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September 7, 2008
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Agamemnon is the first part of the Oresteia trilogy. After ten years, the war at
Genre: Drama, Men: 4, Women: 2, Extras: Attendants, handmaids, soldiers, guards, slaves, male chorus, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Orestês has taken refuge at Apollo’s temple at
Genre: Drama, Men: 2, Women: 3, Extras: Jury of 12 men, female chorus, escort of Athenian women, herald, trumpeter, Athenian citizens, Sets: 2, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Libation Bearers is the second part of the Oresteia trilogy. Orestês, son of Agamemnon, returns home after being gone since early childhood. His mission is to wreak vengeance on his mother Klytaimnêstra for her murder of his father.
Genre: Drama, Men: 4, Women: 3, Extras: Male and female slaves, female chorus, Set: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The Persian invasion of
Genre: Drama, Men: 3, Women: 1, Extras: Chorus of elderly men, male and female slave attendants, soldiers, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Persian. |
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Promêtheus Bound is set somewhere near the beginning of time and at the farthest reaches of earth, Skythia, on a desolate mountain crag of the Kaukasos. Power and Violence, functionaries of a tyrannical Zeus, enter dragging the rebel Titan god Promêtheus.
Genre: Drama, Men: 6, Women: 1, Extras: Chorus of the Daughters of Oceanos, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient mythical past. |
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Thebes is in a state of panic resulting from the immanent attack of an Argive army led by Polyneikês, brother of Eteoklês and king of
Genre: Drama, Men: 8, Women: 0, Extras: Chorus of women, men of |
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The fifty daughters of Danaös are in flight from their fifty Egyptian cousins who are determined to marry them. The daughters have just landed in
Genre: Drama, Men: 3, Women: 0, Extras: Chorus of the Daughters of Danaös, chorus of Argive women, chorus of Egyptian soldiers, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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This lovely, lyrical work is set on the estate of Lyubov Andreeva Ranevskaya, an impoverished landowner who is unable to face the necessity of selling her estate in order to avoid bankruptcy.
Genre: Comedy, Men: 7, Women: 5, Extras: tramp, station-master, post office clerk, guests, a servant, Sets: 3, Acts: 4. |
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Genre: Comedy, Men: 9, Women: 4, Extras: 1 male guest (non-speaking), mill laborer Sets: 4, Acts: 4. |
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Genre: Comedy, Men: 5, Women: 4, Extra: Workman, Sets: 4, Acts: 4. |
 Love. It's a beautiful, magical thing. Unless you're a clown. Pippa is a big shoe-wearing, polka-dot loving clown looking for love. But how can you be sexy wearing a red nose?
A two-act play with intermission. Cast: 5 characters, 2 females, 3 males.
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The young King Admêtos of Phêrai in
Genre: Drama, Men: 6, Women: 2, Boys: 1, Girls: 1, Extras: Male chorus, attendants, guards, slaves, citizens of Pherai, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The Trojan War is over, and Andromachê, widow of the slain Trojan hero Hêktor, is now the slave and concubine of Neoptolemos, the son of Achilles.
Genre: Drama, Men: 4, Women: 5, Boys: 1, Extras: Chorus of Phthian women, male slave attendants, female slave servants, Set: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Dionysos, in disguise, returns home to his birthplace in
Genre: Drama, Men:7, Women: 1, Extras: Chorus of Asian Bakkhai, band of Theban maenads, soldiers, guards, attendants., Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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It was a hectic time in Athens and the hectic structure of Children of Heraklês, as well as the rushed and fragmented nature of its characterizations would seem to be a mirror image of its time.
Genre: Drama. Men: 3, Women: 4, Extras: attendant, moderator/chorus, chorus, children, Acts: 1. |
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The only surviving satyr play of the Greek theater, Cyclops, like all satyr plays, was performed after a series of three tragedies and was related in subject matter to the tragedies themselves, except that it was a comic or farcical treatment of the tragedies’ theme.
Genre: Drama. Men: 3, Women: 0, Extras: Chorus of young satyrs, shipmates of Odysseus, slaves of the Cyclops., Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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It must have caused quite a stir on that day somewhere around 420 as the audience gathered in the Theater of Dionysos at Athens for the first performance of Euripides’ Êlektra.
