March Madness has arrived!!!!!!!!!!

Next Stage Press launches into spring with some INCREDIBLE new works that you will no doubt want to add to your collection or Theatre Season!!! From new takes on classics, to new plays for young audiences, to plays thought be UNPRODUCABLE....here we go!!!

Take some time to see what March has to offer and keep scrolling to see what's coming in April!!!!

Also, if you are in NYC, more and more of our plays are making their way onto the shelves at the Drama Book Shop! Drop in and tell them Next Stage Press sent you!!!!


Also, see below about our PODCAST!!!


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MARCH 1 RELEASES
(All plays are available for pre-order now)
A reimagining of Molière’s Tartuffe, set in a Christian Fundamentalist post-apocalyptic America. The population has been decimated by the super-strain of the Avian Flu – stolen from a lab, probably by Fundamentalists. Oral, a rich businessman, has opened his home to a former megachurch pastor, disgraced in sex scandals: the Reverend Chadwick Pusser. Oral’s son Daniel cannot be free with Tyler, the guy he loves, with Pusser around, planting hidden cameras. Daniel reads SF alternate histories and suspects his own world is an aberration. He asks the website oracle.net for the original draft of Molière’s play Tartuffe – the one that was banned, before Molière watered the play down. Daniel thinks if he can get a pdf of the original, the universe will shift back to what it should be. Tyler’s older brother Vaughn is engaged to Daniel’s younger sister Mary-Anne – but Oral decides to force Mary-Anne to marry Reverend Pusser, horrifying her. Pusser tells Oral to control his women; he cites Lot as the kind of upright man the Lord smiles on. Oral won’t listen to truth when Reverend Pusser makes a pass at Oral’s wife Alma, or hear the outspoken housekeeper, Doreen, who denounces Pusser and tries to get Mary-Anne to stand up for herself. Daniel rejects a pass from Pusser also … and it seems that there is no end to Pusser’s hypocrisy or to Oral’s gullibility … but the people who see through the evangelical con man keep on fighting for truth, and for change.
  • Cast Size: 5M 4W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Reading from a makeshift room in an abandoned warehouse, homeless Ruthie is startled when Flavors, drunk and also homeless, suddenly intrudes. He soon becomes fascinated by Ruthie’s stacks of books and  her refined ways, as she reads him poetry and tells stories about her once upon a time life. A friendship evolves and he softens, as she introduces him to a kinder, more gentle way of life. However, disappointments are on the horizon for both, when Ruthie’s longtime friend Moe, exposes the painful truth to Flavors about her and what she really is. Feeling betrayed, Flavors returns to Ruthie enraged where he unleashes his anger. It is during this powerful scene, that she admits, her stories were all dreams and then asks the question, “ Is it wrong to share a dream? After all without dreams, we are but empty shells.”  
It is then made clear, her fantasy life was the only thing that kept her from falling into her own madness. 
  • Cast Size: 2M 1W
  • Running Time: Under an Hour
  • $50 per performance
It’s hard to label anything, especially when you’re in love. And everything starts looking queer as one chosen family decides what it truly means to choose each other.
As some battle the pitfalls of coming-out again under a different label, others realize there isn’t an LGBTQIA letter that completely fits at all. But sometimes what matters most is discovering what’s between the letters and celebrating each other along the way.
  • Cast Size: 2M 4W 1NB
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
When Jonah and his partner Giancarlo decide to adopt a baby from a foreign country, their friends hold a baby shower for them. But there’s trouble in paradise as Giancarlo had doubts about taking on the responsibility of raising a child. Will the baby help or hurt their relationship?
  • Cast Size: 6M
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
A story of Language, Love, Lust, and Loss. Burning up the Dictionary journeys into the tenaciously crumbling relationship of two people who love and need each other but can’t find any room for trust.  The play tracks the dissolution of a relationship through anachronologically distributed scenes. The couple in the play have come to speak their own language; every word they say to each other is layered with multiple meanings, and we learn the definitions of words as we progress through the play. The play explores the personal language of every relationship and how a common language that once kept people extremely close can also wound and drive them further apart.
  • Cast Size: 1M 1W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
A taboo-breaking drama about a 13-year orphaned girl adopted by a wealthy couple. Once dropped inside their world, she will either make it explode or alter its entire fabric…
  • Cast Size: 2M 2W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
It’s the Roaring 20s, and sugary sodas like root beer have been outlawed by the outrageous 18 ½ Amendment. Detective Holly Abel is short on cases, but when she reads about a suspected ring of soda smugglers operating in town, her toes begin to tingle. Then, a group of strangers whose stories sound very familiar barge into her office, begging her to find their lost mothers, and she knows her time has come to earn some clams! Is it a lot of phonus balonus, or are the Brothers Grimm headed to the big house? Will Holly & Opal figure out why the mothers are always missing in fairy tales? If we know our onions, this delightful ensemble play for young performers and family audiences is the bee’s knees! Holly Abel is root beer barrels full of fun for casts and audiences of all ages, so get on the trolley with Holly, Opal and a gaggle of fairy tale characters!
  • Cast Size: 6M 18W 3NB
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
In the South Bronx, three teenagers struggle to survive where not living beyond today is just another heartbreak and gunshot away.
  • Cast Size: 10M 5W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Jack is an average man trapped in a post-apocalyptic world. Separated from the person he most loves, he is forced to find ways to combat his loneliness by any means necessary including striking up a heartfelt and quite genuine friendship with a scarecrow. It is through this newfound relationship that Jack discovers new purpose in life even if it takes him further away from reality.
  • Cast Size: 2M 3W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Making It Up As We Go Along
The story of how two down-on-their-luck mountebanks and one enterprising woman invented Commedia, by accident, on a Wednesday afternoon.
The New Kid
There’s a new kid at school. The only problem is, he’s a zombie.
  • Cast Size: 4M 2F (Making it Up As We Go Along) 5-6 M / 1-2 F (The New Kid)
  • Running Time: 120+ minutes (Together) Under an Hour seperately
  • Royalty Rate: $75 when produced together, $40 separately.

