National Network for Equitable Library Service

No stranger to dramas both heartfelt and heart-wrenching, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage has written one of her most exquisitely devastating tragedies to date. Set in one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, PA, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggle to keep their present lives in balance, tragically ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their futures.

"Revelatory...As intimate and immediate as a whispered secret. Vogel's play thrums with music, desire, and fear, and it's shrewd about the ways in which America isn't free, and about how art does and doesn't transcend the perilous winds of history." – New Yorker – "Superbly realized...Indecent, the powerful play by Paula Vogel, sheds an eye-opening light on a little-known time when theatrical history, Jewish culture, and the frank depiction of homosexuality intersected, with explosive results." – New York Times – "Gorgeous.

"As ever, Hudes's writing is poetic but wry, full of swagger and poetry. There's live music, but oh, how the lines sing too." —David Cote, Time Out New York. "Ms. Hudes draws all her characters with precision and understanding... this warm-blooded play underscores how the disorienting flux of life can be navigated with the help of carefully tended family ties." —Charles Isherwood, New York Times. "Delightful... Hudes is a very accomplished storyteller, a playwright with an emergent, fulsome American narrative." —Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune.

Speed-the-Plow is an exhilaratingly sharp, comical, disturbing play about the power of money and sex in Hollywood, and how they corrupt two movie producers. Speed-the-Plow opened at Lincoln Center to sold-out seats, rave reviews, and much fanfare in March 1988 - starring Madonna, Joe Mantegna, and Ron Silver - and later moved to and had a long-standing run on Broadway.

Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. —There are many kinds of light. The light of fires. The light of stars. The light that reflects off rivers. Light that penetrates through cracks. Then there's the type of light that reflects off the skin. —Nilo Cruz, Anna in the Tropics. This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression.

What do Physics, three bears and a stroke have in common? Take a journey with Elaine, a middle-aged Physics teacher, as she explains the theory of relativity using the metaphor of three bears and a train, and devises a plan to turn back time and save her ailing father from physical determination. Written by gifted playwright Jean Tay—Everything but the Brain was first developed at the Playwrights' Cove at The Necessary Stage in 2001 and staged by Action Theatre in 2005. It won Best Original Script—The Straits Times' Life!

A powerful study of infidelity and interwoven lives, filmed as the award-winning Lantana. A woman disappears. Four marriages become entangled in a web of love, deceit, sex and death. Who will survive? Nine parallel lives – interlocked by four infidelities, one missing person and a mysterious stiletto – are woven through a fragmented series of confessionals and interrogations that gradually reveal a darker side of human nature.

A stunning collection of plays from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks that captures the societal rupture of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 13, 2020, as theaters shut their doors and so many of us went into lockdown, Suzan-Lori Parks picked up her pen and set out to write a play every day. What emerged is a breathtaking chronicle of our collective experience throughout the troubling days and nights that followed.

"The single most daring thing I've seen in a theater in a long time." - Wesley Morris, New York Times. The Old South lives on at the MacGregor Plantation - in the breeze, in the cotton fields, and in the crack of the whip. Nothing is as it seems, and yet everything is as it seems. Slave Play rips apart history to shed new light on the nexus of race, gender, and sexuality in twenty-first-century America.

Acclaimed for his gentle, complex characterizations, Samuel D. Hunter's bighearted and funny plays explore the quiet desperation running through many American lives. The Whale tells the story of a six hundred-pound shut-in's last chance at redemption and of discovering beauty in the most unexpected places when he reaches out to his long-estranged - and severely unhappy - daughter.