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Showing 3361 - 3380 of 4416 items
By David Landau. 2008
Full Length / Interactive Comedy / 3m, 2f / Interior CONTEMPT OF COURT is a new non-mystery interactive comedy from…
the inventor of the interactive dinner theater. It's a typical night at Judge Judy's Peoples Night court where audience members become plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses and jury in some of the most outlandishly funny law suits ever to double cross the bench. This hilarious comedy send up of all those TV court shows proves that some people really have a Contempt of Court.By David Landau. 2008
Full Length / Musical Comedy / 4m, 3f / Interior An Interactive Musical Comedy Mystery Spoof of the famous HBO…
series. Meet the family that inspired it all, the Altos. It's Tony's funeral (Or is it?) and his wife Toffee has invited you to the wake. Chris wants you should check your weapons at the door (and if you don't have any, he's got extras!) Uncle Senior has a rigged dice game going and Tony's Ma is - well just nuts. Tony's shrink Dr. Malaise is giving free analysis and the Father isn't sure what he is doing! But one thing is for sure, almost no one seems sad that Tony is gone and they certainly done seem happy once he's discovered alive. Be prepared to dodge bullets, laugh at the songs and see if you can't figure out who put a contract out on Tony!By Dori Appel. 2008
Dramatic Comedy / Flexible casting, 3-12 f / Unit Set / 2008 Finalist for the Oregon Book Awards, Angus Bowmer…
Award in Drama / Hat Tricks is an exciting compilation of six scenes and three monologues designed for performance by mature actresses. Covering a range of women's experiences in the second half of life, these nine pieces range from the purely comedic to those that combine humor with thoughtful and sometimes poignant explorations. This is a richly varied collection featuring a single intriguing commonality: Every scene or monologue includes the presence and compelling use of a HAT!By Henry Meyerson. 2008
Fresh Brewed is a collection of eleven plays, all of which take place in a coffee bar, all of which…
use the same set of two small tables and four chairs, and all of which can be performed by two male and two female actors in various combinations from a monologue to two quartets. If all of the plays are performed in one evening, there should be no black outs between plays. Simply changing the composition of the cast can signal the audience of movement between plays. On the hand, each play is written so that it can be performed as a stand alone work. If done as a unit, I suggest the following order. At the least, I would recommend opening with No Prune, and closing with I Fell Swell.By Jack Sharkey. 1977
Comedy. Jack Sharkey. . Charcters: 4 male, 8 female . Interior Set. This hilarious send up of the horror story…
genre has an ancient castle, creaking doors, a mad scientist, his misshapen assistant, a grim housekeeper, secret laboratory, shrieks from the depths of the cellar, disappearing villagers, an incredibly stalwart and stupid hero of sterling character, the scientist's absolutely dopey daughter, and so many laughs you'll lose count. The setting (designed for both proscenium and in the round performances) is the parlor of Castle Von Blitzen in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania. Where is the Baron Von Blitzen's secret laboratory? That's what the terrified villagers would like to know and when the scientist and his assistant convert the innocent parlor into a fiend's experimental station, the ingenuity of the set provokes both laughter and applause.By Darren O'Donnell. 1999
pppeeeaaaccceee, is a vast, imaginative and mesmerizing glide through Life and Power. The play is set in Ephemeral; three people…
firmly floating chat - in O'Donnell's inimitable rapid-fire style - about the revolution. Which revolution? Good question. A gently aggressive meditation, pppeeeaaaccceee examines our being, asks us what we're doing and reminds us that there are monsters in here. Peace. Say it slow, stretch it out, make it last forever.By Amiel Gladstone. 2007
Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays collects three works by one of Canada's dramatic luminaries.'Hippies and Bolsheviks' is set in…
that hotbed of hippie idealism, 1970s British Columbia. Young Star stumbles home from a Led Zeppelin concert with a draft dodger and sets in motion a crisis of love and of faith in their idealism against the Establishment.'In Lena's Car', a woman whose marriage is on the verge of collapse reflects on how it got to that point, harkening back to a youth when things were both more simple and more complicated.'>In The Wedding Pool', a group of dissatisfied single friends decide to each contribute fifty dollars a month to a pool to be collected by the first one to marry. But when one of the friends starts dating the bank teller who opens their account, the others are forced to confront their ideas about loneliness and personal responsibility.'The Wedding Pool is a particularly smart and entertaining example of the thirty-something angst genre.' - The Globe and Mail 'If Hippies and Bolsheviks is any indication of the quality of work at this year's playrites Festival, Calgary theatregoers are in for a phenomenal month.' - Calgary Sun.By R. M. Vaughan. 2000
