TCG Books

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

• 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)

From whimsical comedies to nail-biting chillers, Julia Cho is one of the most versatile playwrights in the contemporary theater. Her plays have been produced at Playwrights Hori­zons, Roundabout Theatre Company, Vineyard Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, South Coast Repertory, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Long Wharf Theatre, among others. She’s the recipient of a Susan Smith Black­burn Prize and is an alumna of New Dramatists. This collection includes the plays The Language Archive, Durango, Aubergine, The Piano Teacher, and Office Hour.

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

“To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor. Which came first? A Strange Loop is complex, teasing, thrilling.” —Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker

Usher is a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical. This blistering musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons—not least of which are the punishing thoughts in his own head—in an attempt to understand his own strange loop.

“Young Jean Lee is, hands down, the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation.” —Charles Isherwood, New York Times 

In Straight White Men, when Ed and his three adult sons come together to celebrate Christmas, they enjoy cheerful trash-talking, pranks, and takeout Chinese. Then they confront a problem that even being a happy family can’t solve: when identity matters, and privilege is problematic, what is the value of being a straight white man? 

In Untitled Feminist Show, six charismatic stars of the downtown theater, dance, cabaret, and burlesque worlds come together to invite the audience on an exhilaratingly irreverent, nearly-wordless celebration of a fluid and limitless sense of identity. 

In her first new work in a decade, Adrienne Kennedy journeys into Georgia and New York City in the 1940s to lay bare the devastating effects of segregation and its aftermath. The story of a doomed interracial love affair unfolds through fragmented pieces--letters, recollections from family members, songs from the time--to present a multifaceted view of our cultural history that resists simple interpretation. This volume also includes Etta and Ella on the Upper West Side and Mom, How Did You Meet The Beatles?

In reaction to the extraordinary events of the first hundred days of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks has created a unique and personal response to one of the most tumultuous times in our recent history—a play diary for each day of the presidency, to capture and explore the events as they unfolded. Known for her distinctive lyrical dialogue and powerful sociopolitical themes, Parks’s 100 Plays for the First Hundred Days is the powerful and provocative everyman’s guide to the Trumpian universe of uncertainty, confusion, and chaos.

Finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Now a major motion picture starring Jon Hamm, Geena Davis, Lois Smith, and Tim Robbins.

“An elegant, thoughtful and quietly unsettling drama. Marjorie Primeoperates by stealth… at some point, you realize that it’s been landing skillfully targeted punch after punch, right where it hurts… It keeps developing in your head, like a photographic negative, long after you have seen it.” —Ben Brantley, New York Times

“Brilliant…A startling and profound new drama.” —Jesse Green, New York

“Memory is an essential element of life—crucial to thought, feeling, progress, identity. But it also comes into play with particular power and meaning after someone who has been loved dies. And it is this tension between life and death—with memory functioning as connective tissue—that animates Jordan Harrison’s subtly shattering, Marjorie Prime.” —Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

“Jordan Harrison’s play has all the hallmarks of the best science fiction; it’s clever in conceit, alive with humor, surprising in its turns, and terribly haunting by the time the lights go out.” —Rollo Romig, New Yorker

With help from an intriguingly innovative technology in a future not far from our present, Marjorie examines her past, sometimes replacing her realities with idealized memories. Through deeply drawn characters—both real and in the form of artificial intelligence companions, or “Primes” —Harrison burrows into troubling questions of the digital age: What would we remember, and what would we forget, given the power of authorship? Will we be any less human, once computers know us better than we know ourselves?

Jordan Harrison grew up on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. His plays include Maple and Vine, The Grown-Up, Doris to Darlene, Amazons and Their Men, Finn in the Underworld, Act a Lady, Kid-Simple, and Futura. Harrison is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, the Kesselring Prize, and the Horton Foote Prize, among other awards. He was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Marjorie Prime. A graduate of the Brown MFA program, Harrison is a writer-producer for the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black.

