TCG Books

“The play nicely combines Pinterian menace with caustic political commentary.” –Time

“Acerbic, elusive, poetic and chilling, the writing is demanding in a rarefied manner. Its implications are both affecting and disturbing.” –Los Angeles Times

“In his exquisitely written dramatic lament for the decline of high culture. . . . [Shawn] offers a definition of the self that should rattle the defenses of intellectual snobs everywhere.” –The New York Times

Writer and performer Wallace Shawn’s landmark 1996 play features three characters—a respected poet, his daughter, and her English-professor husband—suspected of subversion in a world where culture has come under the control of the ruling oligarchy. Told through three interwoven monologues, the Orwellian political story is recounted alongside the visceral dissolution of a marriage. The play debuted at the Royal National Theatre in London, in a production directed by David Hare, who also directed the film version, starring Mike Nichols and Miranda Richardson. The play’s subsequent New York premiere was staged in a long-abandoned men’s club in lower Manhattan, directed by Shawn’s longtime collaborator André Gregory.

Wallace Shawn is the author of Our Late Night (OBIE Award for Best Play), Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, and the screenplay for My Dinner with André. His most recent play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, premiered last year in London.

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

“Rock is alive and rolling like thunder in Next to Normal. It’s the best musical of the season by a mile...an emotional powerhouse with a fire in its soul and a wicked wit that burns just as fiercely.”—Rolling Stone

“No show on Broadway right now makes as a direct grab for the heart—or wrings it as thoroughly—as Next to Normal does. . . . [It] focuses squarely on the pain that cripples the members of a suburban family, and never for a minute does it let you escape the anguish at the core of their lives. Next to Normal does not, in other words, qualify as your standard feel-good musical. Instead this portrait of a manic-depressive mother and the people she loves and damages is something much more: a feel-everything musical, which asks you, with operatic force, to discover the liberation in knowing where it hurts.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Winner of three 2009 Tony Awards, including Best Original Score (Music and/or Lyrics) Written for the Theatre, Next to Normal is also available in an original cast recording. It was named Best Musical of the Season by Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times.

Brian Yorkey received the 2009 Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work on Next to Normal and was also nominated for Best Book of a Musical. His other credits include Making Tracks and Time After Time.

Tom Kitt received two 2009 Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations for Next to Normal. He also composed the music for High Fidelity and From Up Here. His string arrangements appear on the new Green Day album 21st Century Breakdown, and he is the leader of the Tom Kitt Band.

A new title in the ever-popular Drama Games series, Thomasina Unsworth (teacher at Rose Bruford College) presents over eighty energizing, instructive, and dynamic games for actors to develop their own performances—by working on themselves, their characters, and their connection to the text.

Mysterious while compelling, bewildering while intoxicating, Stoning Mary is a mix of Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane, and Edward Bond. Yet Debbie Tucker Green has a voice all her own, one that mixes poetic rhythms with vernacular phrases, rap-song repetitions with complex psychology. In 2004, she won the Olivier Award for Most Promising Newcomer.

Insightful, empowering and always reassuring, this book provides all the tools actors need to understand, confront, and ultimately overcome stage fright and its effects, thereby regaining control over their lives and careers. It’s also valuable reading for any teacher, director or stage manager working closely with actors, and a fascinating insight for anyone interested in what actors go through.

Originally a 1962 film starring Jack Lemmon, Days of Wine and Roses concerns a young alcoholic who drags his much-loved wife with him into the swamp of addiction, from which only he escapes. Northern Irish writer McCafferty has relocated the action to 1960s London, where the young couple has just arrived from Belfast.

A resource book, packed with 101 lively drama games for use in any classroom or workshop setting, suitable for players of all ages. These games explore a wide range of core drama skills: energy, focus, teamwork, trust, character, storytelling, imagination, and improvisation, as well as warming up and cooling down exercises.

Last week, Andrew was that guy with his girl lunching in KFC and making plans for the future. Today he's in Moscow, on the run and at risk of assassination. Loosely based on the case of CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, this is a darkly comic play that explores the unexpected and life-changing consequences of challenging the status quo at a global level.

Traditionally seen as either the pawn of an ambitious family maneuvered into the King's bed or as a predator manipulating her way to power, Anne—and her ghost—are seen in a very different light in Howard Brenton's epic play.

A new title in the ever-growing, increasingly popular Drama Games series: another dip-in, flick-through, quick-fire resource book, packed with dozens of drama games that can be used in rehearsals. This latest book from acclaimed playwright, director, and theater educator Jessica Swale is an invaluable resource for directors, teachers, students, and actors.

An accessible insider's guide to creating a play from scratch, from the award-winning author of The Reluctant Escapologist. Mike Bradwell serves up a clear and precise analysis of how an improvised play is put together, and how those same techniques can be invaluable even when working on a scripted play.

Fifty monologues for men drawn from across the Shakespeare canon. Each is prefaced with an easy-to-use guide to who is speaking, where, when, and to whom; what has just happened in the play; and what the character’s objectives are. In fact, it contains everything the actor needs to know before embarking on the audition!

For all levels creating new theater pieces from scratch and getting the creative juices flowing. Written with clear instructions on How to Play and notes on the Aim of the Game, it covers every aspect of the devising process: creating characters and scenarios, using stimuli, improvising dialogue, structuring the piece, and creating an ensemble.

Norman Davenport feels he was born in the wrong century. Disappointed that he is forced to cater to more current tastes when he opens a brand new clothing store, Norman makes a wish that changes his life—and the lives of his two loyal employees—forever. A delightful new play from one of Canada's most-produced playwrights.

