TCG Books

“McCraney’s richly drawn characters and colloquial poetry . . . manages to sound both epic and rooted in a specific place. Listen closely, and you might hear that thrilling sound that is one of the main reasons we go to the theater, that beautiful music of a new voice.”—The New York Times

“Taut, expressive drama, The Brothers Size realizes the potential of theater to elevate the ordinary. . . . McCraney’s writing can be arresting.”—Time Out New York

This is the first collection by Tarell Alvin McCraney, a major new playwright of the American theater. Lyrical and mythic, provocative and contemporary, McCraney’s dramas of kinship, love, and heartache are set in the bayou of Louisiana and loosely draw on West African myths. In the Red and Brown Water charts the story of Oya, a fast and beautiful track star who must make difficult choices on her journey to womanhood. The Brothers Size dramatizes the struggle between brothers who have taken different paths: Ogun, single-mindedly running his auto shop, and Oshoosi, recently returned from prison and fallen back with trouble. Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet explores a young man’s relationship with his history and friends as he discovers his sexuality and true self against the backdrop of an impending storm.

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s other works include Wig Out! and The Breach. His plays have been produced at The Public Theater in New York, internationally at the Royal Court Theatre and Abbey Theatre, and throughout the United States.

“This brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls.”—Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

“The staggering purity of this show will touch all open hearts…In its refined, imaginative simplicity, it daringly reverses all the conventional rules by returning the American musical to an original state of innocence.”—John Heilpern, The New York Observer

“An unexpected jolt of sudden genius, edgy in its brutally honest, unromanticized depiction of human sexuality.”—New York Post

Spring Awakening is an extraordinary new rock musical with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Grammy Award-nominated recording artist Duncan Sheik. Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play about teenage sexuality and society’s efforts to control it, the piece seamlessly merges past and present, underscoring the timelessness of adolescent angst and the universality of human passion.

Steven Sater’s plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize/Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), and a reconceived version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, which played in London.

Duncan Sheik is a singer/songwriter who also collaborated with Sater on the musical The Nightingale. He has composed original music for The Gold Rooms of Nero and for The Public Theater’s Twelfth Night in Central Park.

This collection includes Lynn Nottage’s best known work, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, which has been produced widely since its premiere in May 1995 and which the Chicago Tribune hailed as "a complex and thought provoking new play." Also included are Mud, River, Stone, Poof, Por’Knockers and her latest work, Las Meninas, inspired by the playwright’s research into the African presence in 17th century Europe.

Lynn Nottage lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her plays have been produced in many theatres across the U.S. including Second Stage (NY), South Coast Rep (Costa Mesa), Yale Repertory Theatre (New Haven), Alliance Theatre (Atlanta) and Steppenwolf (Chicago). She has won the Heideman and the White Bird awards and was a runner-up for the Susan Blackburn award.

“Bone Songs is a series of love poems, inspired by 33 years of marriage . . . The sonata-style material, which evokes Rumi, Thornton Wilder and James Joyce without ever seeming referential, is elegiac, furious and rhapsodic by turns—true theatrical poetry.”—David C. Nichols, Los Angeles Times

“To describe André’s contribution [as a theatre artist] gets into something which is enormously intangible. His greatest accomplishments are really in the realm of human insight and psychological truth.”—Wallace Shawn

Bone Songs is a meditation on the journey of marriage and the meaning of one’s long life, by acclaimed avant-garde theatre director André Gregory. Loosely based on Solomon’s Song of Songs, it takes the shape of a passionate conversation with the artist’s late wife. Gregory performs Bone Songs as a kind of “After Dinner with André,” weaving together his own personal anecdotes with the journey of five characters on a cruise to Antarctica: a young couple honeymooning, a middle-aged couple dealing with illness and an old man returning after the death of his wife. The signature performances sold out in Los Angeles and will debut this season in New York.

André Gregory has been one of the most important forces in the American theatre for nearly 40 years. He was the founder of Seattle Repertory Theatre, and in the late 1960s created the Manhattan Project, one of the leading theatres in the New York avant-garde. His ongoing collaboration with playwright Wallace Shawn is at the center of such films as My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street. His legendary production of Alice in Wonderland played in New York for seven years, and toured the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.