Genre: Drama. Men: 4, Women: 2, Extras: Chorus of women, messenger, dioscuri, Acts: 1. |
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Hêkabê, the former queen of Troy and now the slave of Odysseus, learns that the Greek victors, waiting for a wind to return home, have determined at the behest of the ghost of Achilles, to sacrifice on his burial mound Polyxenê the daughter of Hêkabê.
Genre: Drama. Men: 5, Women: 3, Boys: 2, Extras: Chorus of captive Trojan women, slave attendants, armed guards, Sets: 1. |
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Helen, it seems, never went to
Genre: Drama, Men: 7, Women: 3, Extras: Chorus of Greek slave women, attendants, servants, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek and Egyptian. |
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In the prologue Aphroditê, goddess of sexual love, denounces the eighteen year old Hippolytos for renouncing her in favor of Artemis, goddess of chastity and the hunt. She announces that, in order to punish him, she will impose on Phaidra, his stepmother, an overpowering lust for him.
Genre: Drama, Men: 4, Women: 4, Extras: Chorus of huntsmen, chorus of women of Troizen, male and female slaves, attendants, people., Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Ion, a tragicomedy, is one of Euripides’ lighter plays. Years ago, Kreousa, the daughter of the Athenian King Erechtheus, had a son by the god Apollo, and abandoned it. Apollo, however, unknown to the mother, had the child rescued and sent to his temple in
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 3, Extras: Chorus of Kreousa's female attendants, male slave attendant, female slave attendant, Delphians, Set: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The play opens with Agamemnon gravely troubled by a decision he has to make. The Greek fleet is waiting at Aulis for favorable winds to make possible their departure for
Genre: Drama, Men: 6, Women: 2, Extras: Chorus of young women of Chalkis, soldiers, guards, slave attendants, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Preceding the onset of the Trojan War the Greek fleet was stalled at Aulis waiting for a wind to sail to
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 2, Extras: Chorus of captive Greek women, slave attendant, temple slaves, guards. Set: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Some years prior to the play’s opening the Barbarian princess Mêdeia deceived her father and killed her brother in helping the hero Jason to steal the Golden Fleece. Mêdeia and Jason are now married and living in Korinth with their two young sons.
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 3, Boys: 2, Extras: Chorus of Korinthian women, guards, slaves, attendants. Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The play opens with Orestês on a pallet outside the
Genre: Drama, Men: 7, Women: 3, Extras: Chorus of noble Argive women, male Argive citizens, amored hoplites, attendants, slaves. Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The scene is
Genre: Drama, Men: 9, Women: 2, Girls: 1, Extras: Chorus of young Phoenician women, attendants, servants, soldiers, Set: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Though believed by some that Rhesos is not by Euripides, it is nonetheless a more than capable play with many beautiful aspects to it: exquisite lyrics, as in the morning song of the guards, and the authentic and effective picture of life in the Trojan camp somewhere between
Genre: Drama, Men: 9, Women: 2, Extras: Chorus of Trojan sentries, Trojan soldiers, attendants, guards, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The suppliant women of the play’s title are the mother of the Argive soldiers, the Seven against
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 3, Boys: 7, Extras: Chorus of Argive mothers, female slave attendants of the mothers, temple priests, attendants, slaves, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Heraklês is on a mission to subdue and bring up to the light of day Kerberos the three-headed dog and guardian of the gates of Hades. No man having ever returned from that region, Heraklês’ old father Amphitryon believes his son to be dead, though he dearly hopes for his reappearance.
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 3, Boys: 3, Extras: Chorus of old men of Thebes, guards and slave attendants of Lykos, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The basic action of the play is the disposing of the Trojan women taken captive by the Greeks who exhibit toward them every cruelty imaginable. Hêkabê’s young daughter Polyxenê is killed as a sacrifice to the funeral mound of the dead Achilles.
Genre: Drama, Men: 3, Women: 5, Extras: Chorus of Trojan women, Greek soldiers, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
The action of A Doll House takes place at Christmas, the time of the death of the old year and the birth of the new. Two couples in this play will experience this 'turning point' of the year in radically different ways.
