their personal challenges. Not so easy under their boss Clyde. In this razor-sharp comedy, this motley crew of line cooks, under a visionary chef, are given purpose and permission to dream through their shared quest to create the perfect sandwich.

A wry, innovative reckoning with the legacy of the Salem witch trials from one of America’s foremost playwrights.

Becky Nurse is an outspoken, sharp-witted tour guide at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft who’s just trying to get by in post-Obama America. She’s also the descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who was infamously executed for witchcraft in 1692—but things have changed for women since then…haven’t they? After losing her job for calling out The Crucible in front of schoolkids, Becky visits a local witch for help. One spell leads to another, and then everything really goes off the rails. A darkly comic play about a woman coming to terms with her family’s legacy and finding her voice in the “lock her up” era.

A girl made of glass. Gods and murders. A serial killer’s friends. And a secret in a bottle. This volume also contains the short plays Seven Jewish Children, Ding Dong the Wicked, Pigs and Dogs, War and Peace Gaza Piece, Tickets Now on Sale, and Beautiful Eyes.

As their lives begin to intertwine, their journey takes us through grand drawing rooms, bustling theatres and rowdy Southwark pubs, where the women fight inequality as well as each other. But with the final showdown approaching, only one can become the Lady Boxing Champion of the World. . .

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA: English

In this two-play volume, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Sanaz Toossi explores the emotional toll of migration, both for those who leave and those who stay. Taken together, English and Wish You Were Here offer a moving portrait of the complex effects of the Iranian diaspora.

“A masterpiece . . . Trouble in Mind still contains astonishing power; it could have been written yesterday.” —Vulture

Ahead of its time, Trouble in Mind, written in 1955, follows the rehearsal process of an anti-lynching play preparing for its Broadway debut. When Wiletta, a Black actress and veteran of the stage, challenges the play’s stereotypical portrayal of the Black characters, unsettling biases come to the forefront and reveal the ways so-called progressive art can be used to uphold racist attitudes. Scheduled to open on Broadway in 1957, Childress objected to the requested changes in the script that would “sanitize” the play for mainstream audiences, and the production was canceled as a result. Childress’s final script is published here with an essay by playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, editor of TCG Illuminations.

“One of the most joyous and clear-eyed approaches to playing a character that I have ever read…I was already in awe of his performance; now I’m in awe of his humanity and attention to detail, and willingness to share the hard work and magic that goes into it.” —Lin-Manuel Miranda, from his Foreword

Hamilton and Me is a unique, behind-the-scenes account of preparing for, rehearsing and performing in one of the most important cultural phenomena of our time.

When Lin-Manuel Miranda’s groundbreaking musical Hamilton opened in London’s West End in December 2017, it was as huge a hit as it had been in its original production off and on Broadway. Lauded by critics and audiences alike, the show would go on to win a record-equaling seven Olivier Awards—including Best Actor in a Musical for Giles Terera, for his portrayal of Aaron Burr.

For Terera, though, his journey as Burr had begun more than a year earlier, with his first audition in New York, and continuing through extensive research and preparation, intense rehearsals, previews, and finally opening night itself. Throughout this time he kept a journal, recording his experiences of the production and the process of creating his award-winning performance. This book, Hamilton and Me, is that journal.

It is also deeply personal, as Terera reflects on experiences from his life that he drew on to shape his acclaimed portrayal. Illustrated with photographs and featuring an exclusive foreword by Lin-Manuel Miranda, this book is essential reading for all fans of Hamilton­­—offering fresh, first-hand insights into the music and characters they know and love so well—and for aspiring and current performers or students, and anyone who wants to discover what it really felt like to be in the room where it happened.

“With a no-nonsense and blessedly candid approach, Bob Moss and Wendy Dann have written not only an indispensable practicum for the young director, but also a delightful refresher course for the working director. The authors encourage and challenge us to engage our theatrical imaginations for a lifetime of storytelling on a multitude of stages.” —Michael Mayer, Tony Award–Winning Director

By focusing on five fundamentals for staging a play—Story, Intention, Character, Space, and Theme—veteran theater directors Robert Moss and Wendy Dann help stage directors learn how to build their own practice and begin to master the daunting task of staging a story.

Obie Award for Playwriting: Sanctuary City

Two compelling, uncompromising plays about the immigrant experience by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Cost of Living. With humor, grace, and an unsentimental eye, Martyna Majok explores the challenges immigrants face as they strive to carve out a place in a harsh and often indifferent America.

In Ironbound, Darja, a Polish immigrant, negotiates the terms for her future at a rundown bus stop in New Jersey. Over the course of 20 years and three relationships, Darja’s initial search for love becomes eclipsed by her desire for security and survival.

In Sanctuary City, two undocumented teenagers seek refuge in each other and make a pact to stake their claim in America together. But as their experiences and opportunities diverge, their bonds begin to fray, and each must make a difficult choice about what they are willing to sacrifice for their dreams.

The Kilroys: "We Make Trouble. And Plays."

"When I look at the list of women and nonbinary writers included in this volume, many of whom I have mentored or taught, it is a beautiful reminder that we are a community to be reckoned with, and that there is an abundance of vital narratives awaiting a larger audience. While there remains a great deal of work to be done to reach racial and gender equity in the theater, the powerful and provocative writing presented here is part of the inciting incident that will no doubt shake up the status quo." —Lynn Nottage, from her Foreword

The Kilroys are back with a new collection of 67 monologues and scenes by women and nonbinary playwrights. This collection includes a monologue or scene from each play from the 2016 and 2017 editions of The List.

This intimate and landmark series follows the Gabriel family of Rhinebeck, New York, through the momentous and divisive 2016 election year. While preparing meals in their kitchen, together they grapple in real time with issues of money, history, art, politics and family, as well as the fear of having been left behind.