“I came to see that a line that simply says ‘I love you,’ at the right point in the show, is entirely adequate, that a great deal of verbal sophistication is not necessarily called for. . . . Speak-ability is so important. That’s something I slowly had to learn about poetry, and something I had to work on always with Molière.”—Richard Wilbur

Lovers’ Quarrels is Molière’s second full-length verse play, animated with deception and tangles of love.

Richard Wilbur is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former Poet Laureate of the United States. His verse translations of Molière’s plays have been performed for audiences throughout the world.

"Richard Foreman reinvented dialogue, action, sound, stage design, and philosophical groundwork as no other stage artist in our history."—PEN/Laura Pels Master American Dramatist Award citation

During the forty-five years Richard Foreman has been staging his wildly inventive work, he has been wrestling with the basic question of "What is art?" This book collects his writings on the subject, from his early manifestos through his recent transition to film, and provides a fascinating window into this singular artist's mind and creative process.

Richard Foreman has written, directed, and designed more than fifty of his own plays, both internationally and at his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, which he founded in 1968. He has received many OBIE awards, an NEA Lifetime Achievement Award, and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.

"The words of Nilo Cruz waft from the stage like a scented breeze. They sparkle and prickle and swirl, enveloping those who listen in both specific place and time . . . and in timeless passions that touch us all."—The Miami Herald

One of the United States' most-produced Cuban American writers, Nilo Cruz employs his signature poetic imagery and vivid language to tender and humorous effect in this pair of his newest works. The Color of Desire, set in 1960 Havana, revolves around a passionate romance between an American businessman and an out-of-work Cuban actress. As the relationship becomes a metaphor for their countries' ruptured love affair, Cruz artfully weds magical realism to a familial story that is touching, harrowing, and funny. In Hurricane, a damaged family—a fire-and-brimstone missionary; his wife, who he saved in more than the spiritual sense; and their adopted son, who seems to have materialized from the ocean—face a shocking crisis when a hurricane ravages their Caribbean town. A celebration of humility, generosity, and kindness, Cruz's play explores the nature of identity, faith, and the redemptive power of love.

Nilo Cruz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Anna in the Tropics, as well as A Park in Our House, A Bicycle Country, Dancing on Her Knees, Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, and other works.

Acknowledged as the nation’s foremost expert on audience development involving America’s growing multicultural population by the Arts and Business Council, Donna Walker-Kuhne has now written the first book describing her strategies and methods to engage diverse communities as participants for arts and culture. By offering strategic collaborations and efforts to develop and sustain nontraditional audiences, this book will directly impact the stability and future of America’s cultural and artistic landscape. Donna Walker-Kuhne has spent the last 20 years developing and refining these principles with such success as both the Broadway and national touring productions of Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, as well as transforming the audiences at one of the U.S.’s most important and visible arts institutions, New York’s Public Theater. This book is a practical and inspirational guide on ways to invite, engage and partner with culturally diverse communities, and how to enfranchise those communities into the fabric of arts and culture in the United States.

Donna Walker-Kuhne is the president of Walker International Communications Group. From 1993 to 2002, she served as the marketing director for the Public Theater in New York, where she originated a range of audience-development activities for children, students and adults throughout New York City. Ms. Walker-Kuhne is an Adjunct Professor in marketing the arts at Fordham University, Brooklyn College and New York University. She was formerly marketing director for Dance Theatre of Harlem. Ms. Walker-Kuhne has given numerous workshops and presentations for arts groups throughout the U.S., including the Arts and Business Council, League of American Theaters and Producers, the Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for Arts to name a few. She has been nominated for the Ford Foundation’s 2001 Leadership for a Changing World Fellowship.

“Richard Wilbur’s translations of classic French drama are among the undiscovered treasure of our recent literature.”–The Hudson Review

Molière’s late, elegant comedy, based on Plautus’ Roman version, alludes to the love affairs of the French king. This is the fourth and final volume of Theatre Communication Group’s series (with cover designs by Chip Kidd), completing trade publication of these vital theatrical works. ncludes Richard Wilbur’s translation notes.

