SAM SHEPARD (1943 - )
| Nationality: | American |
| Literary Agent: *: | |
| Email: | n/a |
| Website: |
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Plays by Sam Shepard
4-H Club |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1965 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis | 1971 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: three young men in a trash filled apartment, with occasional outbreaks of violence and shouting | ||||
Action |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1975 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | Faber & Faber, London | 1975 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Four Short Plays | One Act | Parts: | Male | 2 | Female | 2 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: two shaven headed couples sit around a wooden table and wait for and finally consume a real roasted turkey, motiveless and puposefuless like a chimpanzee's tea party | ||||
Angel City |
| 1st Produced: | San Francisco | 1976 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Angel City and Other Plays", Urizen, New York | 1976 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | Play with Music | Parts: | Male | - | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: music by Bob Feldman | ||||
Synopsis: Los Angeles and a young magician and fixer is summoned to work a 'slight miracle' on a disaster movie | ||||
Back Bog Beast Bait |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1971 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis | 1971 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | with music | One Act | Parts: | Male | 4 | Female | 3 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: two cowboys are hired by woman to fight a monster ravaging the Louisiana countryside | ||||
Blue Bitch |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1973 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | Short Play | One Act | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: televised 1972 | ||||
Synopsis: phone rings as someone in Scotland wants to buy to American expatriates greyhound, milkman solves all the problems as a singing telegram arrives | ||||
Buried Child |
| 1st Produced: | San Francisco | 1978 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Buried Child and Other Plays", Faber, London | 1980 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | Tragedy | Parts: | Male | 5 | Female | 2 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: The setting is a squalid farm home occupied by a family filled with suppressed violence and an unease born of deep-seated unhappiness. The characters are a ranting alcoholic grandfather; a sanctimonious grandmother who goes on drinking bouts with the local minister; and their sons, Tilden, an All-American footballer now a hulking semi-idiot; and Bradley, who has lost one leg to a chain saw. Into their midst comes Vince, a grandson none of them recognizes or remembers, and his girlfriend, Shelly, who cannot comprehend the madness to which she is suddenly introduced. The family harbors a dark secretyears earlier the grandfather, Dodge, had buried an unwanted newborn baby in an undisclosed spot, creating a cloud of guilt which is dispelled only when Tilden unearths the child's mummified remains and carries it upstairs to his mother. His act purges the family, at last, of its infamy and suggests the perhaps slim possibility of a new beginning under Vince, whose estrangement from the others has spared him the taint of their sin. | ||||
Chicago |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1965 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis | 1967 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 3 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: a comedy about a young man in a bathtub | ||||
Cowboy Mouth |
| 1st Produced: | Edinburgh | 1971 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays", Winter House, New York | 1971 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 2 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: written with Patti Smith | ||||
Synopsis: games as woman with taste for French poetry wants to turn Slim into a rock and roll star | ||||
Cowboys |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1964 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 4 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: two young men in an unidentified space act out their various fantasies until finally turning on the audience | ||||
Cowboys #2 |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1967 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays", Winter House, New York | 1971 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 4 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: two young men sit and talk about whether it is likely to rain | ||||
Curse of the Starving Class |
| 1st Produced: | London | 1977 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Angel City and Other Plays", Urizen, New York | 1976 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 7 | Female | 2 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: The setting is a farmhouse somewhere in the American West, inhabited by a family who have enough to eat, but not enough more to satisfy the other hungers that bedevil them. The father is a drunk; the mother a frowzy slattern; the daughter precocious beyond her years; and the son a deranged idealist who wants something better but has no clear idea of how to attain it. The action is filled with changes and counter-changes as the family decides to sell the house to raise money; the mother talks of running off to Europe or Mexico, but ends up asleep on the kitchen table; the father sobers up and tries to take control; the daughter is blown up in the family car; and the son is brutalized and bloodied by the evil forces besetting them. In the end of the play its people become a metaphor for the underside of American lifethe benighted innocents forever pursuing a diminished dream, and the illusion of fulfillment which remains ever beyond their reach. | ||||