“The bitingly funny and fierce Gloria is one of the year’s best shows…Gloria is an adrenaline rush of a show, but it also makes you think. Let’s just say it hits the bull’s-eye.” —Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post

“Funny, blistering tragicomedy…along with a delightfully omnipresent, biting wit…You’ll be unsettled by Gloria, perhaps even haunted.” —Peter Marks, Washington Post

An ambitious group of editorial assistants at a prestigious Manhattan-based literary magazine are each chasing the same dream: a life as successful writers—and to get out of their cubicles before they turn thirty. When a regular day at the office suddenly becomes anything but, the stakes for who will get to tell the career-making story are higher than ever.

While rehearsing Oedipus, turbulent relationships between actors threaten to sabotage the production. As tensions grow stronger and hidden truths emerge, reality begins to emulate Oedipus in staggering ways. Lucas’s topical and complex play is a remarkably funny, sharply articulated missive about tragedy in the contemporary world.

Craig Lucas is a playwright, screenwriter and director of both theater and film. His plays include Prelude to a Kiss, The Dying Gaul, The Singing Forest, Small Tragedy, Reckless, Blue Window, Prayer for My Enemy, God’s Heart and the books for the musicals The Light in the Piazza, An American in Paris and Amélie.

2024 Tony Award winner for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score

A musical one hundred years in the making, Suffs brings to life a complicated chapter in the ongoing battle for the right to vote.

Written by one of the most exciting new voices in theater, this epic new musical takes an unflinching look at the unsung trailblazers of the American women’s suffrage movement. In the seven years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, an impassioned group of suffragists—“Suffs” as they called themselves—took to the streets, pioneering protest tactics that transformed the country. They risked their lives as they clashed with the president, the public, and each other. A thrilling story of brilliant, flawed women working against and across generational, racial, and class divides, Suffs boldly explores the victories and failures of a fight for equality that is still far from over.

A funny and profound meditation on the complexity of chronic illness and the ache of desire.

At a clinic in Northern California, five women recline on patio lounge chairs. They are fasting, drinking only water or juice in the hope that the deprivation will help their bodies begin to heal from a litany of afflictions—cancers and autoimmune disorders and thyroid conditions and mysterious infections. To distract themselves from the near-constant pain they are in, they philosophize and swap book recommendations, confide intimate family stories and share hopes for their future recoveries. Over the course of several days, the clinic becomes a purgatorial space, where prolonged hunger and suffering seem to warp time itself. The women's meandering discussions slowly accumulate a powerful emotional resonance, leading to deep and troubling questions: is there any meaning to be found in pain, or is it merely something to be endured? Can physical intimacy be an antidote to suffering, or is it only a brief distraction? An engrossing and compassionate play that resists easy answers to the problem of what it means to reside in a body that fails you.

The story Charles Dickens might have written after drinking too much gin...

Follow half-orphan Pip Bin's remarkable adventures with sisters Pippa and Poppy and best friend Harry Biscuit, as they attempt to escape the scheming clutches of Mr Gently Benevolent and defeat the irrepressible Hardthrasher siblings. Can they avert disaster at every turn? Will evil be vanquished by virtue? Can love triumph over hate?

Mark Evans' play Bleak Expectations is a hilarious, chaotic caper, featuring dastardly villains, preposterous names, pulse-quickening romances, heart-rending death scenes, and, of course, a happy ending.

Based on the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, the play opened at the Watermill Theatre, Newbury, in 2022, directed by Caroline Leslie.

It offers rich opportunities to amateur theatre companies looking for a gloriously daft Dickensian romp which will have their audiences joyfully transported and begging for more.

Tessa is a young, brilliant barrister. She has worked her way up from working-class origins to the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and winning. But an unexpected event forces her to confront the patriarchal power of the law, where the burden of proof and morality diverge.

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller is an award-winning play for a solo actor, taking us deep into a world where emotion and integrity are in conflict with the rules of the game. After several acclaimed productions in Australia and winning the Australian Writers' Guild Award for Drama, the play received its European premiere at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London's West End in April 2022. It was produced by Empire Street Productions, directed by Justin Martin, and starred Jodie Comer, the Emmy and Bafta Award-winning star of TV's Killing Eve, making her West End debut.

David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group’s I Understand Everything Better is a "deeply felt and deeply moving" (New York Times) performance piece, a multi-disciplinary, dance-based work that explores the impulse to report on calamity, the shimmer of attention to realms unseen, and the evidence of the body as possessing a will to let go of living.

Emerging from a year in which David Neumann lost both his mother and father, I Understand Everything Better documents a process of dying, and how the altered attentiveness of the dying and those who care for them can invite a complex layering of now and then, here and there, living room and mountain road. The text draws on Neumann’s accounts of his father’s final days as well as Noh theater, the Kyogen play Boshibari, Shakespeare’s King Lear, transcripts of live weather reporting (mostly during hurricanes), and interviews with end-of-life caregivers, doctors, and meteorologists.

Advanced Beginner Group’s 2015 production—winner of two Bessie awards for Outstanding Production and Outstanding Sound Design—includes text by David Neumann and Sibyl Kempson. Edited and designed by Karinne Keithley Syers with photography by Maria Baranova, this volume is an elegant, richly layered record of a rigorously collaged, collaborative performance that was itself a record of a storm.

It's Christmas Eve. As the cold, bleak night draws in, the penny-pinching Ebenezer Scrooge is confronted by the spirit of his former business partner, Jacob Marley.

Bound in chains as punishment for a lifetime of greed, the unearthly figure explains it isn't too late for Scrooge to change his miserly ways in order to escape the same fate. But first he'll have to face three more eerie encounters...

Mark Gatiss' spine-tingling adaptation is faithful to the heart and spirit of Charles Dickens' much-loved festive ghost story—with an emphasis on the ghostly.

Commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse, the adaptation premiered there in 2021, starring Nicholas Farrell alongside Gatiss, and directed by the theatre's Artistic Director, Adam Penford.

