Comedy / 2m, 3f / Simple Set A scream is heard throughout the stratosphere. It is the voice of the lamp. Louise is selling this expensive family heirloom to keep her daughter April in school and cease her more sordid "consultant" profession. April rushes home with lover in tow to halt the proceedings and save the lamp, but it has been intercepted by a quiet and bizarre middle-aged couple with a haunting secret. Attempts to reclaim the lamp are made, as a misplaced father slowly fades to white in the background. "...A gutsy writer with a gift for creating vivid images rooted in the emotional life of her characters." - The New York Times "...Troubled and precocious college dropout April is described to her mother, Louise, as 'stunningly brilliant' - a line that fits her creator, Sheila Callaghan. The odd characters populating Crawl, Fade to White frantically eat dirt and twist menacingly. Audiences trying to process this engagingly quirky new play might find themselves gaping 'like they're watching the cosmos disrobe.'" - Time Out New York

Crawl, Fade to White

Literature & Fiction

Callaghan, Sheila

Dramas & Plays

Samuel French, Inc.

Dramtic Comedy / 1-2m, 3f / Simple Set Anima's sphere of desperation and self-destruction is invaded by the arrival of her perky new roommate, Christa. Moved by a particularly malevolent statue of the Virgin Mary and a houseplant named Susan, Anima and Christa soon enter into a profound and intimate friendship that incurs traumatic results. "Brilliantly and poetically rendered...[Callaghan's] playful sense of language and her attunement to her characters are enthralling." - Time Out Chicago "Scab...is a textbook example of promising work, written with a yen for interesting language and liberally salted with well-observed details of the lives of newly minted adults...the play shines." - The New York Times "Darkly funny forays into the surreal...Callaghan shows talent in the inventive fantasy sequences...A stylish production." - The Village Voice

Scab

Concord Theatricals

Comedy / Characters: 2m, 3f A pair of radical feminist ex-strippers scour the country on a murderous rampage against right-wing pro-lifers, blogging about their exploits in gruesome detail. Meanwhile, a scruffy screenwriter named Owen tries to bang out his magnum opus in a hotel room as his best friend Rodney ("The Rod") holds forth on rape and other manly enterprises. When Owen decides to incorporate the strippers into his screenplay, the boundaries of reality begin to blur, and only a visit from Jane Fonda can help keep worlds from blowing apart. Sheila Callaghan's That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play is a violently funny and disturbing excavation of the dirty corners of our imaginations. "Mind-blowing images and soul-crushing language flowing wildly." -Back Stage "A submersion in the anarchy of ambivalence: variously a rant, a riff, a rumble - about our notions of naturalism, objectification, perversity, and beauty ... There's sass and sarcasm in Callaghan's high-energy punk writing." -John Lahr, The New Yorker "Raunchy, savvy... the twisted, caffeinated world of the show imagines the collective subconscious of a culture where girls never stiop going wild... [Callaghan] push(es) her audience's buttons with an aggressive treatment of some of the darker corners of the human psyche." -The New York Times

That Pretty Pretty; Or, the Rape Play (Samuel French Acting Edition)

Comedy Characters: 3 male, 3 female, flexible castingChained to his desk in the basement of customer service hell, Segis suddenly finds himself set free in the CEO's penthouse-but is it a dream? This raucous reinvention of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Life is a Dream gleefully skewers corporate America with razor-sharp wit "Enjoyably stylish [with an] antic pace and witty aesthetic" - Washington Post"Ambitious, often uproarious." - City Paper "A pizzazz-filled concoction that skewers corporatism with a generous supply side of laughs. [Callaghan] is without doubt the purveyor of top-shelf American wit." - Metro Weekly "[Callaghan has] a keen eye for the outlandish. Exudes the kind of infectious zaniness that occasionally attracts cult followings." - Variety "I can't remember the last time a play made me laugh so hard. Between the chuckles and belly laughs, the dialog is surprisingly layered, and gives the audience plenty to think about. Fever/Dream is about as funny as the sharpest Hollywood comedy, and far more rewarding." -BrightestYoungThings.com

