Fresh this December: Discover our newest publications—captivating stories ready to shine on your stage. Explore now and find your next hit production!
New Signature Acting Edition
Eureka Day by
Now on Broadway through January 19
The Eureka Day School in Berkeley, California, is a bastion of progressive ideals: representation, acceptance, social justice. In weekly meetings Eureka Day’s five board members develop and update policy to preserve this culture of inclusivity, reaching decisions only by consensus. But when a mumps outbreak threatens the Eureka community, facts become subjective and every solution divisive, leaving the school’s leadership to confront the central question of our time: How do you build consensus when no one can agree on truth?
New Plays
Emily of New Moon, based on the novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery,
Thirteen-year-old Emily Starr is very much her beloved father’s daughter. Like him, she has a rich imagination, loves to learn, and has a passion for writing prose and poetry. After his untimely death, Emily is left an orphan, so her aunts and uncles draw lots to determine who her new guardian will be. Her prudish Aunt Elizabeth Murray draws the losing lot, and Emily comes to live with her on New Moon Farm, unbalancing all of Aunt Elizabeth’s routines with her joyful nature and wholehearted embrace of life. Emily similarly upends the lives of her schoolmates and neighbors, her kind-hearted cousin Jimmy, and her shy Aunt Laura. Over the course of a year, Emily lifts the spirts of her new community and comes to embrace being Emily of New Moon Farm.
The House That Will Not Stand by
Photo by Joan Marcus, 2018 Off-Broadway
In early nineteenth-century New Orleans, a widowed mother, Beartrice, struggles to manage her headstrong daughters after the death of her second husband. But as the matriarch takes her place as head of the household, a more ominous transfer of power transpires in the region. The French-owned Louisiana Territory is about to be acquired by the United States, threatening the liberty of the free people of color residing on the land. A gripping examination of intersecting captivities, The House That Will Not Stand follows four women in mourning as they look ahead to an uncertain and haunting future.
every tongue confess by
In Boligee, Alabama, the temperature is rising, hailstones are falling, ghosts are walking among the living, and someone is setting black churches on fire. As one church burns to the ground, the parishioners trapped inside tell tales spanning generations that may unravel the mystery of who is behind the arsons. Blending folklore, magic, and real American history, every tongue confess is an epic fantasia that probes the line between redemption and damnation.
Angels of Bataan (full-length) by Tracy Wells
It’s 1941 on the tropical island of Luzon in the Philippines. Helen and her sister, Sally, are among more than one hundred US Army nurses who have come to the island looking for warm tropical breezes and a little adventure. But paradise becomes a nightmare when, just a few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, enemy bombers target their island. Now, Helen, Sally, and the rest of the nurses must do everything they can to keep themselves and their charges alive as they navigate nursing through a war zone in Manila, a tropical jungle in Bataan, and eventually as prisoners of war in the Santo Tomas Internment Camp. Through it all, the women’s spirits remain high and they rely on the ingenuity, camaraderie, and strength that eventually earns them the name “the Angels of Bataan.”
A one-act version of this play is also available.
Hamlet by
Photo by Eric Michael Pearson, 2017 Off-Broadway production
Adapted from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Set in Persia a hundred years ago, on the eve of World War I, Ridgely’s Hamlet weaves passages of Farsi translation into the English of Shakespeare’s masterpiece of crisis and identity. In it, a traditional way of life is being threatened by an evolving world, the land is being threatened by encroaching foreign interests, and a young man finds himself uprooted and torn between opposing customs, values, and codes. Seamlessly blending traditional Persian and modern Western elements, this is a bold reimagining of the most renowned play in any language.
