Plays

Welcome to the spoken world / Unspoken heard / Unfocused blurred / A bird of youth / A sooth / A truth / A muse of mind / You are divine / Feel me?—Marc Bamuthi Joseph, from Word Becomes Flesh

Works by the most exciting and influential hip-hop theater artists of today, young performers from across the United States and London who are mixing music, movement, rap, spoken word, and visual design to create an entirely new theater. As described by Harry J. Elam Jr., a leading scholar in the field: “This is a theater that in its form and content recycles elements from the past, but with a new spirit of possibility and a new urgency that speaks to the racial and cultural hybrid of today.”
 
The stars in the Boom Box Galaxy are: Carl Hancock Rux (Brooklyn, New York), Will Power (Beacon, New York), Marc Bamuthi Joseph (San Francisco, California), Psalmayene 24 (Silver Springs, Maryland), Jake Ann Jones (New York, New York), Zell Miller III (Austin, Texas), Dan Wolf and Tommy Shepherd (San Francisco, California), Jonzi D (London, England), Cristal Chanelle Truscott (Atlanta, Georgia), and Aya de Leon (Oakland, California). 

"In the Blood is an extraordinary new play…It is truly harrowing…we cannot turn away, and we do not want to. The play strikes us as Hawthorne claimed his first glimpse of the scarlet letter struck him, with "a sensation not altogether physical yet almost so, as of a burning heat, as if the letter were not of red cloth but of red-hot iron.’"—Margo Jefferson, The New York Times

The playwright who "has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way [John Heilpern, New York Observer and Vogue]," has written two haunting riffs on Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter: In the Blood and Fucking A.

Hester La Negrita of In the Blood is an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children—"my treasures, my five joys"—who practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up. The letter A is as far as she gets. Hester Smith of Fucking A works the only job available—abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her.

These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one of the most unique voices writing for the stage today.

Suzan Lori-Parks is also the author of The America Play and Other Works and Venus, both published by TCG. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Five Lesbian Brothers are not only gaspingly hilarious and blithely subversive, they are fully capable of creating characters named Dawn, Patty and Peaches. Their work travels from the Pygo Moon System to the elite Tilue-Pussenheimer Academy to my favorite town in all world literature-Big Bone, Oregon. Reading The Brothers' plays is addictive, although I am told that the group will come to your home and perform them. But be prepared: these women are sexy, silly and homicidal, and they chug-a-lug SlimFast. You need them. -Paul Rudnick

The first collection of plays by The Five Lesbian Brothers includes:

Voyage to Lesbos "The action is in Lesbos, Illinois, and the occasion of Bonnie's wedding day, when five mysteriously intertwined women ostensibly prepare for the golden event, while their every action works to sabotage it."-Lisa Kron

Brave Smiles...another lesbian tragedy "This play is a reflection of love. This one in particular manifests what we love about being Brothers and what we love about being lesbians: the tragedy of it all which can be so bitingly and relentlessly funny sometimes." -Maureen Angelos

The Secretaries "What happens when someone new comes into a tight group? This is how Patty Johnson was born. Susan Curtis was born when Dominique was being interrogated in an improv exercise. Ashley Elizabeth Fratangello was an homage to Elizabeth Ashley. We were obsessed with her SlimFast campaign at the time. Needless to say it permeates the script." -Peg Healey

Brides of the Moon "We had all reached a point where we could forgive our mothers for their fucked-up lives and accept them for themselves and for doing the best they could against insurmountable odds. We created a worldwide corporation to represent those odds and a woman who had at one time been a promising astronaut, but because of her integrity had ruined any chance she might have had to advance her career. The evil corporation has her "consciousness lowered" to get her out of the way." -Babs Davy

The Five Lesbian Brothers are Maureen Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Lisa Kron. They came together as an acting company in 1989 after performing together in various other com

Latest plays by the author of The Baltimore Waltz.

“Bogosian’s script retains the playwright-performer’s trademark vitriol and hammer wit.”—Time Out

This new version of Eric Bogosian’s best-selling play, set in a convenience store parking lot, premiered last season Off Broadway. His rewrites—for a world seeped in cell phones, hip-hop, and a new political context—render the piece “an American anyplace where everything, yet nothing, has changed” (The New York Times).

Eric Bogosian’s plays and solo shows include Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll; Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; and Drinking in America. He has received three OBIE awards and has toured throughout the country.

“A pungent play of ideas with a big heart. Yellow Face brings to the national discussion about race a sense of humor a mile wide, an even-handed treatment and a hopeful, healing vision of a world that could be.”—Variety

“Charming, touching, and cunningly organized as well as funny, [with] an Ibsenite reach and stature far beyond any issues of Hwang’s self-image.”—The Village Voice

“It’s about our country, about public image, about face,” says David Henry Hwang about his latest work, a mock documentary that puts Hwang himself center stage as it explores both Asian identity as well as race in America. The play begins with the 1990s controversy over color-blind casting for Miss Saigon, before it spins into a comic fantasy, in which the character DHH pens a play in protest and then unwittingly casts a white actor as the Asian lead. Yellow Face also explores the real-life investigation of Hwang’s father, the first Asian American to own a federally chartered bank, and the espionage charges against physicist Wen Ho Lee. Adroitly combining the light touch of comedy with weighty political and emotional issues, “Hwang’s lively and provocative cultural self-portrait lets nobody off the hook” (The New York Times).

David Henry Hwang is the author of the Tony Award–winning M. Butterfly, a finalist for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. Other plays include Golden Child, FOB, The Dance and the Railroad, and Family Devotions; his opera libretti include three works for composer Philip Glass. He was appointed by President Clinton to the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

“Among living American writers for the theater today, Wallace Shawn is among the most respected by his peers and championed by serious critics.”—Don Shewey

“The play is bound to delve further into the world that Shawn began to explore so precipitously nearly thirty-five years ago: one filled with ideas, wherein the action is the domestication of cruelty.”—The New Yorker

Grasses of a Thousand Colors is a poetic epic that tells the story of a scientist (Ben), his wife (Cerise), and his two mistresses (Robin and Rose), as they fend for their lives in a world much like ours, yet one savagely close to extinction. Due to the scientific manipulation of the world’s crops, a destructive system for which Ben is partly responsible, there is very little nourishment left to be had, except for those most privileged and connected. Despite the dying off of most of the world, these characters manage to survive, at times tasting the good life, admiring the beauties of nature, feasting on animalistic sex, and finding love. The play raises issues of redemption, forgiveness, and responsibility as it recounts a somewhat passionate, erotic adventure story.

Wallace Shawn is the author of Our Late Night (winner of the OBIE Award for Best Play), Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner, The Fever, and the screenplay for My Dinner with Andre, in which he starred. Grasses of a Thousand Colors, Shawn’s first full-length play in ten years, will be produced in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2009. Shawn is a well-known film and television actor. He resides in New York City.