The PlayFinder™

Winner of the 2004 Tony Award® for Best Play and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

THE STORY: Based on a true story, and inspired by interviews conducted by the playwright over several years, I AM MY OWN WIFE tells the fascinating tale of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a real-life German transvestite who managed to survive both the Nazi onslaught and the repressive East German Communist regime.... Read more

As the words drawn from their letters, diaries and books reveal, John and Abigail Adams were singular people: proud, loving, articulate and filled with the dedication and spirit required to share in the forging of a nation. Through their words, with rhymed addenda spoken and acted by the company, the stuff of their lives—and the drama of the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress and the Declaration of Independence—are made eloquently and vividly real on the stage. Blendin... Read more

The time is now, the place New York City. Rich, a young writer who is beginning to find success, is breaking up with his longtime lover, Saul, a professional photographer. The split is particularly difficult for Saul, who still loves Rich deeply, but the mood is one of bantering and ironic humor as they divide their belongings. However Rich's idyll with his new lover is short-lived when he learns that he has AIDS and returns to the goodhearted Saul for sanctuary as he awaits it... Read more

The scene is a small Southern town where Colonel and Christine Penmark live with their daughter, Rhoda. Little Rhoda Penmark is the evil queen of the story. On the surface she is sweet, charming, full of old-fashioned graces, loved by her parents, admired by all her elders. But Rhoda's mother has an uneasy feeling about her. When one of Rhoda's schoolmates is mysteriously drowned at a picnic, Mrs. Penmark is alarmed. For the boy who was drowned was the one who had won the penma... Read more

Archibald K. Holly is a widower with three daughters and a problem. Gwendolyn, his middle daughter, wires that she is jilting the boy next door for a new beau from college, and that she is bringing him home. The potential groom is not a young man as expected, but Eliot Spurgeon, a suave, sophisticated professor as old as Mr. Holly himself. But the fun really begins when Mr. Holly realizes, that Eliot is an old fraternity brother of his, famous as the campus wolf. Holly's determ... Read more

In Moscow, in 1926, a housing crisis rages. In a cramped apartment, Ludmilla, a put-upon housewife, lives in dreamy complacency with her cheerful despot of a husband, Kolya. When one day, Kolya's handsome comrade, Volodya, arrives from the country, but can find no lodgings, Kolya offers him their sofa. When Kolya returns early from a business trip, he is shocked to discover that Ludmilla and Volodya have become lovers. Kolya moves out, but there is still nowhere to live, so he ... Read more

Set in pre-Stonewall Greenwich Village, THE BEEBO BRINKER CHRONICLES follows the lives and loves of Laura, Beth and Beebo as they navigate uncharted territories of desire. Beth and Laura, secret lovers in college, went separate ways after graduation: Beth married and had children; Laura moved to New York. Both pine for each other, but before they can reunite, they find themselves entangled in the web of Beebo Brinker, a butch denizen of the bars with a soft spot for young lesbi... Read more

Sergei Maxudov is reluctantly working as a newspaper man and has written a novel everyone is sure will never pass the censors. In despair, Maxudov is about to commit suicide when he is interrupted by the mysterious Rudolfi, a publisher who wants to buy the novel. But after the novel's first installment appears in print, Rudolfi unaccountably disappears, leaving Maxudov in the lurch. But Maxudov's bleak literary prospects are rescued once again, when a note is slipped under his ... Read more

For a battle hardened combat soldier the peacetime Army can hold terrors that make him wish he were back in action again. Take the case of First Lieutenant Stanley Poole, a career Sergeant who earned a battlefield commission, and is now assigned as Supply Officer on an old-line Army Post in the Middle West. It isn't that the life is unpleasant, but only that the Army has decided that its officers should pass tests indicating the equivalent of two years of college study—which ma... Read more

Cited as one of the 100 greatest works of fiction of all time by a panel of international writers in 2002, THE CASTLE remains "Kafka's most magical novel" (The New York Times). By turns sexy, comic, and horrifying, this new stage version of THE CASTLE tells the story of a man who decides to fight a monstrous bureaucracy rather than give in to it, attempting and failing to gain entrance to a castle where he has been summoned to work. In its surreal depiction of an all-pow... Read more

A moving and celebratory musical play in which hats become a springboard for an exploration of black history and identity as seen through the eyes of a young black woman who has come down South to stay with her aunt after her brother is killed in Brooklyn. Hats are everywhere, in exquisite variety, and the characters use the hats to tell tales concerning everything from the etiquette of hats to their historical and contemporary social functioning. There is a hat for every occas... Read more

Co-conceived by L Morgan Lee and George Strus

THE STORIES: In the third volume of plays from the Breaking the Binary theatre festival, George Strus and L Morgan Lee commissioned twelve transgender, nonbinary, and Two-Spirit+ (TNB2S+) playwrights to write short scenes and monologues inspired by the prompt "truth // dare."