"What Churchill has written is a striking memento mori for an age without faith; and although her play is brief, that in itself evokes the idea that we are here for a short time and then are suddenly gone."— The Guardian on Here We Go

"Line by line it's hard to imagine you'll come across a more brilliant play this year . . . and what makes Escaped Alone a great play is that it is strangely euphoric: spiked with terrible, apocalyptic foreboding, yes, but Churchill's funniest since Serious Money, and with an incredible gift for spinning light out of the dark."—Time Out London on Escaped Alone

The prolific repertoire of Caryl Churchill gains two thrilling new entries with Here We Go and Escaped Alone, both exemplary of her notoriously dark, witty work. Creeping and ruminative, Here We Go "acts as a chilling reminder of our own mortality" (The Guardian), with a three-part examination of death and its aftermath. Escaped Alone considers a notably broader demise: the apocalypse. Through the musings of four older women idly chatting in an English back garden, the fate of the world is outlined in an unsettling revelation of mankind's own self-destruction.

Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television, and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest , and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

"A lyrical and understanding chronicler of people who somehow become displaced within their own lives…Mr. Lindsay-Abaire has shown a special affinity for female characters suddenly forced to re-evaluate the roles by which they define themselves."—New York Times

Set in the Bristol Place Assisted Living Facility, this glorious and biting new comedy from David Lindsay-Abaire centers around Abby, who takes pride in her residence in one of the most coveted rooms in the rest home. Things turn sour quickly when she must take in Marilyn, a new roommate to share her precious space. In a satirical conflict of territory and control, Lindsay-Abaire spins a benign, typically mundane setting into an absurdist, colorful battleground. This high-stakes comedy examines our expectations of what it means to grow old in twenty-first century America, and what happens when a sense of possession collides with a mania of obsession.

David Lindsay-Abaire's plays include Good People, Fuddy Meers, Kimberly Akimbo, Wonder of the World, High Fidelity, A Devil Inside, and Rabbit Hole, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Lindsay-Abaire wrote the book for Shrek the Musical, and the screen adaptation of Rabbit Hole starring Nicole Kidman. Lindsay-Abaire is a proud New Dramatists alum, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Juilliard School, as well as a member of the WGA and the Dramatists Guild Council.

"One of the most spectacularly original plays in recent memory."—Entertainment Weekly

"Fascinating and hilarious . . . With each of its three acts, Mr. Burns grows grander."—Village Voice

"When was the last time you met a new play that was so smart it made your head spin? . . . Mr. Burns has arrived to leave you dizzy with the scope and dazzle of its ideas . . . with depths of feeling to match its breadth of imagination."—The New York Times

An ode to live theater and the resilience of The Simpsons, Anne Washburn's apocalyptic comedy Mr. Burns—"even better than its hype" (New York Post)—is an imaginative exploration of how the culture of one generation can evolve into the mythology of the next. Following an enthusiastic critical reception from New York critics for its world premiere, Mr. Burns will receive its London premiere in spring 2014. Also included in the collection are The Small, I Have Loved Strangers, and 10 Out of 12, all of which, together, develop a theme of destruction, from the personal to the city to civilization and, finally, to the destruction of form.

Anne Washburn's plays include The Internationalist, A Devil at Noon, Apparition, The Communist Dracula Pageant, I Have Loved Strangers, The Ladies, The Small, and a transadaptation of Euripides's Orestes. Her awards include a Guggenheim, NYFA Fellowship, Time Warner Fellowship, and a Susan Smith Blackburn finalist. She is a member of 13P, The Civilians, and is a New Georges affiliated artist.

Now a major motion picture! Starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley from his Pulitzer Prize–winning play.

“The best new play of the season. That rarity of rarities, an issue-driven play that is unpreachy, thought-provoking, and so full of high drama that the audience with which I saw it gasped out loud a half-dozen times at its startling twists and turns. Mr. Shanley deserves the highest possible praise: he doesn’t try to talk you into doing anything but thinking-hard-about the gnarly complexity of human behavior.”—Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal

“A breathtaking work of immense proportion. Positively brilliant.”—Melissa Rose Bernardo, Entertainment Weekly

“#1 show of the year. How splendid it feels to be trusted with such passionate, exquisite ambiguity unlike anything we have seen from this prolific playwright so far. In just ninety fast-moving minutes, Shanley creates four blazingly individual people. Doubt is a lean, potent drama . . . passionate, exquisite, important and engrossing.”—Linda Winer, Newsday

John Patrick Shanley is the author of numerous plays, including Danny in the Deep Blue Sea, Dirty Story, Four Dogs and a Bone, Psychopathia, Sexualis, Sailor’s Song, Savage in Limbo, and Where’s My Money? He has written extensively for TV and film, and his credits include the teleplay for Live from Baghdad and screenplays for Congo; Alive; Five Corners; Joe Versus the Volcano, which he also directed; and Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for best original screenplay.

“Lynn Nottage’s work explores depths of humanness, the overlapping complexities of race, gender, culture and history—and the startling simplicity of desire—with a clear tenderness, with humor, with compassion.” —Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright

Intimate Apparel: “Thoughtful, affecting new play . . . with seamless elegance.”—Charles Isherwood, Variety

Fabulation: “Robustly entertaining comedy . . . with punchy social insights and the firecracker snap of unexpected humor.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

With her two latest plays, “exceptionally gifted playwright” (New York Observer) Lynn Nottage has created companion pieces that span 100 years in the lives of 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.

Lynn Nottage’s plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Mud, River, Stone; Por’ Knockers; Las Menias; Fabulation and Intimate Apparel, for which she was awarded the Francesca Primus Prize and the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award in 2004. Her plays have been produced at theatres throughout the country, with Intimate Apparel slated for 16 productions during the 2005–2006 season.

This book collects three plays and one manifesto by writer-director Julia Jarcho, including American Treasure, Dreamless Land, and Grimly Handsome, winner of a 2013 Obie award for Best New American Play.