A Christmas Carol – A Ghost Story subsequently transferred to Alexandra Palace Theatre, London, produced by Eleanor Lloyd Productions and Eilene Davidson Productions.

Trained in classical piano and Marxism and raised on jazz, gospel, pop, hip hop, and Black revolutionary politics, Pulitzer Prize finalist Eisa Davis’s plays are marked by her stunning intimacy with the praxis of music alongside radical change. In Angela's Mixtape, time shifts like a mixtape, and like a mixtape, the play is both a memoir and a gift—for us, of course, and for Davis’s aunt, activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, under whose tutelage Davis reads Das Kapital and learns to drive stick and hack her own way toward inheriting her legacy. In The History of Light, Davis counterpoints the intertwining fates of two couples under racialized pressures a generation apart. Lush with the sound of the grand piano, The History of Light is a study in black and white, love and alienation. Underlying the political clarity and formal virtuosity of Davis’s writing are the unexpected crackles of a voice warming up, the crunchiness of missed notes. Because for an artist concerned, like Davis, with how we become who we are and might be, error is a necessary instrument—maybe the sounding weight.

She’s more than just a wicked old witch. Baba Yaga is a legend, usually known as that elderly woman who lives alone in the woods and grinds the bones of the wicked. But what if she was actually a sexy, smart, modern woman operating off of morally ambiguous motives?

A detective finds himself in a small, isolated town asking, what does the disappearance of a young heir to a yogurt empire have to do with some random lore about an old witch? Matched by an apprehensive local sheriff, a university professor with a taste for younger men, and a whole cast of curious characters, the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga twists into a new labyrinth of secret lives, ancient magic, and multiple suspects.

This genre-bending comedic fairy tale meets thrilling whodunit gives voice to an antihero of epic proportions while interrogating how her story has historically been told by men. From now on, you’ll remember the name Baba Yaga for the right reasons.

Rural Suffolk, 1759. As the country waits for Halley’s Comet, Sally Poppy is sentenced to hang for a heinous murder. When she claims to be pregnant, a jury of twelve matrons are taken from their housework to decide whether she’s telling the truth, or simply trying to escape the noose. With only midwife Lizzy Luke prepared to defend the girl, and a mob baying for blood outside, the matrons wrestle with their new authority, and the devil in their midst.

The Thanksgiving Play

“Satire doesn’t get much richer… A takedown of white American mythology… The familiar, whitewashed story of Pilgrims and Native Americans chowing down together gets a delicious roasting.” —Jesse Green, New York Times

“Wryly funny… Deftly makes points that need making about representation and, to borrow a line from Hamilton, the crucial matter of ‘who tells your story.’” —Don Aucoin, Boston Globe

A group of well-intentioned white teaching artists scramble to create an ambitious “woke” Thanksgiving pageant. Despite their eager efforts to put on the most culturally sensitive show possible, it quickly becomes clear that even those with good intentions can be undone by their own blind spots.

What Would Crazy Horse Do?

“A nuanced portrait of reservation life… A scalding cauldron of race and resentment, poverty, and mental illness.” —Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star

“A timely meditation on the dangers of nationalism tinged with a sad irony as seen through the filter of a Native American lens.” —Alan Portner, Broadway World

Twins Calvin and Journey, the last two members of the Marahotah tribe, make a suicide pact to end the Marahotah when the grandfather who raised them dies. Then two white strangers knock on their door and the insular world of the twins is ripped wide open.

“Richard Nelson uses the stage not as a pedestal but as a field of whispered dreams.” —Michael Schulman, New Yorker

It is 1958. In the midst of a building boom in New York City, Joe Papp and his colleagues are facing pressure from the city’s elite as they continue their free Shakespeare in Central Park. From the creator of the most celebrated family plays of the last decade comes a drama about a differ­ent kind of family—one held together by the belief that the theater, and the city, belong to all of us.

Fierce and passionate, The Ground on Which I Stand is August Wilson’s eloquent and personal call for African American artists to seize the power over their own cultural identity and to establish permanent institutions that celebrate and preserve the singular achievements of African American dramatic art and reaffirm its equal importance in contemporary American culture.

Delivered as the keynote address of Theatre Communications Group’s 11th biennial conference in June 1996, this speech refocused the agenda of that conference, and spurred months of debate about cultural diversity in the American theatre, culminating in a standing-room-only public debate at New York City’s Town Hall.

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Primary Trust is an arresting character study of an isolated man finding the courage to expand his world and begin again. 

38-year-old Kenneth lives a comfortable life of routine in suburban New York: after days spent working at a used bookstore, he whiles away his evenings knocking back mai tais with his best friend Burt at the local tiki bar. But when the long-time bookstore owner decides to close up shop for good, Kenneth panics at the prospect of finding a new job—a process that unearths long-suppressed fears. When Kenneth makes a new friend named Corrina, and she begins to ask questions Kenneth isn’t prepared to answer: how many mai tais is too many mai tais? And who—or what—is Burt? Primary Trust is a deeply affecting play about the careful structures we build to contain oceans of feeling and what happens when those structures begin to crumble.

A small but successful security company staffed with former actors has been hired to protect a certain precious theater curtain – and whatever mystery it conceals behind it.

But things are about to get out of hand as the guards find themselves infiltrated by a rival security company composed of ex-ballet dancers, who are not only artistically more up to date, but also faster and cheaper, and who want to take over this important gig at any cost.

In the end, as always in this contemporary world – where all conflicts are resolved through violence and cannibalism – life plays its fickle games of friendship, love, betrayal, and finally, we hope, redemption. No President is a story ballet of enlightenment in two immoral acts from the internationally acclaimed Nature Theater of Oklahoma.

Poland, 1949. Zula is bold and brilliant, a singer who ignites the stage. Wiktor is withdrawn and damaged, a composer longing to write. Irresistibly drawn to each other, they dream of escape. But in Communist-controlled Poland, the desire for freedom can be a dangerous thing.