Growing up gay in the “fabulous” 70s was no picnic for the precocious budding writer Phillie McDougal. Through nuns, priests, bullying classmates, parents – and years later the realization his best friend may not be the person he thought she was – he lived to tell the tales, with results no one bargained for. Including him.
  • Cast Size: 3M 4W with doubling
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate $75 per performance
Granny hasn’t been visited by her red-hooded grandson in a while, and with Dementia being the only one keeping her company, she can’t remember how long it’s been or who he is when he waltzes through her door. In this contemporary twist on Little Red Riding Hood, what Wesley thought would be a simple trip to Granny’s house, turns into a battle against Dementia to remind her who he is…long enough to reveal the reason behind his spontaneous visit. 
  • Cast Size: 1M 2W
  • Running Time: Under an Hour
  • Royalty Rate: $40 per performance
What do we do when the past refuses to let the present move into the future? Five contemporary women find themselves bound in varying degrees to what happened to Eastern European Jews during World War II. Four of the women are second- and third-generation descendants of Holocaust victims. The fifth is a survivor herself. The protagonist in the play is losing her sense of identity in a debilitating way. She needs to know details of what happened to the survivor, her grandmother, or all will be lost. In desperation she reaches out to strangers and the stories unfold, the secrets are revealed. With varying degrees of success, the past is confronted and dealt with. Based on true stories and extensive interviews.
  • Cast Size: 5W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
In a crumbling chain hotel, two estranged daughters, come together to care for their dying, demented mother. Each of their traumatic pasts and shaky futures converge in one night of surreal, burlesque devastation. Together, this prickly family of three, find their deepest love, longing, and losses as they attempt to escape an ancestry of demons as well as the rented room they seem unable to leave.
  • Cast Size: 3W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Twelve short interconnected plays based in modern day France at Christmas time. Twelve stories set in Paris, Brittany, Normandy and Provence which weave together wild boars and hunters, swans on the Seine, partridges in plum trees, lonely lovers and more… 
  • Cast Size: 2M 4W w/ Flexible Casting
  • Running Time: 60+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
What makes a play “unproduceable?” These shorts present thoughtful challenges to actors, designers, and directors. Some of them…have even been produced!
  • Cast Size: Flexible
  • Running Time: Variable
  • Royalty Rate: $75 for the whole evening, $15 for individual plays
Several years after the country falls under the sway of criminal corruption, Maddie (a former activist turned convenience store clerk) finds herself stuck in her dead-end job, without hope and unable to move forward. When a gun-toting convenience store burglar convinces her to embrace the new America and turn to crime, Maddie embarks on a surreal journey involving a punk rocker, an philandering academic, a former child actor and a man in a giant penguin suit. WAYS TO BE HAPPY is a post-Trumpian comedy about rediscovering hope when you’re surrounded by insanity.
  • Cast Size: 3M 3W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
The play takes place at a yoga retreat and reveals a variety of characters (including a blind woman and her dog) seeking love, peace, and friendship. They are all in love with the yoga teacher, who is present as a voice and only appears at the end when he adjusts each of them in a pose. The group succeed in becoming a community. 
  • Cast Size: 3M 6W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
COMING IN APRIL!!
On the night of the first-ever White House movie screening, First Daughter Margaret Wilson must find a way to break with her past and become her own woman. Yet at a showing of the infamous epic The Birth of a Nation she is forced to fend off advances from a young minister, confront her own racial intolerance, and somehow live up to her duty to her father and to her country without completely losing her mind. After Birth of a Nation is a farcical sendup of politics, piety, racism, and our fractured American experiment.   