A thoughtful and deeply personal book by a master theatre-maker.

In Tip of the Tongue, Peter Brook takes a charming, playful, and wise look at topics such as the subtle, telling differences between French and English, and the many levels on which we can appreciate the works of Shakespeare. Brook also revisits his seminal concept of the "empty space," considering how theatre—and the world—have changed over the span of his long and distinguished career. Threaded throughout with intimate and revealing stories from Brook's own life, Tip of the Tongue is a short but sparkling gift from one of the greatest artists of recent times.

Tip of the Tongue is part of Peter Brook’s “Reflections” trilogy, along with The Quality of Mercy and Playing by Ear.

“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.  

Thought-provoking and electrifying…Ain’t No Mo’ both honors its ancestors and loudly makes a stand for its own unique perspective. —Greg Evans, Deadline

The time is the near future, and African American Airlines Flight 1619 has been chartered to take Black Americans “back to Africa.” Organizing the boarding process is Peaches, a flight agent in drag who is juggling the passengers’ excitement and reluctance, as well as her own. Presented in eight vignettes, Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’ is both a satire and a serious investigation examining the ever-varying facets of the Black American experience: lives affected by violence, class tensions, the prison-industrial complex, and culture vultures.

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.

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.

"Letts is a master of pitch-dark comedies that measure the grisliest depths of human behavior…Linda Vista is very funny, equally unsettling…An inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife-crisis comedy." —Ben Brantley, New York Times

Fifty-year-old Wheeler is moving into his own apartment after a nasty divorce. With a blend of humor and humanity, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Tracy Letts demonstrates the ultimate midlife crisis: the bewildering search for self-discovery once you’ve already grown up.

A troubled teenager and her estranged mother—an undocumented Mexican immigrant on the verge of deportation—embark on a road trip and strive to mend their frayed relationship along the way. Combined with the musical talent of Erin McKeown, Hudes artfully crafts a story of the barriers and the bonds of family, while also addressing the complexities of immigration in today’s America.

“A richly suggestive and beautifully written piece of work, provoking questions that will continue to nag and expand in your mind…The genius of the play is to embed its pressingly topical preoccupations in a humane, tragicomic scenario that is never, despite the circumstances, portentous or clangingly apocalyptic in tone…The Children consolidates my view that Kirkwood is the most rewarding dramatist of her generation.” —Independent

“Sly, gripping, darkly funny…This is sci-fi kitted out with real people, real dilemmas, real scope. It’s really good.” —The Times

“Grips compulsively…Genuinely disturbing…Leaves you an abundance of ideas on which to ruminate.” —Guardian

“A far-reaching, unsettling play about legacy, survival and responsibility…Deceptively lightly written and often tartly funny…Kirkwood tackles huge themes and poses tough, even shocking questions, but weaves them into a droll script that both chastises and sympathises with her characters…” —Financial Times

“Retired people are like nuclear power stations. We like to live by the sea.”

Two retired nuclear scientists in an isolated cottage by the sea as the world around them crumbles. Then an old friend arrives with a frightening request.

“At our time of life we simply cannot deal with this shit.”

Lucy Kirkwood’s previous plays include Chimerica (winner of the Olivier Award for Best Play, the Evening Standard Award, the Critics’ Circle Best New Play Award and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize), small hours, NSFW, and it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now. The Children premiered at the Royal Court, London, and will receive its US premiere at Manhattan Theatre Club in the fall of 2017.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR DRAMA 2023 — 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.

Cambodian Rock Band is an epic play/rock concert that thrusts us into the life of a young woman trying to piece together her family history thirty years after her father fled Cambodia. Featuring actor/musicians who perform a mix of contemporary Dengue Fever hits and classic Cambodian oldies live, Lauren Yee brings to vivid life the Cambodian rock scene of the ’60s and ’70s, a movement cut short by the Khmer Rouge’s brutal attempt to erase the music (and musicians) once and for all. A story about survivors, the resilient bond of family, and the enduring power of music.

