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On the eve of his departure from Paris, Benjamin Franklin and his French contemporaries avoid goodbyes by engaging in charades and parlor games. The passions of revolution are overshadowed by the intensity of personal relationships in this structurally inventive play within a play. "…the power of BALLOON is its density…magnificence…poignancy… Encountering BALLOON bears some resemblance to being overwhelmed while assembling a giant jigsaw puzzle, but then relishing its finished design."The Times (London) "It's absolutely first-rate…serious, intelligent, challenging, a play that's humane in its concerns, vividly theatrical, and gracefully written with one sharp epigram after another…full-blooded drama, layered with meaning…intriguing conceit…the individual in history, both as shaper and thing shaped…a play about the shapes of lives and the fates of nations."The Record "…intriguing…arresting ideas…full of an engaging playfulness, an admirable seriousness."Women's Wear Daily "[Sunde] converts our text book history into flesh and blood passions… People achieving greatly, now and then crippled by arrogance and intolerance, suffering mightily, dazzled by possibilities, devastated by disappointments yet continuing and surviving are what she dramatizes."The Villager

A United States Army medic stationed in World War II Liberia must traverse various cultures and characters to solve his fiancée's grisly ritual murder. Cast is three women and five men, all characters are African-American or Liberian.

A very black and hilarious comedy about love, sacred and profane, in Lydia's Eternal Acres Funeral Home, which is enlivened by two amorous morticians and a couple of really attractive corpses. "In the midst of death, there is life and love-sacred, profane, unrequited and almost always dysfunctional-in Christi Stewart-Brown's very black, five-character comedy (counting two corpses). Scarcely fare for the squeamish, with its excursions into heterosexual and homosexual couplings among the living and dead, the play…nonetheless comes off as a caustic, funny, sharp-eyed and skillfully performed autopsy on the difficulties of love… MORTICIANS IN LOVE may be morbid, but it has a heart."Lawrence van Gelder, The New York Times "… a morbid, pervy, and very funny farce… Sure, it's strange, but strangely touching too."Joe Brown, The Washington Post "What relationship is more tender and romantic than the one between a shy, sensitive female mortuary owner and a handsome, buffed, naked corpse? Christi Stewart-Brown's charmingly morbid comedy is so cheerful and upbeat, you'll hardly believe that you're watching a play about bisexual necrophilia."Paul Birchall, Back Stage West

