"Just Say No, has a great deal to say and says it so there is no mistake: the country is in deep doo doo.  Line for line, Just Say No, is the funniest play New York has seen in years, and the most savage.  Johnathan Swift would be envious.  Kramer has fashioned a piece that makes us laugh even as we stare into the pit.  See it." - Michael Paller, New York Native

Just Say No; a Play About a Farce

Larry Kramer

Broadway Play Publishing, Inc.

While leading a tour of the haphazardly restored home of the Confederate general, a young African American docent suddenly has a revelation. An uproar ensues as she abruptly stops the tour and asks an affluent white couple if she can come home with them - as their slave! But the most astonishing moments are still to come ... A sophisticated, yet unrestrained rampage through the well-intentioned, but agenda-laden forces of the politically correct. "The gloves come off early in STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds's caustic comic tirade against political orthodoxy. A woebegone black guide leading a group through the haphazardly restored home of the Confederate general suddenly stops the tour to ask a well-to-do white couple from Ohio if she can come home with them, as their slave. It's a provocative moment: where is this playwright, who so deliciously savaged film making fifteen years ago in GENIUSES, headed with this tasteless conceit? Mercifully, not to a scene depicting modern slavery. The revolving panels of the play's simple set are eventually pushed aside to reveal the rehearsal room of a small theater company whose self-righteous administrators, interviewing playwrights for the new season, denounce the play the audience has just sampled. With that, Mr Reynolds climbs on his soapbox for a ambling, funny, cranky and highly entertaining diatribe against all the agenda-laden forces and high-minded programs (especially of the liberal stripe) that he believes have conspired to wring common sense out of American political and cultural life. Affirmative action, political correctness, nontraditional casting, the welfare state, black studies, ethnocentrism, multiculturalism: Mr Reynolds pushes so many buttons he could have staged the play in an elevator ... You don't have to agree with Mr Reynolds's inexhaustible supply of opinions to get a kick out of this ... The plot of STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE takes several outrageous turns, culminating in a hilariously radical restaging of the tour-guide scene along lines more politically palatable to the theater company's old guard ... But maybe a little more unvarnished spleen-venting is just what the theater needs." -Peter Marks, The New York Times "In STONEWALL JACKSON'S HOUSE, Jonathan Reynolds has created an American play of ideas much in the manner of Paddy Chayefsky, with intelligent characters expressing their philosophies with a wit that sparkles and stabs at the same time." -Howard Waxman, Variety ..". the funniest and most outrageous play of the season, a withering fusillade of satire aimed at our comfortably congealed political orthodoxies. He's brought brainy cantankerousness back with a vengeance." -Jack Kroll, Newsweek

Stonewall Jackson's House

Literature & Fiction

Jonathan Reynolds

Dramas & Plays

this I S B N is out of print. Title is available as I S B N 9780881453331.

The Complete History of America (Abridged)

Arts & Photography

Adam Long

Austin Tichenor

Reed, Martin

Performing Arts

An unemployed "little man" contemplates suicide and is besieged by discontented groups wanting him to turn his suicide into a gesture on their behalf. "More than a half a century ago, Russian playwright Nikolai Erdman came up with a comic cure for political headaches: THE SUICIDE. It gave Joseph Stalin a pain and Erdman got twenty years in a Siberian work camp. But a strikingly American adaptation of Erdman's political farce is proving just the pill for election-year depression. Playwright Richard Nelson's rollicking, larger-than-life adaptation of the 1920's Russian script explodes with laughter." -Jack Lesar, UPI

The Suicide

Nikolai Erdman

The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Sweater

Naomi Wallace

Bruce McLeod

A lawyer, facing mortality, desperate to find the son he drove away years before, travels in the dead of night to a mysterious cave. There he engages the services of a wizard, who conjures up visions of the romantic, adventurous, perilous life the lawyer's son has been living since his father expelled him from home. THE ILLUSION, freely adapted from Pierre Corneille's L'ILLUSION COMIQUE, is Kushner's most joyfully theatrical play, a wildly entertaining tale of passion and regret, of love, disillusionment and magic.

The Illusion

Tony Kushner

Pierre Corneille

William Shumway, a young, idealistic cellular biologist with a brilliant new idea for curing cancer, is recruited from a relative obscurity to Hill-Matheson, a major cancer research institute, by its charismatic director, Bob Brock, with the offer of his own lab and all the resources he will need to pursue that idea. As the pressure to show publishable results begins to build, fueled by unexpected competition from a rival lab at Oxford and the politically agile head of another department who has resentfully seen his own budget slashed to free up more funding for Shumway's lab, his research suddenly hits a snag. He is faced with having to choose between full disclosure of the problem, which would jeopardize the funding he needs, and making the more expedient decision to bend the rules just a little, which will buy him enough additional time to solve the problem.

