Theatre Communications Group

West London. 1952. When Hester Collyer is found by her neighbors in the aftermath of a failed suicide attempt, the story of her tempestuous affair with a former RAF pilot and the breakdown of her marriage to a High Court judge begins to emerge. Rattigan’s devastating masterpiece is a classic study of forbidden love, suppressed desire and the fear of loneliness.

Debbie Tucker Green is an urgent and distinctive new Black British writing talent.

"The overall effect is of having swallowed a scalding cup of triple espresso coffee in one gulp. The burn stays with you after you have left the theatre."—The Guardian

"Love it or loathe it, Tucker Green’s work is already making its mark."—The Independent

A sharp new play with an offbeat view of Labour's famous 1997 victory. The Tories, eighteen years in power, are defeated as New Labour sweeps into government. From the euphoria and despair, three deeply personal stories emerge.

This comprehensive, practical manual covers the day-to-day, real-world essentials an actor needs to succeed in the industry. Honest, straightforward, and empowering, this book will help you unlock your potential and focus on being the best, most employable—and, hopefully, successful—actor you can be. The essential, one-stop handbook for actors, with everything you need to survive and thrive.

Jessica Hagedorn has transformed her bestselling novel about the Philippines during the reign of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos into an equally powerful theatrical piece that is a multi-layered tour de force. As Harold Bloom writes, "Hagedorn expresses the conflicts experienced by Asian immigrants caught between cultures . . . she takes aim at racism in the U.S. and develops in her dramas the themes of displacement and the search for belonging."

Jessica Hagedorn is a performance artist, poet, novelist and playwright, born and raised in the Philippines. Her novels include Dogeaters (Penguin 1990) which was nominated for a National Book Award and The Gangster of Love (Penguin 1996); a short story collection, Danger and Beauty (City Lights 2002).

A jealous king, an abandoned daughter, a prince hopelessly in love. Shakespeare’s timeless tragicomedy of obsession and redemption is reimagined in a new production codirected by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh. It was performed at the Garrick Theatre in 2015, starring Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh. This official tie-in edition features exclusive additional content including cast interviews, articles, and more.

For Emma and Clare, 1980 was the summer they met at the swings, the summer they built a tree house and the summer a young mother and her infant daughter moved into number fourteen. Now in their thirties, Emma and Clare struggle to come to terms with the chain of devastating events that began that summer, to understand what they did, what they became and how they were judged.

"Every day do at least one thing that might lead to work, and then get on with living your life." With this mantra in mind, Chairman of London's Actors Centre, Paul Clayton, presents a series of invaluable exercises for the newly graduated professional actor to improve their chances of employment.

"It's easy to see what brings actors back [to Mednick's work]. It's the rhythms, the wonderfully tortured characters, the dialogue that begs an actor to tease out the nuance in the lyrical poetry."—Anthony Byrnes, KCRW "Behind the Curtain," from the introduction

Four new plays from the Off-Off Broadway pioneer and Obie-award winner Murray Mednick, including the fifteenth-century historical tragicomedy Villon, reveal a master at the top of his game.

A young girl is trapped in an increasingly tiny world. In the beginning was the mattress. Gradually, other little changes—more bolts on the front door; the gun; the locked cupboard. And she knew in her heart that change was bad. Based on true stories from around the world, this is a startling debut play that looks at the courage, strength, and perseverance of women in conflict zones.

“This exhilarating production ticks all the boxes for families looking for an uplifting treat.”—TimeOut

“Paterson has mastered the art of injecting new zest and color into classic children's stories.”—The London Times

Rudyard Kipling's classic jungle tales in an acclaimed stage adaptation by Stuart Paterson.

Plucked from obscurity to be Hitler’s architect and Minister of War, Albert Speer became the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany and the closest Hitler had to a friend. David Edgar’s panoramic adaptation of Gitta Sereny’s definitive and magisterial biography tells the epic story of a man whose devotion to Hitler blinded him to the worst crime of the twentieth century.