Dog |
| 1st Produced: | 1965 | |||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 1 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: about a black guy on a park bench | ||||
Eyes For Consuela |
| 1st Produced: | - | - | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | Dramatists Play Service, NY | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: Based on The Blue Bouquet by Octavio Paz. | ||||
Synopsis: A disheveled man wakes from a sweat-drenching nightmare, furiously shaking his shirt and pants free of possible small jungle creatures, and hastily dresses to face the utterly dreamlike reality of remote Mexico, a torpid limbo. Henry is a lost soul from the American middle-class, middle aged and unmoored, a superfluous stranger to a wife he left hundreds of scattered miles away in snowbound Michigan, and now alone in a squalid, vine-shrouded "hotel" amid snakes, lizards and ghosts. The owner of the makeshift inn, one-eyed Viejo, warns him to stay put for his own safety, but on a brief, circular walk through the underbrush he is set upon by a peasant named Amado. The predatory figure bears a machete and a slender knife which he will use to cut the eyes from Henry's head, he tells the incredulous American, in order to present this penitent, macabre offering of "a bouquet of blue eyes" to the bewitching Consuela. The fervor of Amado's obsessed mission, his dizzying persuasiveness, and his menacing wit and insight, push Henry's sanity to its limits. In a duel of ironic pathos, humor, cruelty and metaphor, each man examines what has taken him from the woman he loves and what desperate sacrificial price might reunite him with her. At the point when the gracefully haunting Consuela appears before Henry only to dismiss his brown eyes, the sole road out of the tangled tropical forest seems indistinct but at last possible. | ||||
Far North |
| 1st Produced: | - | - | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | 1993 | |||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Film Script | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 2 | Female | 5 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: | ||||
Fool For Love |
| 1st Produced: | San Francisco | 1983 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | City Lights, San Francisco | 1983 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Comedy Drama | Comedy | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: The scene is a stark motel room at the edge of the Mojave Desert. May, a disheveled young woman, sits dejectedly on a rumpled bed while Eddie, a rough-spoken rodeo performer, crouches in a corner fiddling with his riding gear. When he attempts to console May, who is distressed by Eddie's frequent absences and love affairs, she seems, at first, to softenbut then she suddenly attacks him. As the recriminations pour out, and the action becomes, at times, physically violent, the desperate nature of their relationship becomes apparentthey cannot get along with, or without, one another, yet neither can subdue their burning passion. The poignancy of their situation (they are half-brother and half-sister as well as lovers) is pointed out by the play's two other characters: a hapless young man who stops by to take May to the movies and becomes the butt of Eddie's funniest yet most humiliating jokes; and a ghostly old man (perhaps their father) who sits in a rocking chair at the side of the stage, sipping whiskey and commenting wryly on what he observes. Eventually May and Eddie tire of their struggle and embracebut it is evident that the respite is temporary and that their love, the curse of the past which haunts them, will remain forever damned and hopeless. | ||||
Forensic and the Navigators |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1967 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis | 1971 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 4 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: confused struggle between two revolutionaries and the Fxterminators, who are agents for an unnamed power holding people in a nearby prison camp | ||||
Fourteen Hundred Thousand |
| 1st Produced: | 1965 | |||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis | 1967 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 2 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: National Education Television filmed THREE PLAYS FROM LA MAMA. They were PAVANE by Jean Claude Van Itallie, FOURTEEN HUNDRED THOUSAND by Sam Shepard, and THE RECLUSE by Paul Foster. Tom O'Horgan directed the entire program. | ||||
Synopsis: two people are building a bookcase for her fourteen hundred thousand books, assisted and watched by three others | ||||
Geography of a Horse Dreamer |
| 1st Produced: | London | 1974 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | Grove Press, New York | 1974 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Mystery Play | Mystery | Parts: | Male | 8 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: though rescued by his brothers a Wyoming cowboy, pure at heart but destroyed in spirit, cannot recapture the world he has lost | ||||