Based on the film by Academy Award winner Paweł Pawlikowski, Cold War is an epic love story spanning the decades and breadth of Europe at its most divided, and a compelling story of passion, redemption, and the journey to be free.

This stage adaptation by Conor McPherson was first performed at the Almeida Theatre, London, in November 2023, directed by Rupert Goold, and featuring traditional Polish songs alongside music by Elvis Costello.

Chasing his runaway shadow, a mischievous young boy who will never grow up crash lands through an open window and meets a headstrong young girl who is desperate to be an adult.

With a sprinkle of fairy dust, they take flight on a whirlwind voyage over pirate ships, through mermaid lagoons and into the heart of Neverland.

Adapted from J.M. Barrie's perennial favorite, this enchanting new version by Evan Placey, with songs by Vikki Stone, premiered in 2023 at Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames, directed by Lucy Morrell. It was commissioned by the Rose to be performed by twenty members of the Rose Youth Theatre alongside four professional adult actors. It offers rich opportunities for other theatre companies who want to keep their audiences hooked with a magical, musical classic.

50% of royalties from the sale of this book and amateur performance licenses are donated to Great Ormond Street Hospital, London.

It's the 1970s, and Fereydoun Farrokhzad's star is blazing bright – he's a sex symbol and chart-topping pop singer. Imagine an Iranian Tom Jones. A decade on and he's living in political exile in Germany, though still selling out the Royal Albert Hall. Then, on 7 August 1992, he's found brutally murdered. The neighbors said his dogs had been barking for two nights. The case has never been solved.

Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is an investigation into the nature of investigation; part free-wheeling lecture, part podcast and part play. It is a thrilling ride down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and true-crime podcasts, sorting through the tangle of information available online to reveal the limits of the search engines in solving a decades-old cold case.

Originally produced by The Javaad Alipoor Company in 2022, this witty, fast-paced and cutting-edge play, by Javaad Alipoor with Chris Thorpe, was co-commissioned by HOME and the National Theatre of Parramatta. It has toured worldwide, including a run at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, during the 2023 Festival Fringe.

Includes Revised Broadway version of Appropriate

Winner of three 2024 Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Play

A double-volume containing two astonishing breakout plays from one of the theatre's most exciting and provocative young writers.

In Appropriate, strained familial dynamics collide with a tense undercurrent of socio-political realities when the Lafayettes gather at a former plantation home to sift through the belongings of their deceased patriarch. An Octoroon is an audacious investigation of theatre and identity, wherein an old play gives way to a startlingly original piece.

Also includes the short play I Promise Never Again to Write Plays About Asians...

Two whip-smart satirical plays by the Pulitzer-winning author of Fat Ham that examine the racism at the root of America’s founding—and its fruits in our present.

In The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington, the widow of George Washington and self-proclaimed “Mother of America” lies helpless in her bed, ravaged by illness and cared for by the very slaves that will be free the moment she dies. In the terrifying and fantastical fever dream that follows, Martha is called to account for her lifelong dependence on the labor of enslaved people. A wildly theatrical, gleefully anachronistic play that puts Martha Washington’s life and legacy on trial.

In a present-day reimagining of the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever takes place at Commonwealth of Virginia University, where a modern education is rooted in the nation’s “complicated” history. As the campus wrestles with its antebellum legacy, undergraduate student Sally finds herself locked in a more personal battle with Dean TJ, the white dean of students named after Thomas Jefferson, who shares his namesake’s predilection for grossly abusing his position of power over women of color. Amidst a swirl of marching bands, step teams, and bubbly tour guides, Sally must struggle to rewrite this too-familiar narrative, dismantle the wall of oppression, and embrace the dope ass future that waits beyond it.

Our most brilliant, fearless and creative women directors open the door on their craft, discussing their work in the theatre in intimate and illuminating detail.

Through a series of fascinating conversations with many of the leading talents working on British stages, Running the Room explores what it takes to succeed in the field, and how each director approaches the work in their own way.

Each interview focuses on a particular facet of the director's practice, examining not just the 'how' – how to talk to actors, how to create the right rehearsal environment, how to handle cuts and previews, how to work with a living playwright – but also the 'why': why certain approaches work better than others, why there's no 'right' way to direct a play, and why work in theatre anyway?

As this passionate, inspiring book shows, there are myriad ways to be a theatre director. For aspiring or current directors, it will give you the confidence to be uniquely yourself, develop your own approach, and create the work you want to make. For creatives in other disciplines, it will provide insight into directors' processes, along with examples of successful collaboration. And for anyone who loves theatre, this is an unparalleled first-hand account of how brilliant theatre is made – direct from those making it.

With contributions from:

Natalie Abrahami • Annabel Arden • Milli Bhatia • Carrie Cracknell • Tinuke Craig • Marianne Elliott • Nadia Fall • Yaël Farber • Vicky Featherstone • Jamie Fletcher • Sarah Frankcom • Emma Frankland • Rebecca Frecknall • Debbie Hannan • Tamara Harvey • Natalie Ibu • Ola Ince • Lynette Linton • Nancy Medina • Katie Mitchell • Rachel O'Riordan • Emma Rice • Indhu Rubasingham • Jenny Sealey

The early hours of Wednesday 14 June 2017. The north-west corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. A twenty-four-storey residential tower. The scene of a national tragedy.

This powerful verbatim play is drawn from the testimony of residents – a group of survivors and bereaved – at the heart of the Grenfell Tower tragedy. It reveals the impact of the multiple failures that led to the most devastating residential fire in the UK since the Second World War, and asks: how do we stop this ever happening again?

Startling, urgent and deeply moving, Grenfell: in the words of survivors explores the courage and resilience of an ill-treated community and their continued campaign for justice.

Created from interviews by Gillian Slovo, the play was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in July 2023, co-directed by Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike.