A rich evocation of a world poised on the brink of Stalin's Great Terror, based on the 1994 Oscar-winning film written by Nikita Mikhalkov and Rustam Ibragimbekov.

General Kotov, decorated hero of the Russian Revolution, is spending an idyllic summer in the country with his beloved young wife and family. But on one glorious sunny morning in 1936, his wife’s former lover returns from a long and unexplained absence. Amidst a tangle of sexual jealousy, retribution and remorseless political backstabbing, Kotov feels the full, horrifying reach of Stalin’s rule.

“A full emotional geography of a family . . . Seemingly light conversation scrapes the skins of the characters in this sharply etched study of dislocation, loneliness and sexual betrayal.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

“Nelson is a master of the quiet detail, of the oblique rhythm that transforms emotional diffidence into fascinating character.”—Linda Winer, Newsday

“The early scenes proceed with the closely observed simplicity of Chekhov, whereas the later more wrenching moments evoke the eloquent bitterness of Albee.”—David Cote, TimeOut New York

A new work by leading American playwright Richard Nelson, who for more than 25 years has written prolifically, and with fine detail, on the perplexities of everyday living. In Rodney’s Wife, a fading American actor in Rome for the filming of a 1960s spaghetti Western gathers with family and friends at a rented villa. Over the course of one booze-soaked summer night, jealousies and secrets are revealed that crumble the foundations of their relationships. Inspired by Euripides, the play is a tragedy of exiles who continue to need each other, even as they push away.

"Mr. Shinn is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today."—The New York Times

"Chris Shinn explores politics and ethics without moralizing and finds justice and beauty in intimate life, keenly observed and rendered scrupulously, unapologetically, fearlessly . . . I admire his work enormously."—Tony Kushner

When a campus tragedy makes national headlines, Gabe, a senior who runs the Queer Students Group, discovers that events surrounding the tragedy aren't as straightforward as they seem. A Pulitzer Prize finalist's searing play about what happens when a tragedy sparks a movement – and the truth gets lost along the way. Teddy Ferrara received its world premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2013.

Christopher Shinn's works include Where Do We Live, Four, Other People, What Didn't Happen, On the Mountain, and The Coming World. He has received the Obie Award for playwriting and a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting, and has also been shortlisted for the Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play and nominated for an Olivier Award for Most Promising Playwright.

“A neglected landmark of modern theatre that explores the byzantine complexities of marriage with the honesty of genius.”—Guardian

Back in Dublin after nine years abroad, Richard and Bertha have to ask themselves questions about guilt and responsibility as they confront two other people who love them. Will infidelity hold them together? Based in part on James Joyce’s own relationship with Nora Barnacle.

Drawing instances from his own work in theater and from teaching at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, William Gaskill looks at action and intention, stillness and movement, sentences and rhetoric, punctuation and pauses. He pays detailed attention to staging Shakespeare's plays, including chapters on masks and on language as character.

"Guillermo Calderón is an authentic genius of the theater . . . you can't say you've heard or seen any of it before, which may make you want to hear and see it again."—The New Yorker

"Neva's neobrutalist punch demonstrates . . . the enduring power of art."—Time Out New York

"Brilliant and provocative."—TheatreMania

"A lovely, disturbing drama . . . Calderón's drama is Chekhovian in the best sense."—The Village Voice

This politically charged, haunting yet humorous meditation on theater and the revolutionary impulse tells the story of three actors, including Anton Chekhov's widow, who gather to rehearse scenes from The Cherry Orchard as Russia faces an impending revolution. A savage examination of the relationship between theater and historical context, Neva is the author's first play, which he directed for its English language premiere at the Public Theater in New York City.

Guillermo Calderon is Chile's foremost contemporary theater artist. His plays include Diciembre (December), Clase (Class), Villa, Discurso (Speech), Quake, and Escuela (School), and his productions have toured extensively through South America and Europe. His co-written screenplay Violeta won the World Cinema Jury Prize for Drama at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and other awards include Best Play of the Year (Art Critics Circle of Chile), three Chilean Altazor Awards for Best Playwright and Best Director, and the 2010 Bank of Scotland Angel Award (Edinburgh Fringe Festival).