  • Cast Size: 6M 2W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Becca, a 40-something married woman, has to creatively adapt to her condition of infertility due to “old eggs.” As an adopted woman who has no biological ties to her past, and as an infertile woman, she wrestles with her condition: she is, she say, in “eggs-isle.” Becca dubs herself a “genetic island” as she is adopted and her eggs are “mature” – a fertility euphemism for old. Joined by her alter egos, Estrogen and Lucky, two live puppets, who serve as the chorus, wise fools, and comic relief, the play is full of stories, tragic and funny, about motherhood, fate, the transmission of identity, nature vs. nurture and God. 
  • Cast Size: 1W 2 Gender Neutral
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Hamlet was just your average millionaire playboy prince until the king was murdered most foully. And the throne (and queen) seized by a murderous clown and his lackeys. Oh well, revenge solves nothing. Right? Wrong! 
One supernatural origin story later and Bat-Hamlet’s costumed quest begins punching, kicking, and thwarting its way towards justice. But his end has already been written. Or has it?
Bat-Hamlet blurs the line between classic literature and pop culture, suggesting that they might have more in common than your English teacher would care to admit.
  • Cast Size: Large Flexible Cast
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Looney TV news anchor Rick Flick reports on the mysterious coma that has overcome all the residents of the King’s Court. The coma is the work of the evil Pixie Patrick of Paxton, who perpetrated the curse because lovely Princess Briar Rose failed to invite him to the gala palace ball. Once the curse is set loose, the race is on to find the one true Prince who can awaken the Sleeping Princess–and her entire court–with a magical kiss. Of course, Patrick will have none of it–unless he himself can be the Kissing Prince and marry the lovely Briar Rose himself! Lots of laughs and lots of action but, in the end, the sweet, romantic story of Sleeping Beauty is told with charm, humor and care. 
  • Cast Size: 10M 4W 3 Gender Neutral
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Female breasts – entrancing, bothersome, nourishing, aggravating, healthy, unhealthy, hidden, flaunted! A playwright interviews diverse women and two breasts for their personal stories. A girl is furious when her parents don’t give her implants for her 16th birthday. A New Yorker doubles down at the gym when her breasts refuse to defy advancing age. Two new mothers come to grips with nursing. A mammogram is experienced from the P.O.V. of the breasts. Reconstruction after cancer surgery is experienced by a delightfully upbeat young woman. And much more. A patchwork quilt of monologues and duologues touching on the universal through the personal.
  • Cast Size: 2-16 actors (Flexible Casting)
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Buchenwald explores man’s hunger for power and the fight for something greater than the individual. Set in 1946, the show discloses the continued use of Nazi concentration camps as Soviet extermination camps for the Germans. Imprisoned by the Soviets, Nazi SS Colonel Max Richter reaches out to save the future of his young Soviet guard, Sasha Novsky. Buchenwald was inspired by playwright Cristina A. Bejan’s visit to the concentration camp in 2001 when she was a college student studying abroad in Germany. When she toured the camp, she saw the single prison cell “chalk chamber,” learned of the post-WWII Soviet use of the Nazi camps, and was shocked to learn that many Weimar residents lived in denial of the mass murder in their backyard. This new knowledge haunted her and one night back at Northwestern University Richter and Novsky’s story seized her, and the script for Buchenwald was born. Her senior year of college she produced and directed the play as a joint project within the university’s German and Theatre Departments. Fascism and Russian aggression are again at the forefront on the world stage. This play is a reminder of what is ultimately at risk for us all.
  • Cast Size: 3M
  • Running Time: Under an Hour
  • Royalty Rate: $40 per performance
A modern Cinderella story: in reverse.