This collection includes 15 comic one-acts: REUNIONS, THE NEWS, LITTLE DUCK, IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, NIGHT RULES, LIGHT YEARS, LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, NEGOTIATION, GUILT, BLEEP THIS BLEEP, OF TWO MINDS, BEATLES FOREVER, AT THE BEACH, FREE WILL, and COMPLETE UNKNOWNS. REUNIONS: Graduates return to show off the incredible things they've become. THE NEWS: Karen has some really weird news. As people realize what it is they start acting really weird. LITTLE DUCK: A children's television company blends sweetness with sadism. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT: What begins as a romantic rendezvous between two college students turns into something else entirely when the boy's mother visits, and a terrible truth is revealed. NIGHT RULES: Young parents battle the forces of darkness. LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD: The classic fairytale, thoroughly bastardized. NEGOTIATION: An employer and a freelancer try to settle on a fee, and a job, and a species. GUILT: Someone is guilty of something. BLEEP THIS BLEEP: Four people who seem to be in a reality show seem to share certain basic values until they seem to start strangling one another. OF TWO MINDS: A mother and her teenage daughter become involved with the same man. BEATLES FOREVER: Four female fans have a ticket to ride with The Beatles. AT THE BEACH: Mid-life love. FREE WILL: Eight iconic characters from different Shakespeare plays wind up on an island. Comedy/tragedy/romance ensues. COMPLETE UNKNOWNS: Ellen has written a play. Molly intends to produce it."Aronson has demonstrated he has a keen sense of what makes a good one act. Madcap mayhem worthy of the Marx Brothers without censorship. Bravo." -CurtainUpREUNIONS"The play takes a decidedly loopy turn, and the delight is all the more piquant for being a surprise. From then on, the alumni who show up (including a major celebrity whom you'll know but never guess) have, suffice it to say, unusual résumés. That the reunion proceeds with every familiar emotional trapping nonetheless is funny and even touching." -New York TimesTHE NEWS"Touching and surreal. Depicts that strange period of time when one realizes the death of a loved one is inevitable and that knowledge makes time with the person change shape; even the cell phones take on a new, magical meaning." -VarietyLITTLE DUCK"Highly amusing look at the boiling sexual intrigue and artistic warfare behind the scenes of a children's television program. These battles explode in a Bacchanalian conclusion that makes the murderous gunslingers of the Wild West look rather civilized." -New York TimesIN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT"A mother's surprise visit to her son at college reveals the shocking extent of his emotional instability." -New York TimesNIGHT RULES"Takes its on-target premise to the horizon of absurdity. The denouement is a wicked reversal of rules about who sleeps in whose bed, and the logic is priceless. Aronson has nailed these parental holy wars and couples' skirmishes with a keenly observant eye." -Village VoiceLIGHT YEARS"Deft shifts in the tone and meaning of Mr Aronson's dialogue that you only catch when they trigger emotional explosions ... the shock of totally unexpected passions ... it all works perfectly." -New York TimesLITTLE RED RIDING HOOD"An adult re-telling of Little Red Riding Hood ... has moments of real richness. Mr. Aronson clearly has a respect for words and uses them well, creating humor and depth ..." -nytheatrereviewOF TWO MINDS"Mordantly funny. The playwright finds a formula for family and love in an age of fractured marriages, lack of communication and yearning for union." -New York Times

A Feydeau farce re-imagined in a mental ward."Leave any expectations of conventional theater at home. Billed as half farce and half romance, THE ART ROOM is a relentlessly wicked little comedy by Billy Aronson. Aronson's script tosses the audience into the lives of four mental-ward patients, along with the nurse who cares for them and the husband of the newest arrival. All of the patients seem to have multiple personalities upon which to draw. And when added in with the nurse's double life, the husband's philandering, a stage full of doors, and the occasional lice check, things certainly become - in a word - crazy. The craziness has a tenderness to it, which makes a lot of the twitches, outbursts, and mistaken identities enjoyable." -Gina Perille, Boston Globe

A sly, funny, twisted, and surreal sex farce in which the parents of schoolchildren ponder how to spend a day free from work and the duties of parenthood."Good sex comedy should surprise you with how long it can keep its premise up and satisfying. By that measure, Billy Aronson's new farce, FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, is a humdinger. But it gets A's in other departments too, like playing well with others, and having something interesting to say when the panting stops." -Avila, San Francisco Bay Guardian"... the rapid fire of witty dialogue and never wasting an opportunity for laughter ... FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL is an engaging and thoughtful comedy. What starts as a lighthearted subversion of suburban life slows its speed in the end and takes on a philosophical mood ..." -Jennafer McCabe, The Daily Californian"... a highly sophisticated sex farce that skewers middle-class suburbanites (we would have once called these characters 'yuppies') and their values. It is sly and witty and shifts from realism to surrealism at will. It has the kind of barb and bite that might be found in sources stretching from the plays of Molière to the novels of John Updike, and creates the sort of alternate reality found in Edward Albee's humorous satires. This is edgy, tricky stuff ..." -Punch Shaw, Star Telegram (Dallas)

