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.

An adaptation for the stage of this modern children's classic by the best-selling author and 2005 Children's Laureate.

For her history project, Charlie hits on the idea of writing the diary of Lottie, a young Victorian serving girl. When Charlie's mother loses her job as a shop manageress and starts work as a cleaner, Charlie's previously happy and comfortable lifestyle is threatened, and she finds her own hardships and struggles are not so different from Lottie's.

First staged at the Polka Children's Theatre in 1999, this adaptation is suitable for young actors as well as young audiences. The adapter, Vicky Ireland, has provided production notes to indicate how the play can be staged even with minimal resources - plus a lot of ingenuity!

“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.

We Happy Few follows a seven-woman amateur troupe as it travels the country’s schools and village greens during World War II playing a repertoire of Shakespeare and other classics. Disasters happen, triumphs occur, but above all the show must go on.

"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.

Restoration era London: Puritan laws and censorship laws are repealed; theatres re-open; and the cosmopolitan wives are living it up with extravagance, infidelity and impertinence towards their cuckold husbands. But when Margery the country wife comes to town, she arrives with strict handholding from her uptight husband and is promptly locked in a house. But then the door opens to Horner, a reputed womanizer...

“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.

"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.

Different Every Night is the culmination of a lifetime of work in the theater, the most complete rehearsal methodology in print since Stanislavsky. It offers a vital master class for actors and directors, full of sound practical advice and guidance, and is packed with techniques for bringing the text to life and keeping it alive, both in rehearsal and performance.

“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.

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.