Baby
Baby is a musical with a book by Sybille Pearson, based on a story developed with Susan Yankowitz, music by David Shire, and lyrics by Richard Maltby Jr. It concerns the reactions of three couples each expecting a child.
Skin of Our Teeth
Meet George and Maggie Antrobus of Excelsior, New Jersey, a suburban, commuter-town couple (married for 5,000 years), who bear more than a casual resemblance to that first husband and wife, Adam and Eve: the two Antrobus children, Gladys (perfect in every way, of course) and Henry (who likes to throw rocks and was formerly known as Cain); and their garrulous maid, Sabina (the eternal seductress), who takes it upon herself to break out of character and interrupt the course of the drama at every opportunity (“I don’t understand a word of this play!”).
Painting Churches
In a townhouse in the Beacon Hill area of Boston, an elderly couple, Fanny (in her 60s) and Gardner (in his 70s) Church, are packing. They are moving to a beach home on Cape Cod. Gardner is a poet and Fanny is from a “fine old family.” Their daughter Margaret (Mags), an artist who lives in New York, has arrived to help them pack and paint their portrait. Over the course of several days, Mags sees her role in the parent-child relationship changing. Gardner is having memory problems and has become frail, and in his frustration, recites the poetry of William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, among others. Mags finishes the portrait of her parents, in the style of Renoir. Her parents are able to see her talent, and enjoy being in a “Renoir” party as they dance a waltz.
Morning’s at Seven
Morning’s at Seven is a play by Paul Osborn. Its plot focuses on four aging sisters living in a small Midwestern town in 1928, and it deals with ramifications within the family when two of them begin to question their lives and decide to make some changes before it’s too late.
All My Sons
How far would a man go to protect his family, his interests, and his legacy? Joe Keller, the patriarch in All My Sons, desperately wants to secure and maintain the financial security and legacy he spent so many years building, ready to hand it down to his surviving son Chris. At the same time, Joe’s wife Kate is still waiting for their eldest son Larry to return from war, determined that he is alive and will marry the former girl-next-door, Ann –the daughter of Joe’s former business partner who is sitting in prison, punished for Joe’s crimes. To complicate this family drama, Chris and Ann are in love and want to get married. In All My Sons, Arthur Miller creates a post-war American family in a tragic downfall of lies, greed, love, and loss, and demands its audience examine their own social responsibilities to all the sons of American wars.
Our Town
Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thornton Wilder began his storied career as a novelist before branching out to short stories, screenplays, and dramatic works. At first glance, his play Our Town appears to be a simple, innocuous portrait of life in the small New Hampshire town of Grover’s Corners. But as time passes in the three acts—an ordinary day, a wedding, a death—the play builds to a soaring exploration of human existence: its boundless trials, joys, questions, certainties. This play “is one of the great democratic products of American literature. It gives you the sense that the same profound and horrible truths hold true whether you’re a sophisticate in Paris or a farmer in Grover’s Corners” (acclaimed writer Tom Perrotta in the Atlantic).
The Dining Room
The play is set in the dining room of a typical well-to-do household, the place where the family assembled daily for breakfast and dinner and for any and all special occasions. The action is a mosaic of interrelated scenes—some funny, some touching, some rueful—which, taken together, create an in-depth portrait of a vanishing species: the upper-middle-class WASP
Prisoner of Second Avenue
Neurotic middle-aged New Yorker Mel Edison is fired from his advertising job, forcing his loving wife, Edna, to become the couple’s sole breadwinner.
Inherit the Wind
Inherit the Wind is an American play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, which debuted in 1955. The story fictionalizes the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” Trial as a means to discuss the then-contemporary McCarthy trials.
Bus Stop
In the middle of a howling snowstorm, a bus out of Kansas City pulls up at a small roadside diner. All roads are blocked, and the weary travelers on board have to take refuge in the diner until morning.