Showing results by publisher "L.A. Theatre Works" in Drama & Plays

In "Tell Tale", we enter the private thoughts of a respectable married mortician, lost in passion for a beautiful real estate broker who markets to the bereaved. In "Thief of Tears", we meet Mac, the attractive daughter of an upper-class WASP family who frequents the Viper Room and steals jewelry from corpses. And in "Thirteen Things about Ed Carpolotti", a newly widowed suburban matron finds her world crashing about her – only to be rescued by love from beyond the grave.

Leo Beagle has spent two years writing a 638-page manifesto on human harmony that just might change the world. The problem is only that no one wants to read it, especially not Leo’s unharmonious family.

Jon Robin Baitz's commanding drama is about a New York publisher and Holocaust survivor whose decision to publish obscure political tracts threatens the future of both his company and his family.

Award-winning playwright, screenwriter and director Jane Anderson presents four one-act plays: A Seminar For Responsible Living; The Last Time I Saw Her; Earthquake Preparedness; Lynette Has PMS. With unforgettable characters and scathing humor, the stories explore the challenges of life in Los Angeles, from gun violence to earthquakes. These short pieces ask us to consider what we need to take with us into the next hundred years, and what is best left behind.

It’s 1929 as The Jazz Singer hits the silver screen and the talkies promise to change movies forever. Enter three down-and-out vaudevillians who hatch a hare-brained scheme to “make it big” in Tinsel Town. Their plan? To open a voice academy for the witless stars of silent movies. The only things standing in their way are ditzy starlets and power-hungry movie moguls.

Italian shoes, a house in the hills, a gift for stretching the truth, and a petulant assistant to pick the scallions out of his Szechuan noodles - Hollywood producer Davis Mizlansky has it all. But he's about to lose it to the IRS unless he can pull off one more deal. A stellar cast performs this hilarious send-up of modern-day Hollywood.

Walter Matthau stars in the story of a climate scientist trying to balance romance and research. The piece is both serious and surreal as Matthau removes the “fourth wall” while addressing the show’s recording engineer. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Barbara Bain, Zeljko Ivanek and Valerie Landsburg. Directed by Shaun McLoughlin. Recorded before a live audience in Santa Monica, California, in June 1992.

A comedy-drama about the good-hearted workers at North Shore Fish, a seafood processing plant in Gloucester, Massachusetts. When a government inspector lays down the law, their jobs and lives face irrevocable changes. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Kristin Ace, Karen Caplan, Laura Sigrid Crook, Heidi J. Dallin, John Fiore, Melissa Fitzgerald, Mary Klug, Marina Re and M.H. Rogers. Directed by Grey Johnson. Recorded before a live audience in March 1993.

Jonathan Waxman is a hugely successful artist. He's been profiled in Vanity Fair and receives exorbitant prices for his works, sight unseen. But a visit with his original muse and lover causes him to reevaluate the success that now controls him.

In 17th-century Sicily, a clever valet named Mascarille tries to help his boss, Lélie, win the girl of his dreams – only to find that Lélie is a monumental dunce who ruins every one of his intricate schemes. Undaunted, Mascarille invents progressively wilder plots, only to see his best-laid plans go very awry in Molière’s The Bungler, translated by Richard Wilbur.

Light Up the Sky is a fast-paced, hilarious and ultimately loving look inside show business, set just before and immediately after a Broadway bound play meets its first audience. A full-cast performance featuring: Ian Barford, Patrick Clear, Shannon Cochran, Kyle Colerider-Krugh, Matt DeCaro, Kevin Gudahl, Deirdre Lovejoy, Mariann Mayberry, Phyllis Newman and Steve Pickering.

Literary figures from a book thief’s library come alive, offering romantic and other advice. The Incunabula is a prize book that the thief has purloined. Will he get away with his greatest theft, or will hard reality intervene to strip him of his prized possession? An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Alan Corduner, Ken Danzinger, Joanna Frank, Marabina Jaimes, Alan Raichins, Elizabeth Ruscio, Jeanne Sakata, Carolyn Seymour, and James Warwick. Directed by Robert Robinson.

The Scopes trial, over the right to teach evolution in public schools, reaffirmed the importance of intellectual freedom as codified in the Bill of Rights. The trial, in a small-town Tennessee courtroom in 1925, set the stage for ongoing national debates over the separation of church and state in a democratic society - debates that continue to this day.

In 1950s Houston, an affluent couple is transformed by tragedy when their son dies under mysterious circumstances and the husband loses his job of 40 years. Shirley Knight recreates her Tony-nominated performance in this 1995 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.

A brand new lawyer and his young bride have returned from their honeymoon and are moving into their new high-rent apartment. In order to reach this "charming" dwelling, they must first climb six creaking flights of stairs. Once there, they find the place is absolutely bare of furniture, the paint job is all wrong, the skylight leaks, there is room for only one twin bed, and the wacky neighbors pop up at the worst times.

How well do you know your family? Your social class? Your race? Sensitive "Spoon" LeVay and his brother "Flip" see their weekend at the family home on Martha's Vineyard as a perfect opportunity to introduce their girlfriends to their upper class African American parents. Instead they stumble into a domestic powder keg that exposes secrets of prejudice, hypocrisy, and adultery. This fantastic new play comes from the pen of one of the country's most provocative new playwrights!

Dr. Melanie Laidlaw is a scientist developing the first use of ICSI, short for intracytoplasmic sperm injection. Her collaborator, Dr. Felix Krankenthaler, turns out to have his own ideas about how to implement their new procedure. The wild card is Melanie's new lover, Menachem Dvir, a fellow scientist. This darkly comic ménage à trois plays out not only in bedrooms and labs, but also in test tubes and under the microscope. A Brave New World indeed!

Gregory Itzin portrays the brilliant but flawed Lee Atwater, a self-styled master of negative campaigning and a tightly wound country boy from South Carolina, who rose to the chairmanship of the Republican Party. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance starring Gregory Itzin as Lee Atwater, with Fran Adams, Ed Begley Jr., Judyann Elder, Arye Gross, Richard Masur, Daniel Passer, Harry Shearer, Fred Willard, and Kenny Williams.

Commerce and heroism clash when a titan of American business orchestrates a U.S. invasion of Mexico. This long-lost 1927 Broadway melodrama combines the crackling dialogue and riveting storytelling of The Front Page with Wag the Dog cynicism.

This painfully funny slice of Cuban-American life in the suburbs is a cross between a Hispanic soap opera and an ethnic comedy with political overtones. This deft play can turn serious or silly in an instant and you’ll need a scorecard to keep track of the cascading and frequently arboreous calamities. A full-cast performance featuring: Max Casella, Peter Michael Goetz, Valerie Harper, Alexuna Lambros, Anna Sophie Loewenberg, Jonathan Silverman, and Joyce Van Patten.