God Of Hell, The |
| 1st Produced: | Actors Studio Drama School Theater, NYC | 2004 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | |||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Dark Comedy, 70 min | Comedy | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: An uproarious, brilliantly provocative farce that brings the gifts of a quintessentially American playwright to bear on the current American dilemma. Frank and Emma are a quiet, respectable couple who raise cows on their Wisconsin farm. Soon after they agree to put up Franks old friend Haynes, who is on the lam from a secret government project involving plutonium, theyre visited by Welch, an unctuous government bureaucrat from hell. His aggressive patriotism puts Frank, Emma and Haynes on the defensive, transforming a heartland American household into a scene of torture and promoting a radioactive brand of conformity with a dangerously low half life. | ||||
Hawk Moon |
| 1st Produced: | London | 1989 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | - | - | Parts: | Male | - | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: | ||||
Holy Ghostly, The |
| 1st Produced: | 1969 | |||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "The Unseen Hand and Other Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis | 1971 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 4 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: in an effort to catch the ghostly Chindi Ice comes to New York to camp out with his father whom he shoots after endless arguments | ||||
Icarus's Mother |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1965 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis | 1967 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | 2 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: five young people after finishing a 4th July barbecue watch a plane flying overhead and eventually crash | ||||
Inacoma |
| 1st Produced: | San Francisco | 1977 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | - | Play with Music | Parts: | Male | 2 | Female | 2 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: based on Karen Ann Quinian case | ||||
Synopsis: woman in a coma and its effects on those around her | ||||
Jacaranda |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1979 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | text for dance | Dance Play | Parts: | Male | 1 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: dance by Daniel Nagrin | ||||
Synopsis: a man wakes up in his lover's 'rather extravagant' bed. She's not there | ||||
Jackson's Dance |
| 1st Produced: | New Haven, Connecticut | 1980 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | - | - | Parts: | Male | - | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: written with Jaques Levy | ||||
Synopsis: | ||||
Kicking A Dead Horse |
| 1st Produced: | 2007 | |||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | - | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | - | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: New York art dealer Hobart Struther goes on a desert walkabout to rediscover his "authenticity" and is stranded when his horse dies. And there it is, in the middle of the stage: a life-sized dead horse. As Hobart repeatedly tries and fails to tip it into a too-small grave while telling his story, one is reminded of Beckett's love for Buster Keaton: Rea brilliantly mixes antic behaviour and deadpan delivery with this Sisyphean shtick. However, the key writer Shepard is glossing is himself. Hobart made his fortune reselling paintings of the American west at a massive markup. "What I couldn't see was how those old masterpieces would become like demons, trapping me in a life I wasn't meant for," he says. This and other references make it clear that Shepard is nodding to his own career, seeming to want to renounce his past creative patterns by sending them up. But by invoking all his familiar themes - the west, dreams of escape, tourism, violence, authenticity - Shepard re-inscribes them even as he claims to disavow them. - Karen Fricker, Guardian | ||||
Killer's Head |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1975 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | Faber & Faber, London | 1975 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Monologue | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 1 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: thoughts on nurturing a racehorse made horrifying by the fact that it represents the last thoughts of a young man about to be electrocuted | ||||
Late Henry Moss, The |
| 1st Produced: | 2000 | |||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | 2006 | |||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | full length | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 7 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: 1st published Dramatist Play Service, NY | ||||
Synopsis: Two antagonistic brothers, Ray and Earl, are brought together after their father, Henry Moss, is found dead in his seedy New Mexico home. Henry was a harassing, arrogant drunk, and his sons have inherited his worst qualities. Ray is determined to uncover the mysterious circumstances of Henry's death. In three acts, the story of the father's last days unfolds in flashbacks | ||||
Lie of the Mind, A |