Fever/Dream

Characters: 1 male, 3 femaleSingle Set On a secluded Greek island, an American ex-pat pursues his passions: winemaking and his breathtaking young wife. Then, on the eve of Reagan's inauguration, the first tasting of the new wine is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of August's former lover. Inspired by Greek tragedy, Lascivious Something combines evocative language with sympathetic yet deeply flawed characters straight out of Euripides. "Definitely worth spending an undeniably tense evening with, right through an unexpected twist at the end." -Associated Press "Sheila Callaghan has created a great premise and fascinating characters, her writing intertwining wine and blood and sex as painful but necessary life forces." - Back Stage "Sometimes dreamlike, often shocking, Lascivious Something is at once both fraught and languorous, its most powerful moments found in the quietest revelations or silent stares. Go with an open mind and you are certain to find that your cup runneth over with ideas by the final bow." - The Collective Magazine "Callaghan, whose previous work might be described as post-feminist punk incursions into the poetic turf of early Sam Shepard, here employs a more linear narrative line to push her personal-is-political agenda." - LA Weekly "Blown Away...Honest, captivating from beginning to end. I can't recommend it enough" -CBS News

Lascivious Something

Romance

Victor is a ruthless fashion designer in the 1970s at the top of his game. Esme, his glamorous protégé and muse, is pushed aside when an ordinary Midwestern woman inspires Victor to make his artistry accessible to the masses. A generation later, a woman grappling with a healthy dose of self-loathing must wrestle her own family demons to find her way through the world of fashion that won't give a woman her size a second look. Skipping back and forth in time, Everything You Touch is a viciously

Everything You Touch

"What's on the menu for Meredith, Tori, and Sandy, the three women in Guy's life? Healthy lifestyles, upward mobility, meaningful sex? Or self-loathing and distorted priorities? Inspired by the strangely ubiquitous advertising trend of picturing attractive women blissfully eating salad...Sheila Callaghan breaks all the rules of our image-obsessed culture..." -- from back cover.

Women Laughing Alone With Salad

Sheila Callaghan is one of the most distinctive playwrights working in the theater today. Fiercely political, unblinkingly experimental, yet emotionally true, her writing is a refreshing combination of the compelling and the controversial. This volume collects three of her most recent plays to date. It includes: Lascivious Something, a heart-rending and disturbing exploration of failed love and shattered idealism at the dawn of the Reagan era, it follows a lapsed activist’s attempt to start life anew on a vineyard in Greece and what happens when the woman he left behind tracks him down; Roadkill Confidential, a noir-ish meditation on brutality and the intersection between fear and art, focused on an artist who uses the corpses of dead animals found on the side of the road as the medium for her creations; and That Pretty Pretty; Or, the Rape Play, which imagines our girls gone wild culture spiraling out to its most extreme ends while exploring issues of beauty, objectification, perversity, and naturalism in current society.

Lascivious Something/Roadkill Confidential/That Pretty Pretty; Or, The Rape Play: Three Plays

Catapult

Bed: A Play with Music in One Act

Humor & Satire

Tripwire Harlot Press

FEATURING: THE TRANSIT PLAYS (Plane, Boat, Car, Bicycle, Train) Five very short absurd plays Minimal set 2 M, 2-3 F Each play revolves around one form of transportation; ferry, train, bicycle, plane, and car. Strangers attempt to form connections with one another, attaining varying degrees of success. * With theatrical staging, elevated and challenging language, and non-realistic elements. HE ATE THE SUN, Minimal set, 2 M, 1F, A series of quick vignettes navigating the experience of one cowardly man losing his attractive yet shallow wife to a young, hot internet tycoon. Look out, he's got a gun. AMERICAN JACK, Minimal Set, 1M, 1F, A fragmented and theatrical portrait of a Greek survivor of Nazi occupation, who subsequently builds a life for himself in America in the 70's brick by brick. SOAK, Minimal Set, 1M, 2F, Heidi and David come to this space everyday. Something tragic happened here, but all that remains is the ghost of a German chanteuse, an accordion player, an iPod, and a shrine to Bjork. And everyone is drunk.

The Transit Plays and others

Original Works Publishing

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Books by Callaghan, Sheila