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.

In this collection of essays, legendary theatre director Peter Brook reflects on the role of music in theatre and performance and revisits some of the best-known productions from his long and distinguished career, including Titus Andronicus, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and The Prisoner. In his prologue, Brook writes, “As Orpheus discovered, every animal can respond to sounds. For us, the living question is ‘Which sounds? What music?’ In this book we will try to explore together the infinite range of experiences that can sometimes touch us deeply, sometimes leave us cold.” With topics ranging from how to evoke “true listening” to the relationship between words and music to the “living presence” of silence, Brook’s ever-inquisitive and questing mind invites the reader to pay greater attention to the rhythms and melodies present on stage and in life.

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.

“The idea is inspired and the treatment piercingly beautiful . . . Two formidable artists have shown respect for the integrity of each other’s work here and the result is magnificent.” —Independent

“Bob Dylan’s back catalogue is used to glorious effect in Conor McPherson’s astonishing cross-section of hope and stoic suffering . . . It is the constant dialogue between the drama and the songs that makes this show exceptional.” —Guardian

“Beguiling and soulful and quietly, exquisitely, heartbreaking. A very special piece of theatre.” —Evening Standard

“A populous, otherworldly play that combines the hard grit of the Great Depression with something numinous and mysterious.” —Telegraph

Duluth, Minnesota. 1934. A community living on a knife-edge. Lost and lonely people huddle together in the local guesthouse. The owner, Nick, owes more money than he can ever repay, his wife Elizabeth is losing her mind, and their daughter Marianne is carrying a child no one will account for. So when a preacher selling bibles and a boxer looking for a comeback turn up in the middle of the night, things spiral beyond the point of no return . . .

In Girl from the North Country, Conor McPherson beautifully weaves the iconic songbook of Bob Dylan into a show full of hope, heartbreak and soul. It premiered at the Old Vic, London, in July 2017, in a production directed by the author.

Conor McPherson is an award-winning Irish playwright. His best-known works include The Weir (Royal Court; winner of the 1999 Olivier Award for Best New Play), Dublin Carol (Atlantic Theater Company) and The Seafarer (National Theatre).

Bob Dylan, born in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, is one of the most important songwriters of our time. Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. He released his thirty-ninth studio album, Triplicate, in April 2017, and continues to tour worldwide.

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 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.

The Antitheatrical Prejudice is essential reading today when theatricality, antitheatricality, and performativity are once again provocative issues playing out across contemporary culture and the arts. The original edition was published in 1981. The new edition includes a Foreword by Joseph Roach, the distinguished theatre historian and stage director, and professor emeritus, Dept. of English, Yale University. He is the author of The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting and Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance.

“Gloria: A Life is a unique, deeply moving performance created in the hopeful, conversational spirit of its extraordinary subject.” —Sara Holdren, New York Magazine’s Vulture  

Five decades after Gloria Steinem began raising her voice for equality and championing the voices of others, she remains a leader of the American feminist movement. 

Emily Mann’s play, Gloria: A Life, traces the progress of Steinem’s extraordinary life, from her undercover Playboy Bunny exposé in the 1960s, through her founding of Ms. Magazine in the 1970s, to her activism in today’s women’s movement.

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama 

“An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world’s brutalities.”—David Cote, Time Out New York 

A rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage’s extraordinary play, Ruined. The establishment’s shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already “ruined” by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution. 

Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congolese refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.

“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.

Lucy Kirkwood has swiftly made a name for herself as one of Britain’s leading young playwrights and is widely considered to be the natural successor to the great Caryl Churchill. Kirkwood’s plays are infused with a sharp wit and a fierce intelligence, taking an unflinching look at the issues affecting our world today. This collection gathers together five of Kirkwood’s plays, including Chimerica, Tinderbox, it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now, small hours, and NSFW.