Richard Wilbur is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and a former poet laureate of the United States. His verse translations of Molière’s plays have been performed for audiences throughout the world.

This anthology marks the emergence of one of the finest and most innovative new artists writing for the theater today. “The secret of Shinn’s success is in the way he exploits the dramatic gap between what is said and that which is left unsaid . . . writing like this is rare,” said the London Independent. Where Do We Live, the title play, was written shortly after 9/11 and though never referenced, it still haunts this chronicle of the struggles of several aspiring and gifted young New Yorkers on the Lower East Side. Like all his work, it is a deeply affecting story of how we define our lives and our place in the world.

The Coming World
“Shinn certainly looks like a shining prospect for the future.”—Daily Telegraph

Four
“Nothing is simple emotionally. The play keeps delivering small shocks and aches that end in a standoff, or maybe in that pause between despair, resignation and a twinge of hope. Haunting.”—Margo Jefferson, The New York Times

Other People
“Shinn writes with graceful compassion about people trapped inside their own skins unable to make sense of their lives.”—The Guardian

What Didn’t Happen
“. . . is about the distance between people, and the ways in which even friends, spouses and lovers are ultimately unknowable to one another . . . a playwright to cherish.”—The New York Times

Christopher Shinn’s plays have been produced at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan Theatre Club, the Vineyard Theatre in New York and often at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Where Do We Live received a 2003 Olivier Award nomination for most promising playwright. His next play, On the Mountain, premieres in New York City early in 2005.

“My notion of translation is that you try to bring it back alive. . . . If you take on a text which is somehow appropriate to you and which you may already love, what you want to do is to be as perfectly the slave of it as you can be.”—Richard Wilbur

Originally inspired by a revelatory Comédie-Française production of The Misanthrope in 1948 Paris, Richard Wilbur has made translating Molière part of his lifework. These two comedies of marriage and misunderstanding are gathered here in a single volume that is part of TCG’s new series (with design by Chip Kidd) to complete trade publication of these vital theatrical works.

“Nearly everything about David Adjmi’s Stunning has an original ring to it, from the setting . . . to the brassy bleat of the dialogue." –Time Out New York

This volume of distinctive work includes Stunning, set in an insular Syrian Jewish community, where a teenage bride’s world is disrupted by her intellectual African American housekeeper; Evildoers, about the collapse of two privileged couples; and Elective Affinities, a post-9/11 monologue.

David Adjimi’s other plays include Marie Antoninette, 3C, Strange Attractions, and Caligula. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award and Steinberg Playwright Award, among others. Stunning was selected to appear in The 2012 Methuen Drama Book of New American Plays. His as-yet-untitled memoir is forthcoming from Harper Collins. Adjimi is a member of New Dramatists, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and the Juliard School. This is his first play collection.

“A fascinating and provocatively stimulating distillation of three decades of intense conversations between one of the twentieth century’s few true theater innovators and America’s leading writer on the theatrical avant-garde. A splendid book.”—Clive Barnes

“Peter Brook continues to astonish, not in an ordinary, fashionable way, but in an ancient, insistent way that always forces one inward. There is a true, honest, fearless voice in this fascinating conversation.”—Ken Burns

Peter Brook, one of the most important contemporary theatrical directors in the West, shares his most insightful thoughts and deepest feelings about theater with Margaret Croyden, who has followed his career for thirty years, gaining an unparalleled perspective on the evolution of his work. In these interchanges from 1970 to 2000, Brook freely discusses major works such as his landmark airborne A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his untraditional interpretation of the opera La Tragédie de Carmen. He also covers the establishment of the Paris Center, his work in the Middle East and Africa, and his masterwork, the nine-hour production of The Mahabharata, which has virtually reinvented the way actors and directors think about theater.

Margaret Croyden is a well-known critic, commentator, and journalist, whose articles on theater and the arts have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Village Voice, American Theatre, and Antioch Review, among others. She is the author of Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, a seminal book on the development of nonliterary theater.