Based on historical incident, the play chronicles the first race riot in Los Angeles history: the 1871 lynching of 18 Chinese men by a mob of 500 "people from all nations." Tom Jacobson's fiercely theatrical retelling brings to light the remarkable, culturally diverse 19th-century Wild West town that exploded into the metropolis we know today."THE CHINESE MASSACRE (ANNOTATED), Tom Jacobson's rousing new play, is like a fun day at Disneyland. Jacobson chronicles the 1871 lynching of 18 Chinese men by a mixed-race mob, historically considered to be Los Angeles's first race riot. Actors break the fourth wall by expounding on exposition and commentating on chaos, thus the 'annotated' in the title. With 14 astounding actors playing over 30 parts, the characters' contrapuntal conversations can be cacophonous, and the masterful dialects are sometimes unintelligible, but this hugely theatrical historical interpretation is an imaginative, sprawling epic that captivates and charms. With actors popping up and down like shooting gallery targets, gunfights, reenactments of the past, delicious historical tidbits, and clever, tongue-in-cheek dialogue, THE CHINESE MASSACRE (ANNOTATED) is a theatrical Frontierland - but better. You won't see mass murder, syphilis, and herb-induced abortions at the Happiest Place on Earth." -Tony Frankel, Los Angeles Theater"THE CHINESE MASSACRE manages to be emotionally moving and intellectually stimulating as well, but the emotional impact is mostly due to the sheer drama of its events rather than their presentation within Jacobson's play. This might be exactly what Jacobson intended. The (ANNOTATED) in the subtitle means that actors frequently stop the proceedings and speak from the sidelines directly to the audience, offering historical footnotes, candid confessions of the artistic license taken by the playwright, and comparisons of their own comments to the techniques employed by Brecht in his epic theater - which was designed to make spectators think about what's happening, at the expense of emotional reactions." -Don Shirley, L A Stage Times"THE CHINESE MASSACRE is a prodigiously researched, self-consciously Brechtian parable about what may be L A's first officially recorded race riot in 1871. A number of 'annotators' playfully interrupt the action to identify historical inaccuracies that have been interjected for the flow of the story - and, citing Brecht's style of epic theater, to prevent the play's larger ideas from being overpowered by our emotional reaction to various lynchings and other brutalities depicted on the stage. Those ideas swirl around the essences of ethnic bigotry that just seem to keep recycling themselves, like our race riots, as the decades roll by." -Steven Leigh Morris, L A Weekly

Susan is a career woman with a seemingly perfect life, complete with sensitive husband and a brand new bundle of joy on the way. Beginning at the moment a very pregnant Susan goes into labor, the play follows her journey as she becomes a new mother, with a frighteningly inexplicable newborn to care for. Employing both realistic and surrealistic elements, BABY'S BLUES explores one woman's descent into postpartum depression, but also brings into focus the difficult challenge of becoming a mother for the first time, as well as the fine line that sometimes exists between health and madness."BABY'S BLUES makes a strong impact through powerful dialogue ... It takes an emotional dilemma and winds it tighter and tighter and tighter to a wrenching peak, leaving us vibrating with the final impact ... BABY'S BLUES has undoubted immediacy." -Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette"Tammy Ryan's fiercely emotional and darkly disquieting play takes a frank and sympathetic look at one mother's descent into serious psychosis brought on by the birth of her first child. Ryan works overtime to keep the story real yet understandable. It's a tensely orchestrated hundred minute journey unrelieved by intermission, yet there are moments of humor and irony." -Alice T Carter, Tribune Review

"Remarkable…ADULT acquires a kind of quiet force."The Village Voice "It's a blessing and relief to see people on stage like Stanley and Tara: beautifully drawn…treated with rough, cuffing affection by their portraitist… Masciotti has made brilliantly two rich characters… Her character work can't be surpassed."Time Out New York "Christina Masciotti treats her characters with a kindness and patience that are usually accorded to only the very young or very old… This playwright has a distinctive gift for finding an original poetry in everyday speech."The New York Times

"Original, brash and bursting with theatrical energy… The irreverent but charming characters and occasional pokes at tradition in LOOKING AT CHRISTMAS make this play a very good gift." NYTheater.com "For audiences seeking a Christmas holiday show with a sly and witty New York point of view, LOOKING AT CHRISTMAS is just the ticket. A real treat."Theaterscene.net "Absolutely charming and impressive… Remarkably heartwarming… Characters are whimsical delights that spur the broadest smile."Theatermania "You would have to be a major league Grinch not to be charmed… A sharp, contemporary New York holiday story… A delightful mix of sentimentality and cynicism that is the perfect representation of Christmas in Manhattan. If you're looking for a holiday show with a slight edge, you will love LOOKING AT CHRISTMAS. It has the feel of a new Christmas perennial."Connecticut News