'There are no lost women, only women who've forgotten their scripts.' RM Vaughan's play about Hollywood director Dorothy Arzner comes…
off the stage and onto the page in this handsome edition from Coach House Books. An insightful look at the gender politics behind the cameras and studios of the golden age of cinema.By Linda Griffiths. 2007
It's a time of passion and confusion. Virtue is barely holding down its petticoats. People are bursting their corsets with…
unbridled desire. It's 1885, and the typewriter and the suffrage movement are sending things topsy-turvy. In the midst of it all, five ambitious New Women and one Newish Man struggle to find their way. Miss Mary Barfoot runs a school for secretaries with her young lover, Miss Rhoda Nunn. But when the Misses Madden spinsters Virginia and Alice and beautiful young Monica arrive, along with the attractive Dr. Everard Barfoot, things can never be the same.Age of Arousal is a lavish, sexy, frenetic ensemble piece about the forbidden and gloriously liberated self genre-busting, rule-bending, and ambitiously original. The book includes notes and a rousing, thoughtful essay on Victorian womens' suffrage by the playwright.'Endlessly witty, vigorous, funny... brilliantly inventive.' - Calgary Herald 'Griffiths is one of Canada's 'originals' known not only for the quality of her work, but for the sheer range of her career.' - Maclean'sBy Bill Svanoe. 2008
Comedy / 1m, 1f / Simple Set Callback is a two character contemporary comedy, drama about the forty-year mostly professional…
relationship between an actress and a director. They both go through struggles, heartbreaks, triumphs, and unexpected discoveries along the way. They are bound together on and off by many things, but what keeps them both going is their overwhelming love of the theater.By Karen Hines. 2004
Beckett meets Betty Boop in this trilogy of monologues by Canadian cult heroine Pochsy, a nasty, vapid, utterly charming vixen.…
In 'Pochsy's Lips,' she's in the hospital, convinced she's sick because she's got a squid where her heart should be. In 'Oh Baby,' she's at the Last Resort, on holiday from her job packing mercury. And in 'Citizen Pochsy,' our little minx is in the waiting room at an audit from hell.In The Pochsy Plays, Hines remodels and melds traditions like stand-up, absurdism, clowning and neo-cabaret to create some of the most original and cutting satire to hit the stage - and, now, the page. Walk a mile in her distressed calfskin boots as the dark and ditzy Pochsy garbles ad slogans, self-help mantras and desperate grabs at meaning into a postmodern pastiche that is hilarious and harrowing, sweet and bitter at the same time.With extensive photos and musical scores, and an introduction by Darren O'Donnell.By Darren O'Donnell. 2001
These four plays - 'White Mice', 'Who Shot Jacques Lacan?', 'Radio Rooster Says That's Bad' and 'Over' - written by…
Darren O'Donnell for his theatre company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, will challenge your politics, your ontology and everything you hold to be safe, stable and sacrosanct.By R. M. Vaughan. 1994
Ogres, trolls, demons - monsters, like violence, are always represented as male. Not this time. Celebrated playwright RM Vaughan gives…
us, in three one-act monologues, three very monstrous women. 'In A Visitation by St Teresa of Avila upon Constable Margaret Chance,' we meet a middle-aged police officer whose world view is determined by her obsession with race, bloodlines and genetic determinism. 'The Susan Smith Tapes' (made into a film for CBC and Showcase by Jeremy Podeswa) shows the famous American who drowned her two young sons trying to recapture the public's attention by auditioning for talk shows. And 'Dead Teenagers' introduces us to a frustrated reverend unhealthily addicted to the spectacle of large funerals for murdered children.By Anton Piatigorsky. 2009
Nominated for several Dora Awards When a young scholar finds Eternal Hydra, a long-lost, legendary and encyclopedic novel by an…
obscure Irish writer, she brings the manuscript to an esteemed publisher, hoping to secure an international audience for the book. But Vivian's obsession with the dead author, who has materialized in her life, is challenged by the work of a contemporary historical novelist, and she's forced to face confounding questions about authorship, racism, and ethical behavior.Weaving between modern-day New York, 1930s Paris and New Orleans in the years following the Civil War, Eternal Hydra is a postmodern look at the making of a modernist masterpiece.'A play of such tight structure, such cerebral content and such sure drama that the thoughtful theatregoer could hardly fail to be impressed.' - Globe and MailBy Greg Macarthur. 2007
Isolated brings together two inventive, disturbing plays by one of Canada's most intriguing dramatic voices. In 'Recovery', people around the…