Famed children’s writer Harry Golden went missing five years ago during a cliff walk near the family’s country home in northwest Ireland. Five years later, his remains are discovered, and his two troubled daughters must come to terms with the fact that they are now the grown-ups. Premiered in Dublin by the respected Irish company Rough Magic, who developed the play through their new writing program.

In his fifth, brashest solo show, Eric Bogosian again aims scorching social commentary at the contemporary urban and suburban scene. From subway panhandlers to barbecue-crazed millionaires, Bogosian reveals the hidden humor, fear, hypocrisy and rage of Americans - including, for the first time, "Eric Bogosian," a hyperaggressive standup comic. With this seductive element of self-revelation, he heightens the disturbing connections between his characters and, by extension, between us and the people we try not to see - and not to be - every day.

One of America’s premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists, Eric Bogosian’s plays and solo work include suburbia (Lincoln Center Theater, 1994; adapted to film by director Richard Linklater, 1996); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; Griller; Humpty Dumpty; 1+1; Skunkweed; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; Drinking in America; Notes from Underground and Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist; New York Shakespeare Festival, 1987; Broadway, 2007; adapted to film by director Oliver Stone, 1988). He has starred in a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. Most recently, he created the character of Captain Danny Ross on the long-running series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2014, TCG published 100 (monologues), a collection that commemorates thirty years of Bogosian’s solo-performance career.

The Viewpoints is a technique of improvisation that grew out of the postmodern dance world. It was first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie, who broke down the two dominant issues performers deal with—space and time—into six categories. Since that time, directors Anne Bogart and Tina Landau have expanded her notions and adapted them for actors to function together spontaneously and intuitively and to generate bold, theatrical work.

The Viewpoints are a set of names given to certain principles of movement through time and space—they constitute a language for talking about what happens on stage. Coupling this with Composition, which is the practice of selecting and arranging the separate components of theatrical language into a cohesive work of art, provides theatre artists with an important new tool for creating and understanding their art form.

Primarily intended for the many theatre artists who, in the last several years, have become intrigued with Viewpoints yet have had no single source to refer to in their investigations. It can also be used by anyone with a general interest in collaboration and the creative process, whether in art, business or daily life.

Anne Bogart is Artistic Director of the SITI Company, which she founded with Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. She is the recipient of two OBIE Awards and a Bessie Award, and is an associate professor at Columbia University. Her recent works include Alice’s Adventures; Bobrauschenbergamerica; Small Lives, Big Dreams; Marathon Dancing; and The Baltimore Waltz.

Tina Landau, noted director and playwright, whose original work includes Space (Time magazine 10 Best), Dream True (with composer Ricky Ian Gordon) and Floyd Collins (with composer Adam Guettel), which received the Lucille Lortel Award for Best Musical, an OBIE Award and seven Drama Desk nominations. She has been an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company since 1997.

Chicago-based playwright Carlos Murillo's The Javier Plays is an inventive and epic trilogy that delves into themes of authenticity, truth, and self-made mythology. This collection includes the plays Diagram of a Paper Airplane, A Thick Description of Harry Smith (Volume 1), and Your Name Will Follow You Home.

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

This complex new work from celebrated playwright David Mamet revolves around a wealthy man, his young fiancée, and an airplane. The man has just bought a new plane as a wedding present for the girl. He intends to go into semiretirement and enjoy himself. While in the process of leaving his office, and giving last minute instructions to his young assistant, he takes one final phone call.

The new, widely anticipated play premieres on Broadway this fall, starring Tony and Academy Award-winning actor Al Pacino, for whom the play was written. Pacino described the role of billionaire Mickey Ross as "one of the most daunting and challenging roles I've been given to explore in the theater" and declared, "it blew me away."