STUDENT BODY (High School Edition) is the alternate version of STUDENT BODY (College Edition), which is reviewed below. In the words of the author, the two plays are "utterly similar, yet wildly different". "Sexual assault on college campuses...addressing the problem is thornier than it sounds. Should campuses adjudicate cases, or only police? What if the victim wants privacy or nobody's really sure what happened at all? These tricky questions propel the action in STUDENT BODY, Frank Winters's compelling drama... A group of buddies is hanging out in their campus's scrappy theater, surrounded by plywood and power tools, when a freshman arrives seeking advice. She has discovered video on her camera from last week's party, and amid the revelry is footage of what looks like a rape. Should she call the cops? Delete the file? What if the apparent victim was willing-or the apparent rapist was someone they know? As the group debates, argues, and eventually votes (then votes again, and again) on what to do, stories from that night emerge, revealing that everyone present played some role in what happened, and everyone has something to lose. ...Winters constructs it succinctly, keeping the focus on the difficult ethical questions, not on teary confessions of knowledge or guilt. After all, if nailing one culprit solved much, it wouldn't make for such interesting drama."Miriam Felton-Dansky, The Village Voice

"Sexual assault on college campuses...addressing the problem is thornier than it sounds. Should campuses adjudicate cases, or only police? What if the victim wants privacy or nobody's really sure what happened at all? These tricky questions propel the action in STUDENT BODY, Frank Winters's compelling drama... A group of buddies is hanging out in their campus's scrappy theater, surrounded by plywood and power tools, when a freshman arrives seeking advice. She has discovered video on her camera from last week's party, and amid the revelry is footage of what looks like a rape. Should she call the cops? Delete the file? What if the apparent victim was willing-or the apparent rapist was someone they know? As the group debates, argues, and eventually votes (then votes again, and again) on what to do, stories from that night emerge, revealing that everyone present played some role in what happened, and everyone has something to lose. ...Winters constructs it succinctly, keeping the focus on the difficult ethical questions, not on teary confessions of knowledge or guilt. After all, if nailing one culprit solved much, it wouldn't make for such interesting drama."Miriam Felton-Dansky, The Village Voice

Brothers Ray and Billy desperately need their new job with the local crime boss. They've got a drunken, aging father and an overworked sister. This is their shot for something better for their family. But then Billy impulsively brings home a Russian prostitute. And the Big Bossman comes looking for her."A cross between David Mamet and the Marx Brothers ... Ullian's comedy flirts with all kinds of allegorical possibilities ... a suitably flaky style, an oddball naturalism that plays against the absurdities in the dialogue ... bland spoofery, improbable dialogue laced with specific detail and monologues like verbal jazz riffs ... Ullian has a distinctive voice." -Marianne Evett, The Cleveland Plain DealerAbout the plays of Peter Ullian:"Singularly satisfying, winning, heart rending, punchy, button-pushing, irresistible. The sense of new blood entering the mainstream achieves the palpably energizing force of a transfusion." -New York Times"Quirky, crackling prose." -The Village Voice"Without apology. Taut, absorbing. Great style and crisp wit." -Variety"Courageous, intensely empathetic characters ... very poignant ... and truthful." -The Chicago Tribune