In the Downing Street Press Office an emergency meeting has been called. The Prime Minister has been ad-libbing on live TV (again) and his words are going viral.

There is a flurry of accusations, and demands for an apology; but as his team debate what to do next, it's already too late. His words have found their way to dinner parties, bus journeys and newspaper columns across the nation – and not everyone is angry.

Rabiah Hussain's play Word-Play explores how language seeps into public consciousness and reverberates with far-reaching consequences that will last for generations. It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London, in July 2023, directed by Nimmo Ismail.

In May 1926, Britain grinds to a halt, as workers down tools for the General Strike.

With the printing presses shut down, the only sources of news are the government's British Gazette, edited by Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill, and the independent, fledgling British Broadcasting Company, led by John Reith. The stage is set for a fierce battle over control of the news and who gets to define the truth.

Jack Thorne's When Winston Went To War With The Wireless is a gripping play about the birth of a great British institution and its efforts to stay impartial. It premiered at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in June 2023, directed by Katy Rudd, with Stephen Campbell Moore as Reith, Adrian Scarborough as Churchill, and Haydn Gwynne as Stanley Baldwin.

When 'intimidating' Rachel and eternal 'nice guy' Nick meet at an awkward work Christmas party, what was meant to be a one-night-stand becomes a sexual odyssey of self-discovery… and mutual destruction.

Adrift, isolated and insecure, they scramble for new ways to connect. Can some playful, passionate pegging provide a pathway through the pitfalls of modern relationships and present the possibility of a deeper bond?

A penetrating comedy about the search for sexual knowledge, true love and top-notch Tupperware, Lisa Carroll's play The Misandrist was first produced by Metal Rabbit Productions at the Arcola Theatre, London, in May 2023.

On his fifteenth birthday, Noble transforms into a bird. Thousands of miles away, his sister Cleo is stationed on a remote island with the British Antarctic Survey.

But the birds have disappeared and Noble needs to reach her. Lying low until it's safe to take flight, he finds solace in misfit Ellis, while his mum desperately tries to stop their home from falling apart.

The world turns. Dark clouds gather. Chaos is on the horizon...

Billie Collins's play Too Much World at Once is an urgent coming-of-age story for our times – and a lyrical, theatrical journey that spans continents and lives. It was premiered at HOME, Manchester, in March 2023 by Box of Tricks Theatre before a UK tour.

Grocery-store clerk Beth has had a hell of a week. A hell of a life, actually, full of people squashing her soul. And after pushing back at life—stabbing a steak to her boss’s desk and lighting a magazine rack on fire, for instance—freshly unemployed Beth regroups at her mom’s suburban home. Just when Beth starts to think she’s to blame for systemic limits, the gift of a bird feeder sparks a relationship with a talking Crow who reconnects her with her true power.

This sly chamber piece from new voice Caleigh Crow turns post-capitalism ennui on its head with a righteous fury. It unearths the subtle (and not so subtle) ways we gaslight the marginalized, especially Indigenous women, people living with mental-health afflictions, and anyone struggling to make ends meet in low-income service jobs. There Is Violence captures the vivacity and humour of one truly remarkable woman not meant for this earth, and brings her to her own glorious transcendence.

A hauntingly surreal play that plumbs the depths of a group of close friends reuniting for the first time in decades.

Twenty years after graduating from a Catholic academy in Washington, DC, a group of old friends gathers on a porch to pregame their high school reunion. Bonded by a shared sense of alienation and by the traumatic events of their high school years, including the Columbine massacre and 9/11, as well as their own self-proclaimed “Multi-Ethnic Reject” status, the friends are nonetheless surprised to find their memories of core teenage experiences no longer match up. What they do share is a sense that their lives have been continually put on hold by one tragedy or another, up to and including the still-lingering Covid-19 pandemic. Haunting the group is the specter of Death, who serially inhabits each character throughout the play to reveal the substance beneath their chatter. As the friends’ competing versions of their teenage years lead to an increasingly charged encounter, they find themselves facing the difficult reckoning that their past actions may have irrevocably sealed their present fates.

Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

A complex and compelling bilingual play that examines the intersections of queerness and Indian-American identity.

When Indian-American graduate student Choton travels from the U.S. to his family’s home city of Kolkata to film interviews with the local queer community, he relishes acting as the local expert, especially in his role as interpreter between Bangla and English for his filmmaker boyfriend. Soon, though, Choton starts to question not only what he thinks he knows about queerness in India, but what both queerness and his Indian heritage mean for him. When a rediscovered roll of film reveals surprisingly intimate photographs of Choton’s austere grandfather (taken by whom?), Choton’s understanding of his family, both living and dead, starts to unravel. What follows is a mesmerizing examination of intercultural identity, asking audiences to reconsider what we mean when we call a place home.

2022 Edinburgh Fringe First Award

Starting in the quaint days of dial-up and MSN, Happy Meal is a funny, moving and nostalgic story of transition, following two initial strangers on their journeys from teen to adult; from MySpace to TikTok; from cis to trans...

Tabby Lamb's joyful trans rom-com was directed by Jamie Fletcher and produced by Roots and Theatre Royal Plymouth, with ETT and Oxford Playhouse, on a UK tour in 2022, including a run at the Traverse Theatre during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where it won a Fringe First Award.

Every time you open your mouth on stage you are trying to persuade somebody of something.

Sometimes referred to as "the art of persuasion," rhetoric means using language to communicate your ideas and intentions to other people – and to make sure you are heard, understood and believed. This clear and concise guide explains how it works in plays, and how actors can use it to bring their performances to life on stage.

Drawing on her decades of experience working with actors on major productions, including as Head of Voice at the National Theatre, Jeannette Nelson introduces all the major rhetorical techniques and devices that playwrights use. She offers fascinating breakdowns of dialogue and speeches from across the theatrical canon – from Shakespeare and Ibsen, to Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry and Arthur Miller, right up to contemporary playwrights such as Helen Edmundson and Tanika Gupta. Each chapter also includes a series of practical exercises which combine spoken word with physical action to help you explore and understand these techniques, and harness their power in performance.