| 1st Produced: | Promenade Theatre, New York | 1985 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | 1987 | |||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Love Ballad | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 4 | Female | 4 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: Involves two desparate families connected by the marriage of the son of one (Jake) to the daughter of the other (Beth). As the play begins Beth, brain-damaged from a savage beating that Jake has given her, is being tended by her parents, Baylor and Meg. Jake sends his brother, Frankie, to Montana to see if she is dead or alive, but Beth's father, mistaking Frankie for a poacher, shoots him in the leg and takes him prisoner. Thereafter the tensions and enmities that motivate the two families grow increasingly disturbing and dangerous. Frankie falls in love with Beth, but her brother, Mike, is bitterly determined that she no longer have anything to do with her husband or his loathsome family. Meanwhile the distraught, hysterical Jake, back home in California, is nursed by his possessive mother, Lorraine, and his sister, Sally, to whom Lorraine is openly hostile. Having gotten Jake back from Beth, Lorraine is determined to keep him with her forever, but Jake soon recovers and sets out to regain his wife. In the end, however, his will fails, and he allows Beth to stay with Frankie; Lorraine burns down her house and departs for Ireland with Sally; and Jake, bereft and alone, seeks communication with his dead father by gently dispersing his ashes into the moonlighthoping to find order and meaning in the present by coming to terms with the haunting spectres of the past. | ||||
Little Ocean |
| 1st Produced: | London | 1974 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | - | One Act | Parts: | Male | 3 | Female | - |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: no further publications or performances | ||||
Synopsis: three girls - one who has had a child, one who is pregnant, and one who never has been - look at pregnancy from a women's point of view | ||||
Mad Dog Blues |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1971 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays", Winter House, New York | 1971 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | two act adventure show with music | One Act | Parts: | Male | 6 | Female | 3 |
| Parts Other: | musicians | |||
Notes: - | ||||
Synopsis: images of Marlene Dietrich and Mae west as country boy and city slicker set off for an adventure | ||||
Melodrama Play |
| 1st Produced: | 1967 | |||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Five Plays", Bobbs Merrill, Indianapolis | 1967 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | melodrama with music | One Act | Parts: | Male | 5 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: written by Leonard Melfi and Sam Shepard | ||||
Synopsis: manager harasses singer song writer and his brother to try to force a follow up to their one big song | ||||
Nightwalk |
| 1st Produced: | New York | 1973 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | in "Open Theater", Drama Book specialists, New York | 1975 | ||
| To Buy This Play: | If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise (below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies | |||
| Genre: | Collaboration | Play/Drama | Parts: | Male | 2 | Female | 1 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: written with Megan Terry and Jean-Claude van Itallie | ||||
Synopsis: God is indicted for his absence and the consequent sense of absurdity is compounded by the materialism and sexual role playing of society | ||||
Oh! Calcutta! |
| 1st Produced: | Eden Theatre, Off Broadway, NY | 1969 | ||
| Company: | - | |||
| 1st Published: | - | - | ||
| To Buy This Play: | I don't think the play has been published but you could try abebooks.com or the playwright direct where their email is shown at the top of the page | |||
| Genre: | - | Musical | Parts: | Male | 8 | Female | 5 |
| Parts Other: | - | |||
Notes: Conceived by Kenneth Tynan; Contributions by Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer, Dan Greenburg, John Lennon, Jacques Levy, Leonard Melfi, David Newman, Robert Benton, Sam Shepard, Clovis Trouille, Kenneth Tynan and Sherman Yellen; Music and Lyrics, The Open Window: Robert Dennis, Peter Schickele and Stanley Walden; Musical Director: Norman Bergen | ||||
Synopsis: Oh! Calcutta! was a long-running avant-garde theatrical revue, created by British drama critic Kenneth Tynan. The show, consisting of various sketches on sex-related topics, debuted in Off-Broadway in 1969. It proved, once again, that sex sells, running in London for over 2,400 performances, and in New York for over 1,600. The show sparked considerable controversy at the time, because it featured extended scenes of total nudity, both male and female. The title is taken from a painting by Clovis Trouille, itself a pun on "O quel cul t'as!", French for "What an ass you have!". Tynan had hoped that Harold Pinter would direct the production, in order to give it avant-garde legitimacy, but Pinter declined. (The original director was Jacques Levy, remembered by most now as the songwriting partner of Bob Dylan on his album Desire.) Most of the sketches (written, amongst others, by Nobel prize winner Samuel Beckett, John Lennon, Sam Shepard, Edna O'Brien, Jules Feiffer, and Tynan himself) featured the cast naked (including Bill Macy). Peter Schickele (aka 'PDQ Bach'), Robert Dennis and Stanley Walden were the revue's composers, known as The Open Window. A pay-per-view video production played on closed-circuit TV in select cities in 1971, and in 1972 a motion picture version was also released - in both cases many cities and municipalities banned its sho | ||||