David Mamet is an American playwright, director, and screenwriter whose most notable works include Glengarry Glen Ross (Pulitzer Prize for Drama), American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, Oleanna, November, Race, and The Anarchist. Besides the film adaptations of his plays, his major screenwriting credits include The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, Rising Sun, Wag the Dog, and Hannibal. Over the course of his prolific career, Mamet has earned Tony Award nominations, Academy Award nominations, Drama Desk Awards, and "Screenwriter of the Year" from the London Critics Circle Film Awards.

“Directors today are equipped with a larger toolbox than their forerunners, standing on their shoulders as well as those of pioneers in non-Western theater, experimental visual art, community-based theater, and the ever-evolving commercial theater scene.”— Jason Loewith

This second volume presents a cross-section of the most diverse and dynamic stage directors defining today’s American theater, in conversation with director/producer Jason Loewith. A follow-up to the immensely popular first volume, which has sold over eighteen thousand copies, much has changed in the twenty years since The Director’s Voice debuted. “The nonprofit model has been turned on its head,” Loewith notes. “Institution-building is out for these directors; creating a distinctive voice from a multiplicity of influences is in.” Together, these directors sketch a compelling portrait of the art form in the new century.

Interviews include: Anne Bogart, Mark Brokaw, Peter Brosius, Ping Chong, David Esbjornson, Oskar Eustis, Frank Galati, Michael Kahn, Moisés Kaufman, James Lapine, Elizabeth LeCompte, Emily Mann, Michael Mayer, Marion McClinton, Bill Rauch, Bartlett Sher, Julie Taymor, Theatre de la Jeune Lune (Barbra Berlovitz, Steven Epps, Vincent Gracieux, Robert Rosen, and Dominique Serrand), George C. Wolfe, and Mary Zimmerman.

Jason Loewith is a producer, director, and writer. He has served since 2002 as artistic director of Chicago’s Next Theatre Company, where he conceived, co-wrote, and produced Adding Machine: A Musical, which had an award-winning run off-Broadway.

“Brilliant . . . even more ambitious than Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive . . . it covers more ground and is bolder in its storytelling. Vogel’s language is at its most poetic, eloquent and elegiac. In fact, its vivid imagery rivals the prose style of any great American short story writer. The play sounds like it might have been adapted from a beautiful, undiscovered novella.”—New Haven Register

“One of the most absorbing evenings of theatre to come along in some time.”—Variety

Past and present collide on a snowy Christmas Eve for a troubled family of five. Humorous and heart-wrenching, this beautifully written play proves that magic can be found in the simplest breaths of life. Combining the elements of No theatre and Bunraku with contemporary Western sensibilities, Vogel’s Ride is a mesmerizing homage to the works of Thornton Wilder, including Our Town. A moving and memorable study of the American family careening near the edge of oblivion.

Paula Vogel’s plays include The Baltimore Waltz, Mineola Twins, Hot ‘n’ Throbbing, Desdemona, And Baby Makes Seven, among others. Ms. Vogel will be the resident playwright during the Signature Theatre’s 2004–05 season dedicated to her works. She has taught at Brown University in the MFA playwriting program since 1985.

"Comedy nirvana . . . satisfyingly mean and funny."?The New York Post

Nicky Silver, that "strange progeny of a coupling between Neil Simon and Edward Albee" (The New York Times), has cornered the market on deliciously savage family comedies. This intimate and frightening examination of how we cope with loneliness and disappointment delighted audiences on Broadway, earning a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Play.

Nicky Silver’s plays include Pterodactyls (Oppenheimer Award, Kesselring Award, Drama Desk nomination, Outer Critics Circle nomination), The Eros Trilogy, The Food Chain (Outer Critics Circle nomination), Fat Men in Skirts, Fit to Be Tied, The Maiden's Prayer, Free Will and Wanton Lust (Helen Hayes Award), My Marriage to Ernest Borgnine, The Altruists, and Raised in Captivity (Drama Desk nomination, Outer Critics Circle nomination).