world are addicted to a mysterious substance. Large recovery centres are set up, promising refuge, treatment and healing to millions of addicts. But all is not what it seems. Following three residents of a facility in Antarctica, 'Recovery' is a subtle, quirky and unsettling play of Orwellian proportions about the commodification of fear, the oppression of the individual, and the blinding consequences of a medicalized society. In 'Get Away', a strange malaise is leaving people listless and apathetic. David escapes to a cabin in the woods where he discovers two hauntingly beautiful teenagers. Sensing that they might be the key to his survival, and wanting to protect them, he invites them in. The three become dangerously intertwined, and it becomes unclear who is the predator and who is the prey. Part fairy tale and part horror show, 'Get Away', is a haunting look at the destructive nature of longing and our desperate need for love.By Michael Redhill. 2005
Winner of the Best of the Edinburgh Fringe Prize. Our hero, the recently divorced Michael Redhill, goes to Poland to…
get away from his life and to do some research on the Holocaust. Thwarted by witnesses unwilling to talk, he returns home via England, but in London is introduced to someone who can tell him a 'real' story of evil, and genocide. Through the memory of the storyteller, who served as a prison guard, he encounters an alleged war criminal with Alzheimer's who is about to be put on trial, along with the man's beautiful daughter and an attorney who is eerily similar to the criminal he's prosecuting. But has the old man's guilt dissolved with his memory? Could he be pretending to be ill in order to escape punishment?Who do we believe? A prison guard still wounded by history? A writer suffering from heartache? A dying war criminal? Who does memory serve? Did the past really happen? And if it did, who has a claim on it? Goodness is a morality tale for the modern age. This remarkable play, by the award-winning author of Building Jerusalem and Martin Sloane, is a Russian-doll: concentric stories enveloping each other, inhabiting the gaps between experiencing, telling and hearing.By Greg Macarthur. 2005
Expose yourself to one of the most original new voices in theatre with this collection of two uncompromising plays by…
Greg MacArthur.'Snowman': After years of wandering, Denver and Marjorie find themselves in a remote northern community at the edge of a glacier, chopping wood, renting out stolen videos and doing cocaine with Jude, a young gay man whose parents have abandoned him. When Jude discovers the body of a prehistoric boy frozen in the glacier, everyone finds their lives beginning to shift and thaw in unexpected ways.'girls! girls! girls!': Splitz deserved to win. Missy stole first place. Set in the cutthroat world of high school gymnastics, this play follows the Friday-night exploits of four teenage chums as they seek revenge for a loss on the vaulting horse. Told in a hypnotic, rap-meets-nursery-rhymes style, this play, which takes its cue from A Clockwork Orange and the Columbine massacre, is brutally violent as it explores what happens when emptiness becomes the norm.Exposure includes an introduction by Peter Hinton.By Karen Hines. 2012
Dr. Penelope Douglas is an ex-forensic psychiatrist looking for a fresh start in a styling western boomtown, but on her…
first day practicing in her boutique suite, a young television writer hangs himself in her subway-tiled bathroom. A dissection of contemporary television drama through the eyes of the dead writer reveals to Penelope an unsettling connection between the forty-four-minute television hour and the disintegration of the human soul. But it isn't until Penelope's oil wife friend pronounces Penelope her unborn baby's spiritual godmother that Dr. Douglas takes the dive into the uncharted waters of her own unconscious to break the spell that has the frontier in its filthy grip. Will Dr. Douglas be able to find heart in this wild new landscape? Will she have to smudge her lipstick to 'cowboy up'? Drama, the long-awaited new play by the master of edgy dark humour, has all the answers.By William Shakespeare, Stephen Orgel, A. R. Braunmuller, Claire Mceachern. 1999
The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative…
and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. From the Trade Paperback edition.By Karen Hines. 2006
Winner of the 2007 Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for DramaIn the vast, unnamed metropolis of Hello ... hello, art and…
commerce have finally and completely conjoined; stylish cafés serve up zebra mussels and the air is thick with a gentle rain of sparrows plummeting down from the mirrored office towers. Everywhere, people are falling for an edgy new fashion accessory: a shiny ball filled with poison that hangs from a delicate chain. In this oddly peaceful world, Cassandra, a salesgirl at a clothing store called the Abyss, meets a charismatic ad man named Ben in the graveyard where she is mourning her lover, the last true artist on earth. They find themselves helplessly attracted to one another. Ben walks Cassandra home and invites her out to dinner, which leads to sex, marriage and a house in Semi-Residentia. Then comes baby. All one and a half inches of her. Hello ... hello, nominated for several Dora awards, including Best Play and Best Musical, is a tragic, comedic and curiously erotic attack on western society's predilection for escapist consumerism and entertainment. If the boy-meets-girl musical is the shiny happy ball, then the content of the play, and its characters, are the poison held within. '[Hines is] one of the most original artists in the city.' - Toronto Life