Join us in celebrating the magic of World Theatre Day! đźŽâś¨
From the lights dimming to the final curtain call, theatre transports us to new worlds and sparks unforgettable emotions. Let’s honor the creativity, passion, and talent that bring stories to life on stage with our curated list of theatre-themed titles!
Happy World Theatre!
Dramatists Play Service
Act One by James Lapine, from the autobiography by Moss Hart
Growing up in an impoverished family in the Bronx, Moss Hart dreamed of being part of the glamorous world of the theatre. Forced to drop out of school at age thirteen, Hart’s famous memoir Act One is a classic Hortatio Alger story that plots Hart’s unlikely collaboration with the legendary playwright George S. Kaufman. Tony Award-winning writer and director James Lapine has adapted Act One for the stage, creating a funny, heartbreaking, and suspenseful play that celebrates the making of a playwright and his play Once in a Lifetime. Act One offers great fun to a director to utilize over fifty roles, which can be played by a cast as few as twelve, and in a production that can be done as simply or elaborately as desired.
Evening at the Talk House by
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the opening of an unsuccessful play, the playwright, the leading actor, the producer, and various other members of the company get together at their former haunt, the Talk House. Most haven’t been there, or even seen each other, in years, and the gossip and nostalgia are mixed with questions and accusations. Why does a washed-up old actor keep getting beaten up by his friends? Where does a failed actress-turned-waitress disappear to for months at a time? EVENING AT THE TALK HOUSE is a biting portrayal of people grasping to find their place in a world in which terror has become an accepted part of life. Is this the world we’re living in now?
Impromptu by
Four actors sit on a darkened stage, awaiting the arrival of the stage manager who has called them together. Lacking his authoritative presence they are merely characters in search of a play to become part of, for their own personalities seem unformed and shallow next to the full-blooded figures they are used to playing. They are also “types,” and each of them has absorbed most of what he is from what he pretends to be on the stage. As they wait, the stage lights come up—but still no one appears to tell them what they are to do. They know only that they are not to leave the stage until they have “acted out the play.” Suddenly becoming aware that an audience is present, the actors decide to improvise, an idea which finds them slightly flustered. Ernest, the “leading man,” exercises the prerogative of star billing and assumes command. He plunges ahead, assigning roles to himself and his colleagues—Winifred, who always plays the “leading lady’s best friend”; Lora, the struggling ingenue; and Tony, the juvenile lead. The “drama” which unfolds is a mixture of truth, fantasy and well-rehearsed situations, but out of it, in subtle progression, comes a deepening awareness of the real people behind the theatrical facades.
Shows for Days by
It’s May 1973 when a young man wanders into a dilapidated community theater in Reading, PA. The company members welcome him—well, only because they need a set painter that day. The young man then proceeds to soak up all the idealism and the craziness that comes with being part of a struggling theater company with big dreams. When a playwright looks back at his beginnings in the theater and decides to chronicle those experiences in a play, all sorts of things can happen. If you’re Douglas Carter Beane, who grew out of his Reading, PA, community theater days to become one of the stage’s master writers, it’s bound to bring a measure of gimlet-eyed reflection, a large dollop of self-deprecation, and a heaping dose of hilarity.
Stage Door (Revised Edition) by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman
During the Depression, the Footlights Club in the West Fifties of Manhattan provides an affordable respite and community for the bevy of struggling stage actresses who reside there. They are an amusing and varied lot. The main story concerns Terry Randall, a headstrong and witty girl from the Midwest who is determined to become a leading actress on the Great White Way. While pursuing her career, she becomes involved with two completely different beaux: the left-wing arrogant playwright Keith Burgess, who eventually goes Hollywood as a screenwriter, and David Kingsley, a well-groomed elegant film producer who decides to return to Broadway. Among her co-residents at the Footlights Club are Jean Maitland, who lands the Holy Grail—a seven-year film contract; Kaye Hamilton, whose lack of stage success leads to suicide; Pat Devine, a nightclub dancer; and Linda Shaw, a society girl who shocks her mother by having an affair with a wealthy married man. Despite the vicissitudes of the theater trade, Terry sticks to her guns and wins both the leading role in a Broadway play and the affections and respect of the man she loves.
The Actor’s Nightmare by
Having casually wandered onstage, George is informed that one of the actors, Eddie, has been in an auto accident and he must replace him immediately. Apparently no one is sure of what play is being performed but George (costumed as Hamlet) seems to find himself in the middle of a scene from Private Lives, surrounded by such luminaries as Sarah Siddons, Dame Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. As he fumbles through one missed cue after another the other actors shift to Hamlet, then a play by Samuel Beckett, and then a climactic scene from what might well be A Man for All Seasons—by which time the disconcerted George has lost all sense of contact with his fellow performers. Yet, in the closing moments of the play, he rises to the occasion and finally says the right lines, whereupon make-believe suddenly gives way to reality as the executioner’s axe (meant for Sir Thomas Moore) instead sends poor George to oblivion—denying him a well-earned curtain call.
The Book of Will by
Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn’t have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.