Three-Act Play with intermission.9 characters: 5 females; 4 males
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In this lively political comedy, Dr. Thomas Stockman is impetuous, indignant, good-natured, ebullient and brave, embodying that "joy of life" invoked, but proving tragically elusive in Ghosts. He is a study of the kind of man who is likely to turn into a Socratic rebel; like Socrates, a designated 'enemy of the people' in any society.
Drama in 5 acts
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Ibsen always insisted Emperor and Galilean was his greatest work and the cornerstone of his entire dramatic output.
A Drama in two parts; 5 Acts each. |
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In Ghosts, Ibsen presents us with a familiar-seeming image of our reality: a drawing room, characters dressed and acting like the people we know, moving among objects with which we are familiar. Then this reality gradually begins to dissolve.
Drama in 3 acts
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Even in so blasé a production as Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's stage is haunted by archetypal forces and powers, the reproachful and half-forgotten ghosts that have shaped our modern identities.
Drama in 4 acts
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John Gabriel Borkman is the most strangely 'Gothic' of Ibsen's realist plays while also one of his most 'classic' in structure. It is set in winter, in the north, where the vital passions of the characters are locked in a lethal coldness of the soul..
4-act drama, 8 Characters (3 Males; 5 Females) |
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In Little Eyolf, Alfred and Rita Allmers first lose their crippled child who is lured to his death after the visit of an uncanny figure from folk-legend, the Rat Wife; the parents then descend into a hell of mutual recrimination and estrangement, realizing they neither loved their child nor each other.
3-Act Drama, 6 Characters: 3 Males (1 is a boy); 3 Females |
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Pillars of Society, inaugurates Ibsen's Realist Cycle. The play anticipates the themes that will be developed further in the plays that follow. The social world of Karsten Bernick, like our own, is governed by rampant materialism, where morality and spirituality are acosmetic masking of far less ideal motives: until, that is, the astonishing entry of Lona Hessel.
4-Act Play, 19 Characters (10 Males (1 13-yr old boy); 9 Females (1 young girl) plus Several Extras |
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In Rosmersholm, the heroine, the illegitimate Rebecca West, sees herself as an agent of enlightenment in combat with a world of entrenched traditions, superstitions and social repression. Yet she also is associated with social and sexual transgression.
Drama in 4 acts
7 characters - 4 males; 3 females
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The Lady from the Sea explores a cosmic space: of mountain ranges, of the sea, fjord, sky and stars. From these immensities emerges a mysterious figure, the Stranger, as if from another planet.. He has been drowned in the "depths of the sea" and now returns to life and to the land in order to claim his faithless wife, Ellida, the heroine of the play.
5-Act Drama, 8 Characters (5 Males; 3 Females) plus several extras |
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The acton of The Master Builder, which takes place in the fall, seems both shocking and extraordinarily simple: a young woman enters the household of a successful architect with the claim that, ten years to the day, he once made love to her when she was 12-13 year old, promising her a 'kingdom' on this very date.
Drama in 3 acts
7 characters plus several extras - 4 males; 3 females
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The Wild Duck is as mysterious as any of Ibsen's plays. It resembles those paintings, which seem to offer two alternative images of the subject at the same time.
Drama in 5 acts
21 characters plus several extras - 12 males; 9 females.
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Ibsen called When We Dead Awaken an 'Epilogue'. The play is filled with echoes from the earlier plays. Set in summer, and ending "at dawn, before the sunrise" it concludes the Realist Cycle. The physical action of the play is as simple, and as resonant, as that of Sophokles' Oedipus at Kolonos.
3-Act Drama, 6 Characters (3 Male; 3 Female) plus Several Extras |
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Amphitryon is Kleist’s splendid and very free reworking of Molière’s play of the same name. Jupiter and Mercury disguise themselves as the Greek General Amphitryon and his slave Sosia, both of whom are away at war.