Whether you're an actor, a director or a drama teacher, Keeping It Active will empower you with a greater understanding of the ways that language underpins all dramatic works, and will give you the tools you need to unlock the text, understand characters, connect with the audience, and perform with greater confidence, focus and authenticity.

Quiara Alegría Hudes’ stage adaptation of her much-lauded memoir is a joyous celebration of Puerto Rican womanhood in 1990s West Philadelphia.

In this memoir-turned-play, Hudes showcases a handful of key life moments that mark subtle changes in her sense of self and her place in the world. Interlaid between these vignettes are moments of song, dance, and ritual that evoke her boisterous girlhood in a house run by the Perez women. Through this piece, we come to understand the collaborative art that was Hudes’s coming of age, and the communal nature of autobiography.

A heartrending yet hopeful play about two men’s parallel desires to build a secure foundation for their families even as everything around them is falling apart.

At first glance, Ryan and Keith are two men in Twin Falls, Idaho, who have nothing in common. Ryan, a factory worker in the throes of financial instability, seeks help from Keith, a mortgage broker, to secure a loan. The two bond over their love of their daugh­ters, as well as “a specific kind of sadness” that lives in the gap between their dreams and realities. Affecting in its seeming simplicity, Hunter’s play ultimately affirms, if not the existence of God, then at least the possibility that something sacred can come from the connection between two people.

When Yasmin and her guide, Tshering, return from a perilous expedition to Everest without a member of their party, they have a lot of questions to answer. Where is Yasmin's husband Charlie? What happened on the mountain? Why do Yasmin and Tshering's accounts differ so drastically?

As private investigator Connie tries to distinguish hallucination from reality, and fact from delusion, it's clear that someone, somewhere, is not telling the truth.

Set at an altitude where life hangs by a thread, Carmen Nasr's play The Climbers is a thrilling exploration of the lure of the mountains, the drive to conquer and the price of staying alive. It was first performed in June 2022 at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, directed by Guy Jones.

Raffish, urbane and frequently drunk, David Highland has kept a grip on his remote coastal parish through a combination of disordered charm and high-handed determination.

When his faith impels him to take a hard line with a bereaved parishioner, he finds himself dangerously isolated from public opinion. As his own family begins to fracture, David must face a future that threatens to extinguish not only his position in the town, but everything he stands for.

Stephen Beresford's play The Southbury Child is a darkly comic drama exploring family and community, the savage divisions of contemporary society, and the rituals that punctuate our lives. It was co-produced by Chichester Festival Theatre and the Bridge Theatre, London, in 2022, starring Alex Jennings and directed by Nicholas Hytner.

Subhi is a refugee. Born in an Australian permanent detention centre after his mother fled the violence of a distant homeland, life behind the fences is all he's ever known. Now his imagination is pushing at the limits of his world.

One day, Jimmie appears on the other side of the fence, bringing a notebook written by the mother she lost. Unable to read it, she relies on Subhi to unravel her own family's mysterious and moving history. Together, Subhi and Jimmie must find a way to freedom, and they must be braver than they've ever been before...

The Bone Sparrow, Zana Fraillon's powerful and deeply moving novel about the displacement and treatment of refugees and sanctuary seekers, has been widely read and studied around the world since its publication in 2017.

This enthralling stage adaptation by award-winning Australian playwright S. Shakthidharan was first produced on a UK tour in 2022 by Pilot Theatre with York Theatre Royal, Derby Theatre, Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, and Mercury Theatre Colchester.

A small asteroid has hit the capital city. Thousands have been displaced. And in a town far away, a young man called Vin is finding it hard to talk. The only person who seems to notice is Rach, who resolves to find out what's troubling him and help him find his voice again.

But when Rach's family take in an articulate and charismatic survivor of the asteroid incident, Vin's silence is no longer her first priority. How does it feel when the suffering of others seems more legitimate than our own?

James Fritz's Lava is a timely play about grief and the power of expression, rocking with raw emotion and sharp humour. It premiered at Nottingham Playhouse in 2018, in a co-production with Fifth Word who commissioned the play. It was revived on tour in 2022, including a run at Soho Theatre, London.

An ordinary Tuesday turns really, really weird when the sky over the school playground suddenly rips open. Pupils and teachers are sucked up to a parallel universe, whilst a new set of people start raining down from above. 'Us' and 'Them' must come together to work out what is going on, and how they can get things back to how they were.

Alison Carr's play Tuesday is funny and playful, with a little bit of sci-fi and a lot of big themes: friendship, family, identity, grief, responsibility – and what happens when an unexpected event literally turns the world upside-down.

Written specifically for young people, the play formed part of the 2020 and 2021 National Theatre Connections Festivals and was premiered by youth theatres across the UK. It offers opportunities for a large, flexible cast of any size, age and mix of genders.

This bilingual edition includes the original English play with a Welsh-language translation, Un Bore Mawrth, by playwright Daf James.

Un Bore Mawrth

''Wi 'di bod yn aros i rywbeth fel hyn ddigwydd. 'Wi'n synnu'i fod e 'di cymryd mor hir. Ma'r arwyddion 'di bod 'ma ers sbel.'

Dydd Mawrth digon cyffredin yw hi, ond yn sydyn mae'n troi'n ddiwrnod rhyfedd iawn pan mae'r awyr uwch ben yr ysgol yn rhwygo'n agored. Caiff disgyblion ac athrawon eu sugno i fyny i fydysawd cyfochrog wrth i garfan newydd o bobl arllwys i lawr oddi uchod. Rhaid i 'Ni' a 'Nhw' ddod ynghyd i ddeall beth sy'n digwydd ac i ddatrys sut i gael pethau'n ôl fel yr oedden nhw.

