Discover March’s exciting new publications from Dramatists Play Service and Playscripts! Explore captivating new plays that bring fresh stories to the stage and discover beautifully crafted Signature Acting Editions of beloved works.
New Plays
The Price by Don Zolidis
On a frigid winter night, a young mother nurses a sick child, hoping it will live through till morning. A stranger appears at her door, asking for shelter from the cold. She takes him in, but no sooner does she close her eyes, the man and her daughter are gone. The stranger was indeed Death, and he has taken her child, but the Mother does not give up. She races against Death, trying to reach the other shore before he does, but what price will she be willing to pay to save her daughter?
Merely Players by Steve Borowka
It’s the beginning of the new school year at Evergreen Academy. Emma, a content creator becoming more popular by the day, is challenged by head cheerleader Stacy to matchmake five couples at the school by the end of the month—or lose access to her social media accounts. When her class is assigned a sonnet-writing project, Emma thinks it’ll help her win the bet, until she realizes everyone has devoted their sonnet to the wrong person. With echoes of Cyrano de Bergerac, As You Like It, and Jane Austen’s Emma, Merely Players is a modern take on one of Shakespeare’s most timeless truths: the course of true love never did run smooth.
Wicked Child by
Photo by Justin Namon, 2024 Zoetic Stage production
Jake brings his new girlfriend, Amelia, to his close-knit, blended family’s Passover Seder. Despite being a fish out of water, Amelia makes a great impression on the family, though she’s thrown off guard by the tonal discrepancy between the family’s joy and the Passover story—which plants a seed of doubt in Jake’s mind. But the real disruption to the holiday is the news that Jake’s stepbrother, Ben, is quitting his lucrative consulting job and moving to Israel. At the following year’s Seder, everyone in the secular family has come to terms with the news, except Jake, whose disagreement with his stepbrother’s choices are threatening to make him a pariah in his own family. Will the family be able to survive beyond the Seder?
New Broadway Book Club Edition
Alex Edelman’s Just for Us by
With a Foreword by Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
Winner of the 2024 Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special for HBO’s telecast.
After following an anti-Semitic tweet aimed in his direction down an online rabbit hole, comedian Alex Edelman finds himself in an unexpected place: at a meeting of White Nationalists in Queens, face-to-face with the people behind the keyboards. What follows comprises the backbone of this show, equal parts hilarious and gripping, that made its way from small London theaters to a unanimously well-received hit run on Broadway. Within Just for Us, Edelman, who was awarded a Special Tony Award® for the show, explores religion, cultural identity, assimilation, empathy, gorillas that speak sign language—and what it means to be confronted with hatred.
New Signature Acting Editions
Staff Meal by
Mina and Ben, two strangers who frequent the same café, strike up a conversation and decide to have dinner together. But something strange is happening in the city outside: The streets are empty and a bird calls a warning. Amidst this unsettling atmosphere, Mina and Ben find themselves in the only place still open: a mysterious restaurant where service is an art, the chef may be a god, and food is a portal to other—better—worlds. Endlessly surprising and surprisingly moving, Staff Meal is a surreal dark comedy about the stories we tell and the ways we take care of each other when the world grows dark.
The Laramie Project by Moisés Kaufman and the Members of Tectonic Theater Project
In October 1998, a twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Wyoming was kidnapped, severely beaten, and left tied to a fence in the middle of the prairie outside Laramie, Wyoming. His bloody, bruised, and battered body was not discovered until the next day, and he died several days later in an area hospital. His name was Matthew Shepard, and he was the victim of this assault because he was gay. Moisés Kaufman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project made six trips to Laramie over the course of a year and a half, in the aftermath of the beating and during the trial of the two young men accused of killing Shepard. They conducted more than 200 interviews with the people of the town. Some people interviewed were directly connected to the case, while others were citizens of Laramie, and the breadth of the reactions to the crime is fascinating. Kaufman and Tectonic Theater members have constructed a deeply moving theatrical experience from these interviews and their own experiences in Laramie. THE LARAMIE PROJECT is a breathtaking collage that explores the depths to which humanity can sink and the heights of compassion of which we are capable.
Also see its companion play The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later.
Mary Gets Hers by
It’s 950 AD (give or take a few years) and eight-year-old Mary has just lost her parents to a plague which has been turning everyone into foam. She’s kidnapped by a hermit, Abraham, who takes her to a monastery and vows to shield her from the world, with the help of his pious friend Ephraim. After years locked away in a cell-inside-a-cell, Mary escapes her heavily restricted life and runs away to an inn and a life of indulgence. But the innkeeper has plans for Mary’s future, and soon, she again finds herself trapped. Good thing Abraham vowed to do whatever it took to rescue her… A quirky, earthy, hilarious play about how everyone makes their own way to love and self-knowledge.
