Library

Collection of plays for one man and one woman, plays for two women and plays for two men.

The anthology includes thirty-five short plays by such major American playwrights as Christopher Durang, Warren Leight, Romulus Linney and Donald Margulies, alongside a host of exciting new voices.

Things We Said Today features the scripts for Neil LaBute's groundbreaking Directv project - a series of short films written and directed by LaBute based on ten compelling original monologues, five each for men and women. Also included are five short plays displaying the power and scope of Neil LaBute's creative vision. In Pick One, three white guys come up with a way to solve America's problems; in The Possible one young woman seduces another's boyfriend for an unexpected reason. Call Back features an actress and actor who spar about a past encounter that she, unnervingly, remembers much better than he does. Good Luck (In Farsi), a pleasingly astringent study in competitiveness and vanity (The New York Times) has two actresses pulling out all the stops in a preaudition psych out; and in Squeeze Play a father and his son's baseball coach strike a mutually beneficial deal. Rounding out the collection are two monologues commissioned as part of Centerstage's My America project.

Night, cold, a bus stop in Kingston, New York. A woman waits. A boy comes up.

A young couple considers parenthood. They want to have a child for the right reasons. But, in a time of global anxiety, erratic weather and political unrest, what exactly are the right reasons

Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Mamet's Romance is an uproarious, take-no-prisoners courtroom comedy that gleefully lampoons everyone from lawyers and judges, to Arabs and Jews, to gays and chiropractors. It's hay fever season, and in a courtroom a judge is popping antihistamines. He listens to the testimony of a Jewish chiropractor, who is a liar, according to his anti-Semitic defense attorney. The prosecutor, a homosexual, is having a domestic squabble with his lover, who shows up in court in a leopard-print thong. And all the while, a Middle East peace conference is taking place. Masterfully wielding the argot of the courtroom, David Mamet creates a world in microcosm in which shameless fawning, petty prejudices, and sheer caprice hold sway, and the noble apparatus of law and order degenerates into riotous profanity.

Los Angeles. There are two seasons, day and night. Toyer. He is a natural response to Los Angeles. There has never been anything like Toyer, but of course, every time there never is. Each time, the newest cutting-edge lunatic has the same refreshing aspect: he is unimaginable. Maude Garance. She is a doctor, thirty-six years old. Her face is complicated by a scars of fatigue, she is on the brink of a breakdown caused by a disorder in her patients - Toyer's victims -that she can not cure. Doctor T. Chief of Service at Maude's Hospital. Married too long to the wrong wife. Maude without mentioning it. Sara Smith. Has reported. A story, any story, is feeling from God and God. Maude dislikes her on sight. Jim O'Land. Sara Smith's boss at the Herald, a man easily followed. He publishes Rent ' s thoughts. Unprecedented in journalism, he says, a first. The Uncastables. Three comfortably unemployed actors. Telen Gacey came to Hollywood and is ready to leave. Peter Matson has a star quality but can not act. Billy Waterland, would-be comic, ex-gymnast, dreams of stardom. Jimmy O. A pale ginger cat with a direct stare, humble. Maude called him in his clothing. She was right. These are the players in Gardner McKay's first novel, Toyer. Their lives intersect and intrude on one another with terrifying results to produce a novel that is as compelling as it is rewarding. Billy Waterland, would-be comic, ex-gymnast, dreams of stardom. Jimmy O. A pale ginger cat with a direct stare, humble. Maude called him in his clothing. She was right. These are the players in Gardner McKay's first novel, Toyer. Their lives intersect and intrude on one another with terrifying results to produce a novel that is as compelling as it is rewarding. Billy Waterland, would-be comic, ex-gymnast, dreams of stardom. Jimmy O. A pale ginger cat with a direct stare, humble. Maude called him in his clothing. She was right. These are the players in Gardner McKay's first novel, Toyer. Their lives intersect and intrude on one another with terrifying results to produce a novel that is as compelling as it is rewarding.

There has never been anything like Toyer, but of course, every time there never is.

Bruce makes movies about killers. Wayne and Scout are killers. It's Oscar night and fact is about to confront fiction in this wickedly funny media satire.

The haunting play was inspired by the true story of a group of people, 'ghosts from the netherworld of an Australian childhood', who were discovered in the wilds of Tasmania in 1939. Lost in time and steeped in its own history and traditions, this curious community is a complete mystery and a disturbing challenge to its modern counterpart.

The young man who lives in a remote beach bungalow has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose.

As Howard Taubman outlines the play: At the outset Quentin emerges, moves forward and seats himself on the edge of the stage and begins to talk, like a man confiding in a friend. In the background are key figures in his life, and they move in and out of his narrative. The narration shades into scenes, little and big. They are revelations and illuminations. They remind Quentin of an awkward young girl whom he made proud of herself. They bring the tortured image of his mother's death and another of his mother's fury with his father, who lost all in trying to save a floundering business. They crisscross through his relations with a number of women, the first wife who wanted to be a separate person, the second who drove him into a separateness and a possible third who knew, as a German raised in a furnace of concentration camps, that 'survival can be hard to bear.'