"Fifty Words has a gimlet eye, providing meticulously chosen, artfully integrated details that let us understand why its characters so love and loathe each other. Like Mr. Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it understands how closely hate and love can be linked in marriage."—The New York Times

In Fifty Words, a Brooklyn brownstone becomes a marital battleground for Adam and Jan; What the Night Is For dramatizes Adam's infidelity at a hotel with former lover Melinda; and in Side Effects, Melinda and her husband Hugh come to terms with their broken relationship.

Michael Weller has written over forty dramatic works, including the plays Moonchildren, Fishing, Loose Ends, and Beast, and the screenplays for Hair and Ragtime.

“Naomi Wallace commits the unpardonable sin of being partisan, and, the darkness and harshness of her work notwithstanding, outrageously optimistic. She seems to believe the world can change. She certainly writes as if she intends to set it on fire.”—Tony Kushner

Naomi Wallace, the rare writer who combines lyrical theatricality with political ferocity, turns her sight to the Middle East, with a new triptych for the stage. Vision One, A State of Innocence, is set—as the playwright describes, in “something like a small zoo, but more silent, empty, in Rafah, Palestine. Or a space that once dreamed it was a zoo”—and features a Palestinian woman, an Israeli architect, and an Israeli soldier. Vision Two, The Retreating World, is of an Iraqi bird keeper from Baghdad and his address before the International Pigeon Convention. Vision Three, Between this Breath and You, takes place after hours in the waiting room of a clinic in West Jerusalem, where a Palestinian father confronts the nurse’s aide, a young Israeli woman, about the meaning of the loss of his son and the impact it had on her life. These multifaceted works explore the urgency and complexity of the Middle East’s political landscape, through the voices and bodies of the people who inhabit it.

Naomi Wallace is a poet and playwright from Kentucky, who currently resides in England. Her numerous awards include the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Her plays, including One Flea Spare, In the Heart of America, and Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, are produced throughout the United States and around the world.

"Marvelous . . . the conceit is elegantly of a piece, yet Hwang is able to keep turning it in on itself to reveal new ambiguities, absurdities, subversions and paradoxes."—Chicago Reader

"Hwang's plays collectively chart the evolving definition of what it is to be an 'American.' . . . His art has illuminated and anticipated our ongoing national story with a sensibility unlike any other in the American theater."—Frank Rich

Springing from the author's personal experiences in China over the past five years, Chinglish follows a Midwestern American businessman desperately seeking to score a lucrative contact for his family's firm as he travels to China only to discover how much he doesn't understand. Named for the unique and often comical third language that evolves from attempts to translate Chinese signs into English, Chinglish explores the challenges of doing business in a culture whose language—and ways of communicating—are worlds apart from our own. David Henry Hwang's "best new work since M. Butterfly, this shrewd, timely and razor-sharp comedy" (Chicago Tribune) received its Broadway premiere in fall 2011.

David Henry Hwang is the author of the Tony Award–winning M. Butterfly, the Pulitzer Prize–finalist Yellow Face, Golden Child, FOB, Family Devotions, and the books for musicals Aida (as co-author), Flower Drum Song (2002 Broadway revival), and Tarzan, among other works.

“The finest new American play I’ve seen in a long while . . . Dying City is a political play and also a psychodrama about what Arthur Miller called the politics of the soul. It’s about public conscience and private grief, and real and symbolic catastrophes.”—The New York Observer

“Anyone who doubts that Mr. Shinn is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today need only experience the . . . sophisticated welding of form and content that is Dying City.”—The New York Times

In Christopher Shinn’s new play Dying City, a young therapist, Kelly, whose husband Craig was killed while on military duty in Iraq, is confronted a year later by his identical twin Peter, who suspects that Craig’s death was not accidental. Set in a spare downtown-Manhattan apartment after dark, scenes shift from the confrontation between Peter and Kelly, to Kelly’s complicated farewell with her husband Craig. Shinn’s creepy, sophisticated drama—infused with references to 9/11 and the war in Iraq—explores how contemporary politics and recent history have transformed the lives of these three characters.

Christopher Shinn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and lives in New York. His plays include Where Do We Live, Other People, What Didn’t Happen, and On the Mountain, which have been widely produced in New York, across the United States, and in London. He is the recipient of an OBIE Award in Playwriting, as well as the Robert S. Chesney Award. He teaches playwriting at The New School for Drama.