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.

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.

This new collection brings together plays and monologues from the National Black Theatre Festival, one of the most historic and culturally significant events—not only in the history of Black theater but in American theater. Held every two years in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, this gathering of Black theater companies and artists from around the country and across the globe features an extraordinary array of performances, workshops, films, spoken-word poetry, and more. Established in 1989 by Larry Leon Hamlin and the North Carolina Black Repertory Company, this volume includes three full-length plays produced at the Festival:

Maid’s Door by Cheryl L. Davis

Berta, Berta by Angelica Chéri

Looking for Leroy by Larry Muhammad

This collection also includes seventeen monologues and scenes selected from each year of the Festival, featuring the artists and playwrights: Jackie Alexander, Ifa Bayeza, Pearl Cleage, Kamilah Forbes, Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Javon Johnson, Rhodessa Jones, and others.

A consummate compendium that highlights the work of an audacious, incomparable theatremaker.

A vital presence in the avant-garde theatre movement since the 1970s, Robbie McCauley worked as a playwright, director, and performer for many decades, garnering international acclaim for her thought-provoking work. Her plays consistently confronted uncomfortable truths about race and racism in America by breaking down the walls between performer and spectator. McCauley's uncompromising and uplifting work sought to highlight the varied lived experiences of Black women, as well as their indelible mark on global culture.

In this volume, you'll find:

• The full text of McCauley’s plays Sally’s Rape, Indian Blood, Sugar, and Jazz ’n Class
• Insightful introductions to each play
• Additional essays by McCauley and other leading writers and academics about her work and legacy

“A beautiful, endlessly echoing portrait of a murder and its afterlife. Ms. Nottage shaped this story with such theatrical inventiveness and discipline that it never feels sensational… A finely wrought fusion of elements.” —Ben Brantley, New York Times

Continuing in her tradition of crafting thought-provoking, socially conscious dramas, Lynn Nottage’s play tells the story of Mlima, an elephant struck down by poachers for his magnificent tusks. Beginning in a game park in Kenya, the play tracks the trajectory of Mlima’s tusks through the ivory trade market while Mlima’s ghost follows close behind—marking all those complicit in his barbaric death.

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.

"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.

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.

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...

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.

“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.

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. . .

“Christopher Bayes is a master, an extraordinary visionary who has done more to liberate young American actors over the last two generations than I can possibly express. His classes in Clowning are philosophical manifestos; the power of his laughter inextricable from the depth of his spirit. This book is a treasure. Nothing can replace the experience of being in the room with a master teacher, but this practical, playful, brilliant book is the next best thing. Read it. It is indispensable.” —Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director, The Public Theater

Discovering the Clown, or The Funny Book of Good Acting is a unique glimpse into the wild world of the Clown, unveiling “the playful self, the unsocialized self, the naive self…the big stupid who just wants to have some fun with the audience.” An essential guide for artists and actors wanting to set free the messy and hilarious Clown within.

The Mammary Plays are mirror-image investigations of coming of age in the ’60s: How I Learned To Drive, a deceptively delicate tale of sexual awakening in desperate if not criminal circumstances, and The Mineola Twins, an outrageous political satire. Both plays are receiving multiple productions throughout the U.S., and How I Learned To Drive, one of the most acclaimed plays of 1997, has won 13 major awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, Obies, Lucille Lortel, Drama Desk, NY Drama Critics Circle and Outer Critics Circle awards and the coveted Susan Smith Blackburn Prize.

Ellen McLaughlin returns with a new collection of adaptations and modern reimaginings of classic Greek tragedies. Drawing on works by Sophocles, Homer, Aeschylus and more, these plays breathe fresh life into timeless questions and conflicts that still feel startlingly relevant today: Can civilization survive humanity’s basest instincts? What do we do about the human compulsion toward violence? Are we irreversibly transformed by the trauma of war and political strife, or is there a chance we can recover a part of our former selves? This collection includes the plays Ajax in Iraq (from Sophocles), Kissing the Floor (Sophocles), Penelope (Homer), Mercury’s Footpath (Euripides), and The Oresteia (based on Aeschylus’ trilogy Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides).