Genre: Drama, Men: 7, Women: 2, Extras: Numerous: Soldiers, citizens of both sexes, Sets: 1, Costumes: Classical Greek, Roman, or Renaissance. |
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The Broken Jug, a full-length play in one act, is considered one of the finest of the few great comedies of the classic German stage. Farcical by nature, it is also a play of enormous subtlety and underlying seriousness.
Genre: Comedy, Men: 6, Women: 5, Sets: 1, Costumes: 18th century provincial Holland. |
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The Prince of Homburg is generally considered the finest of Kleist’s six completed full-length plays. Its central problem is one that tormented Kleist during his entire life: Is self-mastery in reality a denial of self?
Genre: Drama, Men: 16, Women: 3, Extras: Numerous soldiers, courtiers, pages, etc., Sets: 11 (Unit set possible), Costumes: Prussian court, 17th century. |
 A full-length play with no intermission; cast: 12 females.
phat girls is a fast-paced account of the struggle many women experience dealing with weight and body image. |
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A head injury—suffered twenty years ago during a historical carnival cavalcade in which he wore the costume of the German Emperor Henry IV—left him fixated on the idea that he was that Henry. For the eight years that follow the accident, he lives as Henry IV, in a villa that is outfitted in the manner of an eleventh-century castle.
Genre: Drama, Men: 11, Women: 2, Three acts, three sets (with the possibly of only two), Costumes: contemporary and historical. |
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Signora Frola, an elderly woman, is denied by her son-in-law, Ponza, the right to see his wife, whom Signora Frola maintains is her daughter. Ponza, however, insists that the Signora’s daughter was his first wife, now deceased, and that his current wife bears no relation to the old woman.
Genre: Drama, Men: 7, Women: 7, Extras: several of both sexes, Sets: 2, Acts: 3, Costumes: Contemporary. |
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The play begins on an empty stage soon populated by a company of actors who are rehearsing a play by Pirandello. In the course of the rehearsal, a group of six characters enters the theater and disrupts the rehearsal process. We learn that they are characters created by a playwright who, as it happened, never utilized them in a play.
Men: 11, Women: 6, Boys: 1, Girls: 1, Extras: other actors, stagehands, backstage workers, Acts: 2, Costumes: contemporary. |
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Anatol is a series of seven one-acts united by the eponymous character of the young fin de siècle Viennese sensualist Anatol. Together these seven short, episodic plays present a picture of
Genre: Drama, Men: 4, Women: 7, Scenes: 7, Costumes: 1890s Viennese. |
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Flirtation takes place, like most of Schnitzler’s plays, in the
Genre: Drama, Men: 4, Women: 4, Sets: 2, Costumes: Viennese 1890s. |
La Ronde, Schnitzler’s most popular play, is a comedy in ten more or less independent scenes (“dialogues”) each of which depicts a sexual encounter and seduction of a different tone and social stratum.
Genre: Comedy, Men: 5, Women: 5, Scenes: 10, Costumes: 1890s Viennese. |
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The Green Cockatoo, a play in one act, is a prime example of Schnitzler playing with the Pirandellian factor of illusion and reality. The play takes place in a sordid
Genre: Drama, Men: 16, Women: 5, Scenes: 1, Costumes: French 1789. |
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When Achilles is killed in the Trojan War, his splendid armor is awarded to the devious and crafty Odysseus. Aias takes this as an affront to his heroic reputation and determines to avenge himself on his Greek comrades, in particular on Odysseus and Menelaos.
Genre: Drama, Men: 6, Women: 2, Boys: 1, Extras: Soldiers, attendants, servants, chorus, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The war against
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 3, Boys: 1, Extras: Guards, attendants, servants, chorus, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Orestês, son of Agamemnon and Klytaimnêstra, and brother to Êlektra, returns home accompanied by his Tutor and his friend Pylades. His aim is to wreak vengeance on Klytaimnêstra for the murder of his father.
Genre: Drama, Men: 4, Women: 3, Extras: Attendants, female chorus, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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Burdened with the guilt of having killed his father and married his mother, the blinded old Oedipus has been wandering about for years in exile, accompanied by one of his daughters, Antigonê. They stop to rest at a grove sacred to the Eumenides near Kolonos where it has been prophesied that he will at last find rest.
