Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2021: Read a Play (Female Playwrights)
- Ariel H.
- Monday, March 01, 2021
Collection
Fulfill the "Read a Play" prompt with these titles written by female playwrights
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2021 reading challenge. Find more lists here.
Stick Fly
Published in 2014
Two wealthy, African-American brothers take their girlfriends to their Martha's Vineyard home to meet their parents. However, events are set in motion that will expose long-standing secrets of personal and domestic strife.
Trifles
Published in 2011
Written by Susan Glaspell in 1916, Trifles is a one-act play about a woman accused of strangling her husband. Based on an actual murder case reported by Glaspell for the Des Moines News, the play represented an early exploration of gender relationships in a time when women often were considered to be mere trifles. A groundbreaking feminist play, Trifles is often included in anthologies of drama and literature. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Jeanie Hackett as Mrs. Peters; Amy Madigan as Mrs. Hale; Sam McMurray as the Sheriff; Steven Vinovich as Mr. Hale; Steven Weber as the County Attorney.
Eclipsed
Published in 2017
"Amid the chaos of the Liberian Civil War, the captive wives of a rebel officer band together to form a fragile community--until the balance of their lives is upset by the arrival of a new girl. Drawing on reserves of wit and compassion, Eclipsed reveals distinct women who must discover their own means of survival in this chilling and humanizing story of transformation and renewal in a hostile world of horrors not of their own making."--Page 4 of cover.
Crimes of the Heart
Published in 2001
This Pulitzer Prize-winner is a deeply touching and funny play about three eccentric sisters from a small Southern town rocked by scandal when Babe, the youngest, shoots her husband. Humor and pathos abound as the sisters unite with an intense young lawyer to save Babe from a murder charge, and overcome their family's painful past. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Ray Baker, Donna Bullock, Arye Gross, Glenne Headly, Sondra Locke and Belita Moreno.
4000 Miles -- After the Revolution
Two Plays
Published in 2013
Known for delicately detailed character studies that subtly balance humor and insight, Amy Herzog is swiftly emerging as a striking new voice in the American theater. After the Revolution, an astute and ironic drama about how society appropriates history for its own psychological needs, was heralded by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best New Plays of 2010. Herzog's other critical hit, 4,000 Miles, is a quiet rumination on mortality in which twenty-one-year-old Leo seeks solace from his feisty ninety-one-year-old grandmother Vera in her New York apartment. Amy Herzog received the 2011 Whiting Writers' Award and the 2008 Helen Merrill Award for Aspiring Playwrights. Her plays have been produced or developed at the Yale School of Drama, Ensemble Studio Theater, Arena Stage, Lincoln Center, The Actors Theatre of Louisville, New York Stage and Film, Provincetown Playhouse, and ACT in San Francisco. Her newest play, Belleville, premiered at Yale Rep in fall 2011.
Detroit '67
Published in 2013
It's 1967 in Detroit. Motown music is getting the party started, and Chelle and her brother Lank are making ends meet by turning their basement into an after-hours joint. But when a mysterious woman finds her way into their lives, the siblings clash over more much more than the family business. As their pent-up feelings erupt, so does their city, and they find themselves caught in the middle of the '67 riots. DETROIT '67 is presented in association with Classical Theatre of Harlem and the National Black Theatre.
Ruined
Published in 2009
Mama Nadi, the owner of a brothel set in Congo, is a mother figure who keeps watch over her business, serving men from both sides of the conflict, and employing women, "ruined" by rape or torture, who are forced to work as prostitutes.
Sweat
Published in 2017
Winner of the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. "From first moments to last, this compassionate but clear-eyed play throbs with heartfelt life, with characters as complicated as any you'll encounter at the theater today, and with a nifty ticking time bomb of a plot. That the people onstage are middle-class or lower-middle-class folks - too rarely given ample time on American stages - makes the play all the more vital a contribution to contemporary drama. If I had pompoms, I'd be waving them now."--Charles Isherwood, The New York Times. No stranger to dramas both heartfelt and heart-rending, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage has written one of her most exquisitely devastating tragedies to date. In one of the poorest cities in America, Reading, Pennsylvania, a group of down-and-out factory workers struggles to keep their present lives in balance, ignorant of the financial devastation looming in their near futures. Set in 2008, the powerful crux of this new play is knowing the fate of the characters long before it's even in their sights. Based on Nottage's extensive research and interviews with real residents of Reading, Sweat is a topical reflection of the present and poignant outcome of America's economic decline. Lynn Nottage's plays include the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined; Intimate Apparel, the most widely produced play of the 2005-2006 theater season in America, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'knockers, and POOF!"-- Provided by publisher.
Topdog/underdog
Published in 2001
A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.
Enron
Published in 2011
Fasten your seatbelts for a rapid-fire, sophisticated thrill-ride that propels you through one of the most infamous financial scandals in history! With a spicy blend of humor, pathos and music, the big biz machinations of Kenneth Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andy Fastow are laid bare as razzle-dazzle entertainment. Lucy Prebble's Enron casts a shocking new light on today's economy and how we got here. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Chris Butler, Jackie Emerson, Greg Germann, Pamela J. Gray, Gregory Itzin, Kasey Mahaffy, Jon Matthews, Julia McIlvaine, Amy Pietz, Russell Soder, Steven Weber, Kenneth Alan Williams and Matthew Wolf.
Tribes
Published in 2015
Billy has been deaf since birth, but his family has never learned sign language. In fact, until he meets Sylvia, who is fluent in ASL, Billy has never in his life been understood by anyone. This critically acclaimed sensation from Nina Raine will awaken all of your senses as it boldly asks some of life's hardest questions: what is communication and understanding, and can we truly have it-with anyone?
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf
A Choreopoem
Published in 1989
Twilight--Los Angeles, 1992 on the Road
A Search for American Character. Issue 1-4
Published in 2016
Duane Swierczynski and Simon Gane launch this ultimate action-movie blockbuster, ushering in a new era of monster battles. Ex-special forces tough-guy Boxer is a man with a grudge and vows to end the terror of Godzilla, no matter what. He assembles a top-notch team to take down monster-sized threats... at $7 billion a bounty. What starts as a vendetta could become a lucrative business for Boxer... if he can live past day one!
How I Learned to Drive
Published in 2015
Balmy evenings in rural Maryland are fraught with danger, and seductions can happen anywhere from a river bank to the front seat of a car, where a young self-conscious girl is learning to drive. To Li'l Bit, the radio is the most important part of the car, but the pop music of the 50's can never quite drown out the harrowing images in her mind.||An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Randall Arney, Joy Gregory, Glenne Headly, Paul Mercier and Rondi Reed.
The Mammary Plays
Published in 1997
The Mineola Twins and How I Learned To Drive are mirror-image family plays about coming of age in the '60s. The Mineola Twins, primarily set on Long Island, New York, is the more fiercely comic and political of the two. How I Learned To Drive, set mostly in Maryland, is a more delicate tale of sexual awakening.