Obie Award for Playwriting — Sanctuary City 

Two compelling, uncompromising plays about the immigrant experience by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-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.

“Until the Flood is an urgent moral inquest.” —Jesse Green, New York Times

In the gripping and revelatory Until the Flood, Dael Orlandersmith journeys into the heart and soul of modern-day America—confronting the powerful forces of history, race, and politics. Drawn from interviews following the shooting of a black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, Orlandersmith embodies the many faces of a community rallying for justice and a country still yearning for change.

“Revelatory…As intimate and immediate as a whispered secret. Vogel’s play thrums with music, desire, and fear, and it’s shrewd about the ways in which America isn’t free, and about how art does and doesn’t transcend the perilous winds of history.” —New Yorker

“Superbly realized…Indecent, the powerful play by Paula Vogel, sheds an eye-opening light on a little-known time when theatrical history, Jewish culture, and the frank depiction of homosexuality intersected, with explosive results.” —New York Times

“Gorgeous. Illuminating and heartbreaking. Rich in sympathy and humor, Indecent has the scope of an epic but the intimacy of a chamber piece…It celebrates and illustrates the power of theater.” —Time Out New York

“A moving and fascinating play…A singular achievement… The historical perspective is vast and knowing…Has there ever been anything quite like Indecent, a play that touches—I mean deeply touches—so much rich emotion about history and the theater, anti-Semitism, homophobia, censorship, world wars, red-baiting, and oh, yes, joyful human passion?...An extraordinary play.” —Newsday

“Indecent is more than a play about forbidden love: It’s about theater as a life force.” —New York Post

When Sholem Asch wrote God of Vengeance in 1907, he didn’t imagine the height of controversy the play would eventually reach. Performing at first in Yiddish and German, the play’s subject matter wasn’t deemed contentious until it was produced in English, when the American audiences were scandalized by the onstage depiction of an amorous affair between two women. Paula Vogel’s newest work traces the trajectory of the show’s success through its tour in Europe to its abrupt and explosive demise on Broadway in 1923—including the arrest of the entire production’s cast and crew.

Paula Vogel is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of How I Learned to Drive. Her other plays include Don Juan Comes Home from Iraq, A Civil War Christmas, The Long Christmas Ride Home, and The Baltimore Waltz, among others. She has also had a distinguished career as a teacher and mentor to younger playwrights, first at Brown University and then at the Yale School of Drama.

When the owner of a Sheffield scissor manufacturer dies, the future of the factory site falls into uncertainty. Can it be reborn as a fashionable music venue, converted into luxury apartments, or somehow reinvigorated so the old business can survive?

There's more than just money or bricks and mortar at stake. It's about knowing where you fit in the world – knowing that somewhere there's still a place for you.

Fresh, funny and heartfelt, Rock / Paper / Scissors are three intricately interwoven plays by Chris Bush about family, heritage and legacy. They were first performed simultaneously with the same cast moving between three theatres in Sheffield – the Crucible, the Lyceum and the Studio – as part of Sheffield Theatres' fiftieth birthday celebrations in 2022.

While the three plays can be enjoyed separately, they also offer a uniquely rewarding opportunity for any company looking to take on the challenge of staging them together.

By combining literary and dramatic narrative with eye-witness accounts of Sasquatch encounters culled from the internet, The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. reinvents as many versions of the Frankenstein author Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word “Gothic.” In this work, a string of financial, maternal, and familial misfortunes causes Shelley—referred to in this production as Maery S.—to spawn a monstrous creative expression, which takes on its own life and violent history. Maery cannot help but fall  in love with her Monster, only to see it “collected” and imprisoned by charitable funding at a mandatory artists’ residency.

“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.