The Grand Manner by
In 1948, playwright A.R. Gurney, then a young boarding-school student, traveled to New York where he attended a performance of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, going backstage afterwards to meet the production’s star, the great stage actress Katharine Cornell, who was dubbed “The First Lady of the American Stage” by the legendary critic Alexander Woollcott. A mix of remembrance and imagination, The Grand Manner is a love letter to this fabled actress and a heartfelt look back at the glorious heyday of the Broadway theatre.
The Nance by
In the 1930s, burlesque impresarios welcomed the hilarious comics and musical parodies of vaudeville to their decidedly lowbrow niche. A headliner called “the nance” —usually played by a straight man—was a stereotypically camp homosexual and master of comic double entendre. The Nance recreates the naughty, raucous world of burlesque’s heyday and tells the backstage story of Chauncey Miles and his fellow performers. At a time when it was easy to play gay and dangerous to be gay, Chauncey’s uproarious antics on the stage stand out in marked contrast to his offstage life.
The Play That Goes Wrong by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer & Henry Shields
From Mischief, Broadway masters of comedy, comes the smash hit farce. Welcome to opening night of the Cornley University Drama Society’s newest production, The Murder at Haversham Manor, where things are quickly going from bad to utterly disastrous. This 1920s whodunit has everything you never wanted in a show—an unconscious leading lady, a corpse that can’t play dead, and actors who trip over everything (including their lines). Nevertheless, the accident-prone thespians battle against all odds to make it through to their final curtain call, with hilarious consequences! Part Monty Python, part Sherlock Holmes, this Olivier Award–winning comedy is a global phenomenon that’s guaranteed to leave you aching with laughter!
High School Edition is also available.
The Understudy by
Franz Kafka’s undiscovered masterpiece in its Broadway premiere is the hilarious and apropos setting for Theresa Rebeck’s exploration of the existential vagaries of show business and life. Charged with running the understudy rehearsal for the production, Roxanne finds her professional and personal life colliding when Harry, a journeyman actor and her ex-fiancé, is cast as the understudy to Jake, a mid-tier action star yearning for legitimacy. As Harry and Jake find their common ground, Roxanne tries to navigate the rehearsal with a stoned lightboard operator, an omnipresent intercom system, the producers threatening to shutter the show and her own careening feelings about both actors and her past. Will the show go on? THE UNDERSTUDY is a dazzling and humanistic look at people trying to do what they love in the face of obstacles that mount until all anyone can do is dance.
Yellow Face by
The lines between truth and fiction blur with hilarious and moving results in David Henry Hwang’s unreliable memoir. Asian-American playwright DHH, fresh off his Tony Award win for M. Butterfly, leads a protest against the casting of Jonathan Pryce as the Eurasian pimp in the original Broadway production of Miss Saigon, condemning the practice as “yellowface.” His position soon comes back to haunt him when he mistakes a Caucasian actor, Marcus G. Dahlman, for mixed-race, and casts him in the lead Asian role of his own Broadway-bound comedy, Face Value. When DHH discovers the truth of Marcus’ ethnicity, he tries to conceal his blunder to protect his reputation as an Asian-American role model, by passing the actor off as a “Siberian Jew.” Meanwhile, DHH’s father, Henry Y. Hwang, an immigrant who loves the American Dream and Frank Sinatra, finds himself ensnared in the same web of late-1990’s anti-Chinese paranoia that also leads to the “Donorgate” scandal and the arrest of Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. As he clings to his old multicultural rhetoric, this new racist witch hunt forces DHH to confront the complex and ever-changing role that “face” plays in American life today.
Playscripts
Deadline by Marcia Kash, Douglas E. Hughes
A team of two struggling playwrights has just found out their longed-for production is canceled. While stewing in their righteous grief, their agent informs them that their idol, the most celebrated murder-mystery writer since Agatha Christie, has died with the script to his upcoming Broadway thriller left unfinished. Tasked with completing his work in under a week, Mara and Don jump into the story—and soon find themselves characters in the unresolved caper. Can they use their love of the genre and writing skills to solve the mystery and become the toast of Broadway?
Long Live Love by Don Zolidis
It’s opening night for Long Live Love, a drawing room comedy about a marriage squabble where everything turns out happy in the end. But hours before the curtain is set to go up, George Harold, one of the show’s two playwrights, rushes in with a new, much more cynical version of the script he wrote in an angry, drunken haze. As the actors scramble to add a tragic ending to their romantic farce, Marjorie Bright, the other playwright—and George’s wife—arrives with a new new ending for the show. Now the actors are stuck in an impossible situation, trying to piece together a working script from the remains of the playwrights’ marriage. Long-lost children, mistaken identities, and sword fights abound in Long Live Love—and that’s just behind the scenes.
The Audition by Don Zolidis
A new theater teacher is bringing a production of A Chorus Line to the high school. Though the hopefuls range from shy to outrageous, and from diva-like to determined, everyone has a chance to step into the spotlight. A hilarious and heartbreaking look at the madness of auditioning and the actors who brave the process for that perfect part.