"Brilliantly upsetting and endearing . . . riveting."—Newsday

This poetic epic about a scientist, his wife, and his two mistresses as they fend for their lives in a world savagely close to extinction raises issues of redemption, forgiveness, and responsibility. Grasses of a Thousand Colors is a troubling, erotic adventure that received high critical praise for its first New York City revival in 2013, starring Wallace Shawn.

Wallace Shawn is a noted actor and writer. His often politically charged and controversial plays include The Fever, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Marie and Bruce, and The Designated Mourner. With Andre´ Gregory, he co-wrote My Dinner with Andre´, in which he also starred.

“The play’s two hours fly by as if you’ve barely taken a breath. . . . Ethical dilemmas arise like exploding mines.”–Variety

“Mr. Margulies is a skilled practitioner of fluid dialogue that is naturally funny and sensibly smart.” –The New York Times

In his “absorbing intelligent” (Los Angeles Times) and timely new play, Donald Margulies uncovers the layers of a relationship between a photojournalist and foreign correspondent—once addicted to the adrenaline of documenting the atrocities of war, and now grounded in the couple’s Brooklyn loft. Photographer Sarah was seriously injured while covering the war in Iraq; her reporter partner James had left weeks earlier, when the stress and horrors became too much for him. Now James writes online movie reviews while Sarah recovers, mourning for her Iraqi driver (and former lover) killed in the explosion, and itching to get back behind the camera. With this play—coming to Broadway this winter—Margulies revisits themes of being an artist, as characters ask: What does it mean to capture suffering on film, rather than stopping to intervene?

Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends, which has been produced throughout the world. Other plays include Sight Unseen (OBIE Award), Brooklyn Boy, and Collected Stories, among many others.

This volume features two of Bogosian's more unsettling works. Notes from Underground charts, in diary form, the life of an urban recluse who wants desperately to be "normal" but ultimately sinks into an abyss of his own making. Scenes from the New World is a play composed of three one-acts, probing modern life on the eve of the millennium.

One of America’s premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists, Eric Bogosian’s plays and solo work include suburbia (Lincoln Center Theater, 1994; adapted to film by director Richard Linklater, 1996); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; Griller; Humpty Dumpty; 1+1; Skunkweed; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; Drinking in America; Notes from Underground and Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist; New York Shakespeare Festival, 1987; Broadway, 2007; adapted to film by director Oliver Stone, 1988). He has starred in a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. Most recently, he created the character of Captain Danny Ross on the long-running series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2014, TCG published 100 (monologues), a collection that commemorates thirty years of Bogosian’s solo-performance career.

“I want theater to wake me up, not lull me to sleep. My theater is not about fantasy, it’s not about seduction. My theater is not an outline for a film. It is not a TV sitcom onstage. I want my theater to be an event. I want it to push limits, bite the hand that feeds it and bang heads. It’s about my fears, my ideas, my blind spots, my isolation.”—Eric Bogosian

Eric Bogosian is one of our most singular and exhilarating commentators on American life. His award-winning solo performance works have been performed with acclaim all over the world. As the New York Times has pointed out, “Bogosian is a born storyteller with perfect pitch.” That is never more evident than in his newest book, which collects his three most recent plays.

In Humpty Dumpty, five friends gather for a holiday at a mountain getaway where unforeseen events bring them to the brink of the end of the world. Griller is set in a New Jersey backyard, where a barbecue gathering turns sinister and deadly. Red Angel is Bogosian’s riff on Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, reset on a college campus in 1990s New England.

One of America’s premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists, Eric Bogosian’s plays and solo work include suburbia (Lincoln Center Theater, 1994; adapted to film by director Richard Linklater, 1996); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; Griller; Humpty Dumpty; 1+1; Skunkweed; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; Drinking in America; Notes from Underground and Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist; New York Shakespeare Festival, 1987; Broadway, 2007; adapted to film by director Oliver Stone, 1988). He has starred in a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. Most recently, he created the character of Captain Danny Ross on the long-running series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2014, TCG published 100 (monologues), a collection that commemorates thirty years of Bogosian’s solo-performance career.