100 Plays for the First Hundred Days

Considered the nation's foremost expert in audience development, Donna Walker-Kuhne has spent her career developing successful strategies for increasing access to the arts. Over the past ten years, Walker-Kuhne has traveled to over 100 U.S. cities and 5 continents to give lectures, workshops, and keynotes specifically focused on community engagement. This guide synthesizes her findings from the last decade into an accessible text that provides sustainable, measurable community engagement strategies for leaders in the arts community—with a specific focus on ways to drill deeper into issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. Including case studies from around the world that offer models for creating sustainable audiences and membership, Walker-Kuhne offers a practical yet visionary way of thinking about community engagement in the arts as a vehicle for social change.

Winner of five 2024 Tony Awards, including Best Play

An epic play with music that examines the human costs of the quest for artistic greatness.

The place: Sausalito. The time: the mid-1970s. The carpet: brown shag. Stereophonic brings us inside the cloistered world of a recording studio as a rock band on the brink of superstardom attempts to create their sophomore album. The ensuing pressures open up cracks in the band’s once-easy camaraderie, and spats over issues like tempo and song length begin to reveal deeper problems in the band’s foundation. Running on a diet of booze, sleep deprivation, and a giant bag of cocaine, interpersonal relationships are pushed to the breaking point as a process that was meant to last a few weeks becomes a neverending slog. With original songs by Arcade Fire’s Will Butler, David Adjmi’s play is an electrifying portrait of a band wracked with division and disillusionment that nevertheless might be on the verge of creating a masterpiece.

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.

“Smart, funny and utterly engrossing…This unexpectedly rich sequel reminds us that houses tremble and sometimes fall when doors slam, and that there are living people within, who may be wounded or lost…Mr. Hnath has a deft hand for combining incongruous elements to illuminating ends.” —Ben Brantley, New York Times

It has been fifteen years since Nora Helmer slammed the door on her stifling domestic life, when a knock comes at that same door. It is Nora, and she has returned with an urgent request. What will her sudden return mean to those she left behind? Lucas Hnath’s funny, probing, and bold play is both a continuation of Ibsen’s complex exploration of traditional gender roles, as well as a sharp contemporary take on the struggles inherent in all human relationships across time.

“This new play is a subversive enchantment. It is part absurd domestic seriocomedy, part erotic magic realism, unflinching about taboos and about questioning that, just maybe, monogamy isn’t enough.” —Linda Winer, Newsday

Over dinner with another married couple, George and her husband grow fascinated by stories of their friends’ new acquaintance—an intriguing younger woman named Pip. What begins as an innocent intellectual discussion turns into a sexually explosive New Year’s Eve party after George extends an invitation to Pip and her two live-in boyfriends, raising the question: What ultimately binds human beings together?

August Wilson's Century Cycle is one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken (The New York Times). With it, Wilson dramatized 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 (9781559362818)
• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (9781559362986)
• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (9781559362993)
• The Piano Lesson (9781559363006)
• Seven Guitars (9781559363013)
• Fences (9781559363020)
• Two Trains Running (9781559363037)
• Jitney (9781559363044)
• King Hedley II (9781559363051)
• Radio Golf (9781559363068)