Mae'r ddrama wreiddiol hon gan Alison Carr, Tuesday, yn ddoniol ac yn chwareus, gyda phinsiad o ffugwyddoniaeth a thomen o themâu mawr: cyfeillgarwch, teulu, hunaniaeth, galar, cyfrifoldeb – a beth sy'n digwydd pan fydd digwyddiad annisgwyl yn llythrennol yn troi'r byd wyneb i waered.

Wedi'i hysgrifennu ar gyfer pobl ifanc, roedd y ddrama'n rhan o Ŵyl National Theatre Connections yn 2020 a 2021, a chafodd ei llwyfannu am y tro cyntaf gan theatrau ieuenctid ar draws y DU.

Mae'n cynnig cyfleoedd i gastiau mawr, hyblyg o unrhyw faint, oedran a rhywedd.

Mae Tuesday yn waith gosod ar fanyleb TGAU Drama CBAC. Yn y gyfrol ddwyieithog hon, fe welwch y ddrama wreiddiol Saesneg ynghyd â chyfieithiad Cymraeg y dramodydd Daf James, Un Bore Mawrth.

It's Year 10's first day back at school. Mark is new and too scared to make friends. Darren is out of control and too scary to make friends. The two of them need each other – but neither would ever admit it.

Worlds apart, but more similar than they realise, the pair form a complex and manipulative relationship. And before they know it, they're embarking on a dangerous experiment that will alter the course of their lives.

Sophie Swithinbank's play Bacon is an unflinching and unexpectedly humorous look at masculinity, sexuality and power, through the dizzying lens of youth.

First developed on the Soho Theatre Writers' Lab, it won the Tony Craze Award in 2018, and was first produced at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2022, directed by Matthew Iliffe.

A boldly theatrical time travel epic from one of the premier chroniclers of Black gay life in the American theatre.

In Robert O’Hara’s stunning debut play, gay Black grad student Ron is transported back in time with his 189-year-old great-great-grandfather to the time of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion. Applying a thrilling theatrical lens to some of the darkest chapters of American history, Insurrection: Holding History is an investigation of the scars of racism and homophobia, as well as a passionate tribute to the power of resistance. This play won O’Hara the1998 Oppenheimer Award for Best New Playwright.

Insurrection: Holding History received its world premiere at The Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival in 1996. It is the third title in the TCG Books Illuminations series, edited by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.

Seventeen-year-old Asha is an emphatic rebel, unafraid of pointing out the hypocrisy around her but less sure how to actually dismantle it. Her younger sister, Bettina, wide-eyed and naïve, is just trying to get through the school day without getting her pocket money nicked.

Between essays, homework and bus journeys home the two sisters meet outside the school gates each afternoon, smarting at the injustice of the world around them.

Bouncing with wit, Sonali Bhattacharyya’s mesmerizing play Two Billion Beats is an insightful, moving and tremendously funny coming-of-age story about the unfairness of growing up in a world where you don't make the rules.

It premiered at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, in February 2022.

An earlier version of the play was performed as part of the Orange Tree's Inside/Outside season, livestreamed in 2021.

In How Plays Work, distinguished playwright David Edgar examines the mechanisms and techniques which dramatists throughout the ages have employed to structure their plays and to express their meaning.

Written for playwrights and playgoers alike, Edgar's analysis starts with the building blocks of whole plays—plot, character-creation, genre and structure—and moves on to scenes and devices. He shows how plays share a common architecture without which the uniqueness of their authors' vision would be invisible.

How Plays Work is both a masterclass for playwrights and playmakers and a fascinating guide to the anatomy of drama. In this revised edition, Edgar brings the book right up to date with analyses of many recent plays, as well as explorations of emerging genres and new innovations in playwriting practice.

Two young people and their dæmons, with everything at stake, find themselves at the center of a terrifying manhunt. In their care is a tiny child called Lyra Belacqua, and in that child lies the fate of the future.

As the waters rise around them, powerful adversaries conspire for mastery of Dust: salvation to some, the source of infinite corruption to others.

Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust – La Belle Sauvage is set twelve years before the epic His Dark Materials trilogy. Bryony Lavery's stage adaptation was first performed at the Bridge Theatre, London, in December 2021, directed by Nicholas Hytner, whose groundbreaking production of His Dark Materials was a critical and commercial success at the National Theatre.

A teenage girl has something growing inside her. She doesn't know what it is, but she knows it's not a baby. It expands. It has claws. Eventually it takes over the entirety of her body.

No one must know about it. She has to keep its presence, its possession of her, concealed. She pulls away from her friends. She refuses to speak, in case "The IT" is heard. But she can't contain it forever. Sooner or later something's got to give...

Presented in the style of a direct-address documentary, Vivienne Franzmann's The IT is a darkly comic state-of-the-nation play exploring adolescent mental health and the rage within.

Written specifically for young people, the play formed part of the 2021 National Theatre Connections Festivals and was premiered by youth theatres across the UK. It offers opportunities for a large, flexible cast of any size and mix of genders.

Emergency rooms, scans, tests, blood work, and more blood work . . . Robert’s had a wide range of concerning symptoms checked. Multiple times. And yet he still has no answers as to why everything hurts. So he wonders, is he Tennessee Williams or Dorothy Zbornak? Could all of it be in his head?

Everybody Just C@lm the F#ck Down is a multi-layered story of anxiety in which Robert explores the shifting planes of middle age, mortality, grief, and creativity while learning how to embrace a lack of control.

Jenny and Sam—and their baby Phoebe—have recently moved into their new home. But something feels frightening and wrong. Very wrong. Over the baby monitor, at 2:22 every night, Jenny hears footsteps around her daughter's cot. Could the house be haunted?