Joe, Interrupted. Joe Biden receives advice on his political future ... Read more

Muriel Whitlock, a middle-aged English spinster, is a perfectionist. Small wonder that Virginia Whitlock, an attractive young girl, hopes to get away. Virginia is a sculptress and she has just finished a statute which she is convinced will win her a scholarship to an art school in Rome. Muriel is not pleased, when she realizes that Virginia's mind is made up, she agrees, and even offers to help finance the trip. All seems well, but when they leave for church one day Muriel slip... Read more

Democracy is in trouble—the show is, at least. Federal Hall is presenting a play about the birth of American democracy, and one of the actors is sick, forcing the hall’s computer technician, Alicia, to step into a role. But Alicia, a Black woman, experiences the show differently than her predecessor, and as she reenacts key moments in American history, she starts to question how wise the founders actually were—especially if the Bill of Rights was basically an afterthought. As t... Read more

The place is Heavenly Heights, U.S.A., where a flourishing black capitalist and his family enjoy the gaudiest blessings of material success, while regarding the poor black people of Goodbread Alley with disdain. The irony of their attitude is enhanced by the casting of black actors as white and white as black, with roles reversed as the play progresses; until all are merged at a point of soul stirring catharsis as the need to recover a stolen humanity is made undeniably and pow... Read more

Lives intersect in comic and dramatic fashion in a motel that has seen better days in Watkins Glen, New York. Break-ups and a wedding, a rapping reverend and a drone attack, the ridiculous and the sublime all come together in one unlikely place.

THE GORGES MOTEL is comprised of the short plays:
Missing by James Hindman
... Read more

Content Notes: Adult language and content.

THE STORIES: Fast and funny, this volume contains ten short comedies that will surprise you at every turn. From a terrifyingly badass third-grade tetherball champion (Chronicle Simpkins Will Cut Your Ass by Rolin Jones), to a real-life narrator who blends the lines between fiction and truth (Boise, Idaho by Sean Michael Welch), to a couple whose relat... Read more

Persian translations by Maryam Ataei and Arian Moayed, after Behazin

THE STORY: Set in Persia a hundred years ago, on the eve of World War I, Ridgely’s HAMLET weaves passages of Farsi 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 code... Read more

In Molière's outrageous satire of medicine and its practitioners, the wealthy Argan, to put it mildly, enjoys poor health. Laxatives, suppositories, bloodlettings, and second and third opinions from the leading quacks are the order of his day—and hell on his wily, back-talking servant Toinette. His daughter Angélique is in love with the impoverished Cléante, but Argan wants to marry her to Thomas Diafoirus, a medical dunce who can assure his father-in-law a lifetime of health c... Read more

The normally pleasant routine of their lives having been disrupted by the privations of the Civil War, the four March sisters are drawn even more closely together by the absence of their father and the need to help their mother maintain their home. They all pitch in, with the exception of the delicate Beth, and earn what money they can to help meet expenses but they are still affected by the mainstream of life and the inescapable call of love and marriage. The first to strike o... Read more

A couple is moving too fast—literally.... Read more

Oliver is being groomed by his in-laws for a position in the family business: banking. Shy and ineffectual under ordinary circumstances, Oliver discovers that he can be bold and independent when wearing the dog costume he had acquired for a masquerade ball. Donning it on the proper occasions, he can even outface his in-laws. They, in turn, are appalled at the thought of Oliver's wearing the dog suit in public. When he wears it to work at the bank he's told he must choose betwee... Read more

The scene is a remote ranch in the Australian outback, where Shirley, a widow, lives with her teenage daughter, Margaret. Shirley has become disturbed by the intense relationship that has grown between Margaret and her friend, Carla, the child of her late foreman, who Shirley took in after her parents' death. To eliminate Carla's influence over Margaret, Shirley decides to send her daughter to boarding school and Carla to live with relatives. This plan leaves the girls devastat... Read more

The widower Harpagon, so cheap he’d swipe the pennies off a dead man’s eyes, rules his roost with a tight, iron fist. His son, Cléante, has fallen in love with the beautiful but penniless Mariane; his daughter, Elise, has secretly promised to wed Valère, a young charmer of unknown parentage who has flattered his way into being Harpagon’s chief steward. When Harpagon reveals his plan to wed Mariane himself and yoke Elise to the wealthy but aged Seigneur Anselme, children, suitor... Read more

Misery follows successful romance novelist Paul Sheldon, who is rescued from a car crash by his “number one fan,” Annie Wilkes, and wakes up captive in her secluded home. While Paul is convalescing, Annie reads his latest book and becomes enraged when she discovers the author has killed off her favorite character, Misery Chastain. Annie forces Paul to write a new Misery novel, and he quickly realizes Annie has no intention of letting him go anywhere. The irate Annie has Paul wr... Read more