Secret Order

Clyman, Bob

One of Off-Broadway's best-loved plays, originally directed by the author. The audience follows the lives of eight women. For this play, María Irene Fornés received one of her nine Obie awards. "A wonderful, important play." Susan Sontag "Fornes is America's truest poet of the theater." Erika Munk "An extraordinary play of uncommon insight and wit." Los Angeles Herald Examiner "One of the most powerful plays written about the mysteries and shared hallucinations of the female experience." L A Weekly "Though written in 1977, the message of FEFU AND HER FRIENDS remains ever the same: women don't know what to do with feminism. Or rather, they don't know what to do with themselves. It's a strange, unsettling play, not least because the strong women characters are at a loss with each other and with themselves. Without a man to center around, they disintegrate into cattiness and then madness. Fefu is probably deranged to begin with. She 'pretends' to shoot her husband with a gun that may or may not be loaded. She likes men better than women and in fact finds women 'loathsome.' Fefu and her friends are a group of society women, circa 1935. They're bored and affected in the manner of wealthy women who have too much free time. The play begins with plans for a charity benefit being planned at Fefu's New England estate. During the second part, four different scenes play simultaneously in four different rooms. The audience is led around to each in no particular order. In the final act, the women turn giggly, then bitchy, and then everything takes a tragic turn. Though not a realistic play neither is it strictly allegorical...at the heart of the play [is] 'a provocative statement about women to this day.' Fornés's self-loathing, self-doubting women only gradually come to understand the glossy surface and the dark underbelly that is the dual reality of their lives. It's thought-provoking but challenging, not for those who enjoy escapism in their theatre." Jenny Sandman, CurtainUp

Fefu And Her Friends

Fornés, María Irene

Neil LaBute brings a rich theatricality and his provocative way with language and story to the world of Count Dracula, Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and his beloved Mina — this time, with very much a mind of her own — infusing the classic gothic tale of terror, obsession, and pathos with a modern edge. Chilling yet stylish in its atmosphere, dark yet deeply human in its emotional impact, Neil LaBute's DRACULA is a tribute to both LaBute's dramatic vision and the timelessness of Stoker's novel.

Dracula

LaBute, Neil

Two of history's most enigmatic leaders — Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev — meet to halt the arms race. A crafty game of one-upmanship ensues, while their wives engage in a passive-aggressive tango over tea in this compulsively fascinating, slyly comic backstage glimpse of a twentieth-century landmark event.\n"BLIND DATE, Rogelio Martinez's playfully titled and altogether amusing geopolitical romp … might very well be described as a 'Ron-com.' Ron as in Ronald Reagan, the actor, California governor and 40th President of the United States whose military and foreign policies some say helped bring the Cold War to an end (at least temporarily). Whatever the long-term historical assessment of all that might be, there can be no doubt that one of the most notable events in late 20th century US–Soviet relations occurred during two days in November, 1985: Reagan, (who seemed to have bounced back from a 1981 assassination attempt, but as always was somewhat indecipherable), met for the first time at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland with Mikhail Gorbachev, who had only recently been elected to serve as General Secretary of the Soviet Union, and was something short of secure in his position. As with all blind dates, the 'couple' … arrive in a state of both apprehension and hopefulness. And their actual meeting ('truthy' as it might or might not be here, and without the presence of translators who are always essential elements in the room) is marked by all the nervous humor, misunderstandings, game-playing and awkwardness of such encounters. The two men also arrive with their respective wives … Also in attendance are the all-important advisors: US Secretary of State George Shultz, and the sophisticated Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose introductory lunch cannily reveals much about both men. Dancing around the edges of it all is Edmund Morris, the British–American historian whose much-anticipated biography of Reagan ultimately became what he described as 'a work of nonfiction by an imaginary author' — largely the result of Reagan's impenetrability. Most crucially, given the moment in which audiences are now watching BLIND DATE, there is a fully 'meta' quality about the play, with the decorum and diplomatic interplay of the historical event free of the social media contagion of the moment, and with the press corps very much of a long-gone era. In fact, if you tend toward nostalgia, you also might delight in the witty, zestful way in which Larry Speakes, Reagan's Mississippi–bred acting Press Secretary, handles his job. Yet more than anything, there is a sense of constructive peace-making and future-building (if far from naïve 'trust') here — one that might just keep mutually assured nuclear destruction at bay. To be sure, BLIND DATE … is no documentary. But the Cuban-born Martinez, who has riffed on the Cold War era in several other plays, captures both the personalities and issues in play, including the Reagan administration's 'Strategic Defense Initiative,' which raised the hackles of the Soviet Union, a nation already suffering from the fallout of its war in Afghanistan, a flailing economy, and Gorbachev's untested leadership. Two more wildly different personalities than 'Ron' and 'Misha' could not have been put in a room together. And yet, for whatever reasons (a mutual wish for a sane approach to major differences), they managed to find some common ground. And now, seen with the power of hindsight, a sort of melancholy overlays the farcical aspects of the play simply because we know Gorbachev's short tenure ultimately led to the arrival of Vladimir Putin, that Reagan's legacy was laced with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease and that nuclear war is no longer a matter of just two sides …" —Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

Blind Date

Martínez, Rogelio

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