Princess Cynthia of Malibu has it all, yet she longs to be “normal.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be unremarkable and forgettable? When the paparazzi break the news about her husband’s foot fetish–he’d been caught forcing women throughout town to try on Cindy’s shoes–she seizes her chance and embarks on an adventure to find out who she truly is. Going incognito as Ella, Cindy seeks to prove herself capable without servants and discover what the world outside of celebrity culture really has to offer. Meeting a host of quirky characters while traversing across the Kingdom of California’s urban sprawl, Cindy discovers that what she’s been craving most has been with her all along.
  • Cast Size: Flexible; 9-12 (5-7F, 4-5M)
  • Running Time: 60+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
This one-act musical comedy follows Catherine, Amy, and Hailey as they navigate the stress of the college admissions process in different ways– Catherine trying to get into her dream school, Amy trying to choose the best option for track and field, and Hailey applying to a whopping sixteen schools to hopefully commit to the Ivy League. The senior class faces pressure on social media, the feeling of falling behind your friends, financial burdens, and the scariest application question there is– who are you?
  • Cast Size: 3F 5 Gender Neutral
  • Running Time: Under an Hour
  • Royalty Rate: $40 per performance
Newlyweds Jake and Luna are headed for epic calamity. Impulsively eloping after meeting on a bungee jump, they now must discover the stranger they married. But their wish for a marriage of constant surprises becomes more than they bargained for. First, they have no place to live, and every attempt to solve this only creates more mess. They deal with quirky roommates, Mari and Stan, by unwisely trying to match-make them. Then they must cope with mysterious disappearances, violence, intruding interlopers, and a disastrous dinner party ending in a mystical disco dance. As Jake and Luna bring their dreamy romance back to earth, they see their crazy love contagious to the people surrounding them. 
  • Cast Size: 3M 3W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
MAD FOR MYSTERY offers a full evening of tasty shorts sure to satisfy a mystery lover’s palette. This collection of six one-act plays, offering roles for Gen Z to age 50+ actors, serves up a smorgasbord of “who-dunnits” with a madness chaser, sure to sate your audience’s senses. 
Each unique play tackles plot twists and turns that make MAD FOR MYSTERY a memorable night of theatre, taking on all your favorite motives for murder – love, greed, buried secrets, and of course, a distinctive dose of revenge. 
Join us in witnessing the full experience of the unpredictable under belly of human nature gone awry – that magic that makes for the wonderful genre of mystery. 
  • Cast Size: Flexible Casting
  • Running Time: Variable
  • Royalty Rate: $75 for the Full Evening, $15 for individual plays
As the school year comes to an end; Amy is desperate to make some memories. Unfortunately, nothing exciting has happened until the principal goes missing! Can Amy organize a secret group of students to find out what happened to him before the bullies find out he’s gone!?
  • Cast Size: 1M 3B 3G (Gender Flexible)
  • Running Time: Under and Hour
  • Royalty Rate: $40 per Performance
Mamma Mia - La Befana?! weaves the ancient Italian Epiphany tale, La Befana, into a contemporary American setting. Could the fun loving sixty-something Nonna from Florida really be the thousands of years old scruffy old woman who on January 5th delivers gifts to the good children and coal to the bad? The answer becomes evident as Nonna/Befana uses her holiday magic to find her lost and injured granddaughter, Mary. Every January, La Befana finds all the Italian children in the world, this year she finds one very special Italo-Americana, her granddaughter.
  • Cast Size: 3M 4F
  • Running Time: Under an Hour
  • Royalty Rate: $40 per performance
With comedy, poignant anecdotes, and a little bit of Yiddish, Arielle takes us through growing up in a conservative Jewish household and then falling in love with a non-Jew. In a time of otherness, My Shiksa Boyfriend asks, how can we honor both our past and our future?
  • Cast Size: 1W
  • Running Time: About an hour
  • Royalty Rate: $50 per performance
As Alicia, a tech-savvy teenager from San Francisco, is recovering from the death of her mother Patricia, her sister Frances drowns in a freak accident. Alicia is determined to create a virtual reality app to bring Frances back to life, but her father Garrett and aunt Jody, partners in their own VR company, stand in her way. Frances returns as a winged spirit, as Alicia confronts her hidden trauma and creates a different path towards healing. 
