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The award-winning team behind Doubt -- playwright John Patrick Shanley and director Doug Hughes -- reunite on Broadway for the world-premiere romantic comedy Outside Mullingar starring Debra Messing and Bryan F. O'Byrne. Playing through March 16 at Manhattan Theatre Club, Shanley's newest follows the romance between two middle-aged neighbors in rural Ireland as family eccentricities and land feuds threaten to keep them apart. The volume contains an introduction by the playwright about his own offbeat Irish family that inspired this work.
Playwright-provocateur Adam Rapp (Pulitzer Prize finalist for Red Light Winter), spanning 100 years in a Lower East Side tenement hallway, weaves tales of love, torment and redemption in The Hallway Trilogy. In the playwright's words: "I thought setting a series of plays in one of these transitional spaces would be an exciting challenge: How to extend moments and dig deep with story and character. How to embrace the limitations of a non-descript, narrow space... How the actual hallway would change over the course of a century... And what doesn't change? What's forgotten? Which lives have haunted a building and which ones simply fade away?"
Twenty years after its world premiere, Tony Kushner's masterpiece, Angels in America, received its first New York revival in fall 2010 at Signature Theatre. This new Revised and Complete Edition, available in hardcover and paperback, contains both Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika, in the revised versions that were performed, as well as a new author's foreword. TCG celebrated the launch of this new edition with the playwright and director George C. Wolfe at Signature Theatre back in December.
Inspired by the case of gay Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, who killed himself in 2010 after being harassed by his straight roommate, Teddy Ferrara is a searing new play about what happens when a tragedy sparks a movement -- and the truth gets lost along the way. By Christopher Shinn, the author of Pulitzer Prize-finalist Dying City, this gripping drama received its world premiere at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in 2013.
 Published to mark the National Theatre's 50th anniversary, The National Theatre Story (Oberon Books) chronicles the political, architectural and artistic history of London's National Theatre, revealing scores of previously unpublished stories. Author Daniel Rosenthal interviewed more than 100 actors, directors, playwrights and producers, and was granted unprecedented access to the National's archive. The result is this definitive work which covers many of the stage's greatest actors, dramatists and productions. Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Grounded (Oberon Books) tells the story of a hot-rod F16 fighter pilot whose unexpected pregnancy ends her career in the sky. A tour-de-force play for one actress, the multiple-awards-winning play by George Brant targets our assumptions about war, family and the power of storytelling. One of the hotly debated current issues is the turn by visual artists towards theatre as a way of working, by using plays, acting and rehearsal techniques for their art. The first of the new "Performance Ideas" books by PAJ, newARTtheatre: Evolutions of the Performance Aesthetic by Paul David Young, includes playwright and curator Paul David Young in dialogue with many crossover artists, including Pablo Helguera, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, Janet Cardiff, Alix Pearlstein and Michael Smith, who offer wide-ranging views on performance, video, photography and sound.
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One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent Broadway history, Tracy Letts's Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest -- and absolute worst.
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A new edition of the play, coinciding with the current film starring Academy Award nominees Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, as well as Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepherd, Juliette Lewis and Ewan McGregor, is now available. Letts's screenplay was nominated for a WGA Award and a Critics Choice Award. Watch the Oscars on Sunday, March 2, to see if either Streep or Roberts goes home with the gold.
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Will Eno
The Pulitzer Prize-finalist playwright of Thom Pain (based on nothing) receives a starry Broadway premiere.
Nearly ten years after being christened by the New York Times as "a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation," playwright Will Eno ( Middletown, The Flu Season) is receiving his Broadway premiere, and it's a starry one at that. The Realistic Joneses, which begins performances March 13 at the Lyceum Theatre in NYC, first premiered at Yale Rep in spring 2012. It's an outrageous, intimate look at the suburbanites who live next door -- and in this case, those same last-named neighbors are portrayed by playwright-actor Tracy Letts, Marisa Tomei, Michael C. Hall and Toni Collette. The production will be directed by Sam Gold, who also helmed the Yale production. The busy playwright also has a play premiering Off-Broadway simultaneously: The Open House -- which, as Eno told the New York Times, he wrote because he "had never written a play that was just about a family" -- began performances at Signature Theatre on February 11 and will run through March 23. (One imagines that the playwright, known for sly language and absurd humor, wrote his this "synopsis" of the play for Signature's website; the "trailer" can be viewed here.) The next act for Eno? TCG will publish a volume including his plays Title and Deed and Oh, the Humanity and Other Good Intentions, as well as Gnit, a willfully American misreading of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, this spring. In addition, the recently married Eno is expecting his first child with actress Maria Dizzia. And that might be his greatest work of all.
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In the Wake
Monday, March 24 at 7:00 PM
Barnes & Noble; New York, NY
 Obie-winning author Lisa Kron, author of Well and the recent hit-musical Fun Home, presents a reading of In the Wake, a play that takes on the question of our country's character and politics with plenty of humor and passion. This event is co-sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts.
For more information:
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Each month, a TCG staff member selects a TCG Books title that holds a special meaning -- whether it's a show the staffer performed in, a dog-eared acting resource, a writer that continually inspires or simply a favorite play -- and we offer a special 50% discount off that title for the month. For February, Alissa Moore, education, research & collective action associate, has selected Ruined by Lynn Nottage, and here's why. |
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TCG Titles Currently in Production in March
Floyd Collins
by Adam Guettel &
Tina Landau,
La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts (CA)
Water by the Spoonful
by Quiara Alegrķa Hudes, Court Theatre (IL)
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Enter Playwright, Trailed by Filmmakers
by Erik Piepenburg
New York Times
"The studio said: Let's make it a hug instead. And I said: Well, then we'd have to call it Prelude to a Hug." Playwrights Craig Lucas, Eric Bogosian, David Lindsay-Abaire, Alfred Uhry and more discuss adapting their works for the silver screen.
Turns Out His Blood Runs Green
by John Patrick Shanley
New York Times
"I always knew I'd have to come home eventually." John Patrick Shanley discusses his Irishness and his newest play, Outside Mullingar, currently on Broadway.
Adam Rapp, Theresa Rebeck slated for
Pacific Playwrights Festival
by David Ng
Los Angeles Times
Adam Rapp (The Hallway Trilogy) and Samuel Hunter (The Whale/A Bright New Boise) will be part of the festival in Costa Mesa, CA, April 25-27.
Columbia University Announces Winner of 2014 Edward M. Kennedy Prize
The prize for a drama inspired by American history was awarded to Dominique Morisseau's Detroit '67, which is published by Oberon Books.
Going Down For It: Thomas Bradshaw's Intimacy
by Ariel Stess
The Brooklyn Rail
Thomas Bradshaw, the author of Intimacy, currently running Off-Broadway and to be published by TCG this fall, speaks to fearlessness, shock and genuine laughter in his work.
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