When their friends Lauren and Ben come round for a housewarming dinner, they drink wine, relive their pasts, and argue about the existence of ghosts. They decide to stay up until 2:22, to discover the truth. Over one adrenaline-filled night—as the foxes scream outside—secrets will emerge and ghosts may appear…

Spine-chilling, funny and scary, Danny Robins' play 2:22 premiered at the Noël Coward Theatre in London's West End in August 2021, directed by Matthew Dunster, and starring Lily Allen, Julia Chan, Hadley Fraser and Jake Wood. It provides rich opportunities for any drama group wanting to make things go bump in the night—and their audiences scream.

Winston Smith is in prison, found guilty of Thoughtcrimes against Big Brother. As part of his reconstruction, he must re-enact key moments from his past life, with the help of other thought criminals, so that everyone can learn from his mistakes. Including his biggest mistake of all: falling in love with Julia.

George Orwell's classic dystopia 1984 is a still-resonant vision of the tolls of living under totalitarianism. Constructed almost entirely from dialogue taken from the original novel, this bold and powerful dramatization restores the blazing heart of Orwell's work: a doomed love story, with the lovers at its center.

This pre-eminently stageable version, adapted with an eye on economy by Nick Hern for a cast of five or more, is ideal for any school, youth group or amateur company looking to bring Orwell's chilling vision to life on stage.

When a woman receives an unexpected letter from the British Passport Office, she is forced to confront an old mystery: why does her South African passport not carry her first name? Armed with the wisdom of favourite '90s TV shows, she sets out on a journey that will take her back to the turmoil of Mobutu's Congo, growing up in post-Apartheid South Africa, moving to Ireland, and finding love in a hostile England.

As her journey becomes inextricably linked with the tides of global history, how far will she go to unravel the truth? By turns wickedly funny and strikingly lyrical, Benedict Lombe's Lava is an explosive debut play that will turn the way you see the world on its axis.

It premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in July 2021, performed by Ronke Adékoluejo and directed by Anthony Simpson-Pike.

Three generations of a family argue over current events, finances, and culture, with everyone looking to blame someone else for society’s ills in this satirical examination of how judgment can both divide and unite people.

Elizabeth, the matriarch, has invited her children and grandchildren over for dinner. Instead of a nice family meal, it quickly slides into the adults arguing in the dining room and the kids fighting in the living room. Rapid-fire dialogue fuses and overlaps, but no one listens to each other. A blistering take on the family drama, Public Enemy asks, who’s really responsible for all our suffering?

On the set of a new film about Victorian artist J.M.W. Turner, young actress Lou is haunted by an unresolved history. Meanwhile, in 1840, Londoners Lucy and Thomas try to come to terms with the meaning of freedom.

Moving between London past and present, Winsome Pinnock's astonishing play retells British history through the prism of the slave trade. Fusing fact with fiction, and the powerfully personal with the fiercely political, Rockets and Blue Lights asks who owns our past – and who has the right to tell its stories?

Winner of the 2018 Alfred Fagon Award, the play opened at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, in 2020, directed by Miranda Cromwell. It transferred to the National Theatre, London, in 2021.

In his work, Samuel D. Hunter has a singular gift for exploring the decline of small-town America with an empathetic yet incisive eye. His plays take place in corners of the country that are receding from the forefront of contemporary American life, focusing on those who get left behind, isolated and disillusioned with the false promise of the American dream. This new collection contains three striking, deeply-felt plays, all set in Hunter's home state of Idaho. In Greater Clements, the longtime residents of a dying Idaho mining town have voted to unincorporate in order to retaliate against the wealthy out-of-staters who are buying up property. In doing so, they also speed the town's decline, forcing them to reckon with their desire to hold onto their history while struggling to find a path forward. In Lewiston, an aging descendant of Meriwether Lewis sells off her family’s land as she becomes increasingly convinced that her family’s past is a curse. But when an unexpected visitor enters the picture, she is left to consider whether any good remains in the world. In Clarkston, a young descendant of William Clark has made the journey out west from his home in Connecticut, anxious to find meaning in his own history. Faced with the reality of the diminished towns that used to make up America’s shining frontier, his faith in his future and the future of the country itself begins to falter.

Kilnsea, East Yorkshire. Angie and Lauren are closing up the café for another winter; the birds have gone south and taken the tourists with them. The last visitor is Dennis, stopping by for his pasty and beans. But there's another arrival – one that's unforeseen and life-changing for them all.

Big Big Sky is a beautifully tender play by Tom Wells, who was originally from Kilnsea. The play explores nature's influence on love, friendship and family – the belief that anyone who's lost can be found, even in the remotest of places. It was premiered at Hampstead Theatre in July 2021, directed by Tessa Walker.

A dinner party during the Second World War unites celebrated writers Agatha Christie, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas – with a mysterious guest.

With copious booze flowing, acid-tongued barbs flying, and the threat of global conflict looming, the guests – and the world around them – are close to boiling point. Everyone has a confession. Someone has a secret.

Set in the French Alps in 1940, Steven Carl McCasland’s Little Wars is an enthralling, entertaining and ultimately moving portrait of seven exceptional women – and a thrilling fiction based on truth.

It was workshopped Off-Off-Broadway, first performed in 2015, and received an acclaimed digital premiere in 2020, featuring Linda Bassett, Sarah Solemani, Juliet Stevenson and Sophie Thompson. It provides glorious opportunities for an all-female cast to play some of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century.

A sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreaking journey into the world of autism.

Sandra is looking for love. Gordon is seeking acceptance. Simon just wants these parents to stop talking for two minutes so he can get on with teaching their kids.

And Casper? Casper is not here.

Jody O'Neill's play What I (Don't) Know About Autism mixes narrative, song, dance and direct address to explore this contentious and often misunderstood subject matter.

What I (Don't) Know About Autism was co-produced by Jody O'Neill and the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in association with The Everyman, Cork, and Mermaid County Wicklow Arts Centre, Bray. It was first performed, with all relaxed performances and a cast of autistic and non-autistic actors, on the Abbey's Peacock Stage, in February 2020, before touring.