A Rave Fable. This play hurls one of Greek tragedy's most compelling sagas into a sleek netherworld of sex, drugs and trance music. Iphigenia is the daughter of a political celebrity who embraces sensuous excess with a transgendered glam rock star named Achilles in a desperate attempt to flee her inevitable fate."Svich's text is a unique language spoken by beings that inhabit the intermediate world that she creates. It vacillates between poetry and realism, composing a theatrical intercultural dialogue that fuses aspects of modern Latin American slang with US media lingo and original rock lyrics." -Chiori Miyagawa, The Brooklyn Rail"Sacrificial women haunt the darkling world created by Caridad Svich in her bold play. It creates a transfixing vision of hell on earth, buttressed by Svich's fractured poetic voice and her unblinking laser gaze at the ethical costs of cheap labor and disposable celebrity. Svich cunningly twists our expectations of class and gender roles." -Kerry Reid, The Chicago Tribune"Caridad Svich's IPHIGENIA ... A RAVE FABLE is an exhilarating play. The narrative subtlety is what makes Svich's redux of Euripides's IPHIGENIA IN AULIS so stirring. Through video projections, throbbing music and brand-name chemicals may offer escape, they punish the soul. Svich's remarkable poetry and crackling words reveals that the ravers, now permanently numb, also want Iphigenia dead. A play of mythic power." -Mark Blankenship, Variety"Caridad Svich's play has gorgeous, drunken poetry ... This 'rave fable' re-invents the story of Agamemnon's doomed daughter as one of modern political exigency. In the chorus (of dead girls of Ciudad Juarez) Svich layers elegy and comedy, the shame and fear she feels for these lost girls. Svich makes the anonymous city stand in for the gods of ancient drama ¿ just as unforgiving, just as hungry, just as brutal." -Helen Shaw, N Y Sun

Based on the actual minutes of a women's club formed in rural South Dakota in 1934, this poignant comedy charts 70 years of personal and national history, from skinning skunks and julebukking in the '30s to restoring native prairie in the new millennium."Tom Jacobson has paid exemplary homage to real-life American heroes from a less jaded period in our history, using transcripts of minutes from a rural South Dakotan women's club that gathered monthly from 1934 through 2004, when the last two survivors begin to fade. As with other of Jacobson's plays (BUNBURY, SPERM, OUROBOROS), the playwright assigns himself intricate narrative challenges that would have sent Williams back to the loony bin ... These powerful Midwestern survivors are the stoic Americans to celebrate and honor, something Jacobson has accomplished with his lyrical, sweetly bucolic text." -Backstage"Playwright Tom Jacobson seems to challenge himself with each new project, from the ambitious interconnectivity of the two parts of OUROBOROS to the giddy rewrite of famous literature in BUNBURY. On the surface, his latest play, THE FRIENDLY HOUR, may not seem stylistically in line with his other work, but it is - its audacity is simply more quiet. It is a moving and funny piece ... Jacobson's intriguing play structure, which tells the story entirely through meetings of a club, seeks to let the passage of life over seven decades provide the drama ..." -Variety"Tom Jacobson's lovely new play chronicles the rituals of a women's club in rural South Dakota from the late '30s to 2007, and we watch the women with whom we grow increasingly familiar age and engage in theological disputes that are really at the heart of the matter. God's purpose, and the purpose of community, interweave and clash through the decades ... an impressionistic landscape that straddles the literary worlds of Anton Chekhov and Thornton Wilder." -L A Weekly

What if Blanche Dubois didn't go crazy? Or the Three Sisters actually made it to Moscow? When he discovers he's fictitious, a never-seen character in an Oscar Wilde play, Bunbury joins forces with Rosaline, Romeo's never-seen obsession from ROMEO AND JULIET. Together they infiltrate and alter classic literature, including giving ROMEO AND JULIET a happy ending."In essaying a 'play for trivial people,' Tom Jacobson has delivered a seriously clever meta-theatrical comedy and an unexpectedly moving ode to the mysterious powers of art and love in BUNBURY ... Jacobson's antic yet humane wit harpoons some of the biggest leviathans of the theatrical sea, from Wilde to Chekhov to Albee, with an impressive range and a nimble touch that recalls the young Tom Stoppard ..." -Terry Morgan, Daily Variety"... Jacobson's latest play is his most magnificent to date ... As Bunbury and Rosaline sweep through time and literature, his audience's collective imagination is also swept up in ways in which the world can change. A hundred years from now, people finding complex and ingeniously twisted great works of art could easily find it to be quite 'Jacobsonian.'" -Travis Michael Holder, Backstage West