Genre: Drama, Men: 6, Women: 2, Extras: Guards, attendants, bodyguards, chorus, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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The city of
Genre: Drama, Men: 7, Women: 1, Boys: 1, Girls: 2, Extras: Soldiers, suppliants, guards, attendants, priests, chorus, Sets: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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It has been prophesied that only with the aid of Philoktêtês and his magic bow and arrows can the Trojan War be won by the Greeks. But because of a festering foot wound, Philoktêtês was abandoned nine years ago on the
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 0, Extras: Male chorus, Set: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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In her loneliness, Dêianeira, wife of Heraklês, awaits the return of her long gone husband, away completing the last of his obligatory labors imposed by the goddess Hêra. She is anxious because of an oracle that Heraklês will now either die or live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet.
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 3, Extras: Women captives, bearers, servants, attendants, female chorus, Set: 1, Costumes: Ancient Greek. |
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A Dream Play is one of the most significant as well as the most influential play of the modern theater. It is, in fact, the beginning of the modern theater inasmuch as it freed the stage of the time-bound, space-bound demands of naturalism, allowing for expressionism, symbolism, surrealism, and even the so-called theater of the absurd to develop.
Genre: Drama, Men: 25, Women: 15, Extras: Many of both sexes, Sets: 11, Costumes: Depends on the production's basic concept. |
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Strindberg was strongly interested in the power of suggestion as a dramatic tool. In an essay on Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, he describes Rebekka West as “an unconscious cannibal, who has devoured the dead wife’s soul.” The “suggester” as cannibal Strindberg had already utilized a year earlier in The Father, but he made even more of it in Creditors.
Genre: Drama, Men: 3, Women: 3, Sets: 1, Costumes: High fashion, Swedish 1880s. |
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Miss Julie, a fifty minute one-act play, is a Strindberg’s best known play. It’s action centers on a dual conflict, one internal, one external, and both of them sexual.
Genre: Drama, Men: 1, Women: 2, Extras: Several for a song and dance, which can also be done offstage, Sets: 1, Costumes: High fashion, servant livery; peasant. Swedish 1880s. |
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Playing with Fire, a one-act play, has the distinction of being one of only three comedies written by Strindberg. It must be said, however, that it has, nonetheless, a decidedly bitter taste. In any case, it is Strindberg in his best form, though it is no easy play to perform.
Genre: Comedy, Men: 3, Women: 3, Sets: 1, Costumes: Swedish seaside resort clothes, 1890s. |
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Storm was one of five long one-act plays written by Strindberg for his so-called Intimate Theater, plays which as a unit he called Chamber Plays, and of which A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata are a part.
Genre: Drama, Men: 8, Women: 4, Sets: 2, Costumes: Swedish, high fashion and working class, 1900. |
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The Dance of Death, Part I has had a wider international currency than any other Strindberg play. It is a play about marriage, a dissection of what has been called “a marriage of hell.” The play’s location is in a round gray-stone fortress on an island off the coast of
Genre: Drama, Men: 3, Women: 3, Sets: 1, Costumes: Swedish, 1880s, some military for the men. |
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The Dance of Death, Part II was an attempt by Strindberg to lighten the negative mood that disturbed contemporary critics at the early performances of Part I. It takes place during the summer following Part I in an oval living room decorated in white and gold, a far cry from the earlier gray stone of the fortress of Part I.
Genre: Drama, Men: 4, Women: 2, Sets: 1, Costumes: Swedish, 1900s. |
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As with so many of his plays and novels, Strindberg used his work as a means of exorcizing private demons. In The Father he relies on his disastrous first marriage to supply material, and, as in much of his work, it is the battle of the sexes that determines the action of the play Father.
Genre: Drama, Men: 5, Women: 3, Sets: 1 (Need not be realistic). |
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The themes of The Ghost Sonata are two: the life-giving idealism represented by the young student Arkenholz, and the vampirism of Hummel, the old man in the wheelchair. It is the tension generated by these two opposites that animates the play at every turn.
Genre: Drama, Men: 7, Women: 8, Sets: 3, Costumes: Swedish 1908. |
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