"The finest American author of his generation."—Sunday Mail

Nothing is quite what it seems in David Mamet's latest work. With a nod to his mentor, Harold Pinter, Mamet once again employs his signature verbal jousting in this battle of two women over freedom, power, money, religion—and the lack thereof. Broadway premiere, under the direction of the playwright, in fall 2012 starring Patti LuPone and Debra Winger.

David Mamet is a playwright, director, author, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. His plays include Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, A Life in the Theatre, Oleanna, The Cryptogram, and Race.

"The cumulative power of these shared stories is nothing short of astonishing. Ping Chong creates a tremendous tapestry of lives."—Twin Cities Reader

In Chong's extraordinary series of choral documentary dramas, bodies that had once been rendered 'undesirable elements' become - as bodies on stage always do, through the theater's magical mechanisms of empathy and display - emphatically desirable. The performers - who are not professional actors - live in the community where they are performing and, most important, they are telling their own stories. Through the act of naming themselves and recounting how they came to be here - quite literally here, now, in the theater, as well as here in this town in the United States - they claim their place in the body politic. Theater, like America, is a space of self-making. The Undesirable Elements series offers a distilled, elegant demonstration of that exhilarating and complicated process." - Alisa Solomon, from Her Introduction

This four-piece volume of Undesirable Elements, the community-specific theater works series, examines the lives of those born into one culture but living in another. Each production grows out of an extended residency, during which Ping Chong and his collaborators conduct interviews of community members and then create a script that explores both historical and personal narratives.

Ping Chong is a theater director, playwright, choreographer, and video and installation artist. The recipient of two OBIE awards, two Bessie awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he has created more than fifty works for the stage, including twenty-five in his Undesirable Elements series.

“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.

"Drawn in subtle but indelible strokes, Mr. Karam's play might almost qualify as deep-delving reportage, so clearly does it illuminate the current, tremor-ridden landscape of contemporary America. The finest new play of the Broadway season so far — by a long shot."—Charles Isherwood, The New York Times

Breaking with tradition, Erik Blake has brought his Pennsylvania family to celebrate Thanksgiving at his daughter's apartment in lower Manhattan. Unfolding over a single scene, this "delirious tragicomedy" (Chicago Sun-Times) by acclaimed young playwright Stephen Karam "infuses the traditional kitchen-sink family drama with qualities of horror in his portentous and penetrating work of psychological unease" (Variety), creating an indelible family portrait.

Stephen Karam's plays include Speech & Debate and Sons of the Prophet, a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the 2012 Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Lucille Lortel and Hull-Warriner awards for Best Play. Born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, he now lives in New York City, New York.

"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.

Included in this frequently inspiring and often poignant volume of plays, originally published in 1985, are works penned in the same era as the Vietnam War from some of the most revered playwrights in the national canon. The challenging work within—from playwrights like Terrence McNally, Emily Mann and David Rabe—reflects on the social and political ethos of this pivotal moment for America.

Plays include Streamers by David Rabe, Botticelli by Terrence McNally, How I Got That Story by Amlin Gray, Medal of Honor Rag by Tom Cole, Moonchildren by Michael Weller, Still Life by Emily Mann, and Strange Snow by Stephen Metcalfe.

"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.

"Irresistible . . . intoxicating. . . . Enduringly original sensibility."—New York Times

Adele is a painter and an addict. Through her eyes, we meet her two lovers, Mala and Bill, and follow her destructive relationships over the course of fourteen years. A vulnerable exploration of the interplay between art, love, and addiction, Ode to Joy is an affecting new drama from respected playwright Craig Lucas.

Renowned playwright Craig Lucas's newest work is a sensitive look at illness, addiction, and love.

Craig Lucas's plays include Missing Persons, Reckless, Blue Window, Prelude to a Kiss, God's Heart, The Dying Gaul, Stranger, Small Tragedy, Prayer for My Enemy, The Singing Forest, and the book for the The Light in the Piazza (music and lyrics by Adam Guettel).

"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.