Three wickedly scintillating plays on the artistry and science of duplicity, mendacity, and deception. THE ART OF PAINTING: "The Art of Painting" is the magnum opus of Johannes Vermeer, one of the greatest artists in history, who lived his whole life ruing the life and work of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, one of the greatest-er artists in history. Or "The Art of Painting" is the magnum opus of Han van Meegren, one of the greatest art forgers in history who lived his whole life ruing the work of artist Johannes Vermeer. Or "The Art of Painting" is an act of rue by Jacques van Meegren, son of one of the greatest art forgers in history, who lived his whole life bereft of a father who let him down. A story of sex, Nazis, philosophy, forgery, patricide, creation, deception, art, authenticity, rue, rue, and rue all presented with the same eye for false historical verisimilitude that its sources pretended to demand. PHONIES, FRAUDS AND FAKES: A whirlwind tour of some of the greatest liars history and nature have to offer. A list that does not include the author's ex-girlfriend who scammed him for four years, about whom he will not be speaking. IMPOSTERS: Persecuted gay British codebreaker Alan Turing helped develop the first computers and an empirical test for artificial intelligence and other minds. To write about him, the author enlisted the two 1970's robots, ELIZA and PARRY, who first challenged Turing's test. Together with the author, ELIZA and PARRY have written their tribute to Turing: a dark meditation on whether and in what forms our minds really exist.THE ART OF PAINTING"If THE ART OF PAINTING were a real art history lecture, it would be a sophomore's dream. The instructor (Mark Chrisler) is cute, and he makes the lives of long-dead white European men entertaining." -Anita Gates, The New York Times"... more exciting and intellectually stimulating than anything I remember from college ... Chrisler builds a sense of unreliability and mystery, and the twists that follow are a refreshing reminder of the vivid worlds a one-man show can create onstage." -Marissa Oberlander, Chicago ReaderPHONIES, FRAUDS AND FAKES"What starts as a witty lecture on history's biggest lies soon morphs into the fascinating story of Chrisler's four-year involvement with a girlfriend who turned out to be a pathological liar. As he relates how he fell for one whopper after another, Chrisler is insightful on self-deception and the way great liars exploit our willingness to believe what we want to believe, even when the truth is staring us in the face. Still more ingenious, Chrisler uses those very qualities against us, carefully parceling out information in a way that leaves us eager to know what happens next even after we begin to doubt the reliability of our narrator ... an unsettling and irresistible act of storytelling that ... illustrates the power of a cracking good yarn." -Zac Thompson, Chicago ReaderIMPOSTERS"Mark Chrisler credits ELIZA and PARRY as his coauthors on IMPOSTERS, and their influence is undeniably apparent. ELIZA and PARRY were two 'chatterbots': computer programs, dating from 1966 and 1972, respectively, that could generate primitive forms of conversation. Their idiosyncrasies - including ELIZA's tendency to turn everything into a question and PARRY's preoccupation with Mob involvement in horse racing - gradually invade a dialogue between the tragic British computer genius Alan Turing and an interrogator called Nicolas Bourbaki (which is also the nom de plume of a group of mathematicians who specialized in set theory), raising the question of whether Turing and Bourbaki are human ... [What emerges is ] a surprisingly vivid sense of anguish as Turing seems to go off program and, well, raise the question of whether he's human." -Tony Adler, Chicago Reader

When Doc Frankenstein and the Count fall for the same showgirl, you're in for an evening of showdowns and hoedowns that could turn Tombstone into a ghost town. A Halloween Western family entertainment in two acts. And the Mummy dances."One of the most interesting young writing talents in the off-Loop scene, Goode is in equal parts funny, angry, imaginative, crude and hopelessly over the top." -Chicago Tribune"A depraved playwright." -Denver Post"A smarty-pants theater cult-god." -Northern California Bohemian"It's easy to see why some might call Jeff Goode 'anti-Christ.'" -Arizona Daily Star"Playwright Goode is a witty wordsmith." -Beacon Journal (Akron)