  • Cast Size: 1M 3W 1-7M/F/NB
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Based on the work of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, the Sound of Silence follows Robert Graham and Anna Hart as they embark on their pursuit of following their dreams in showbiz. The two cross paths at the most renowned theater in Hollywoodland. Robert is working as a stagehand and Anna is starring in her first play. Upon meeting, the two heroes experience love at first sight only to be separated and brought together for the rest of their lives. Will their love be able to persist through the trials and tribulations or will it fall by the wayside? Only one thing is certain…silence is golden, but true love is pure.
inderbox takes place during the East St. Louis Riots of 1917. The Potts Family, black migrant workers from the South, arrive along with 470 other blacks in February 1917 at the height of management-labor conflict and increased racial tensions in industrial East St. Louis. The play leads up to the May 27 conflicts leading up to the deadly July 2 attacks by white rioters on blacks, the wanton destruction of property in the black section of East St. Louis, and the senseless massacre of hundreds of Blacks. The mob violence escalates, threatens the South End section of East St. Louis where they live, and the Potts are forced to defend themselves from imminent danger.
  • Cast Size: 4M 3W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Shortly after her husband’s premature passing, Cedar finds herself with two new tenants in her home. Her husband would have eased the transition of Dawn, her mother-in-law, but now that task is up to her. Then there’s Reed, whose baggage is mostly metaphorical, except for the turtle, Ambrose. The three must learn how to cohabitate while Cedar prepares to bring yet another member into the household, an adopted baby.
  • Cast Size: 1M 3W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
When a company that produces a sexual enhancement drug relocates to a religious factory town in northern Minnesota, and its fumes begin to enter the air, the puritanical beliefs of the townspeople begin to waver. Long held inhibitions release and untold secrets spurt forth as the town spills into debaucherous revelry. For the pious Pastor Johnson, it means the arrival of the devil. For the tempting Dr. Corazon De La Fuente, who runs the factory, it is a wonder to be studied. Stuck in the middle is Mayor Frankie, anxiously watching as his town populace begin giving into wildest urges. Fargo meets Frankenfurter in this wacky comedy that is based on true events until it’s not.
  • Cast Size: 6M 5W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
New York City, 1897. Christmas is almost here, and eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon is beside herself with excitement. Suddenly, though, she finds herself facing a crisis of belief when her friends tell her Santa Claus is a myth. Filled with doubt, Virginia asks everyone she knows to tell her the truth: Is Santa Claus real or not? Still unsure and dissatisfied, she finally takes her father’s advice and famously writes a letter to the New York Sun newspaper for a definitive answer to that most crucial of questions. Funny and heartwarming, this holiday play will delight audiences of all ages.
  • Cast Size: 2M 7F (3adults, 4 children)
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
YOUR LITHOPEDION is a dark comedy about a serial killer who becomes the founder of Serial Killers Anonymous and how that ruins his marriage. You’ll never think of 80’s rock in the same way again. The show uses a false-narrative that parallels how the characters are false-people pretending towards humanity. The play constantly subverts time, space, and story, while always teasing with a feeling of narrative—an almost-narrative perhaps. This play walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, but on close inspection is really a fish. A very murderous fish. Remember, it’s a comedy.   
  • Cast Size: 1M or 1W (with expandable casting)
  • Running Time: 60+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
IN REHEARSAL!

THE FOLLOWING PLAYS ARE CURRENTLY IN REHEARSAL ON STAGES ACROSS THE U.S.

MEET OUR PLAYWRIGHT J.E. ROBINSON
As award-winning essayist and fiction writer as well as a playwright, J. E. Robinson teaches history at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis. His work of creative nonfiction, "GERTRUDE BARLABIE?" MY QUEST, which follows a woman's escape from slavery in Saint Louis to freedom in Canada in 1853, is forthcoming.
Read J.E. ROBINSON's play SOLEDAD



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