Here's to a GREAT 2023!!!!

2023 has arrived!! With that Next Stage Press has a great new lineup of works heading down the pipeline for you to enjoy throughout the year. To keep you up to date, we will feature every new play that is under contract with us as these emails roll out. Also, ALL of the plays listed are available for preorder, so you can grab a copy and it will ship once it rolls off the presses.

May your 2023 be alive with great theatre!!! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!

Also, see below about our PODCAST!!!
FEBRUARY 1 RELEASES
(All plays are available for pre-order now)
Four vengeful, narcissistic actors, with the assistance of a brutish stage manager and a cynical stagehand, abduct and hold captive a theater critic notorious for shutting down productions and ending careers through his malicious reviews. To confound matters, they intend to carry their plan out during a performance of a show they’re all currently appearing in. Less than an hour before the curtain is due to rise, their scheme begins to quickly unravel as we discover that none of the conspirators are familiar with the actual plan or its designed outcome. Brute Farce is a satirical commentary on the perpetually symbiotic, oftentimes dysfunctional, and occasionally turbulent relationship between actors and reviewers.    
  • Cast Size: 3M 3W 1 Any Gender
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
A vaudeville-style comedy straight out of Saturday morning cartoons. This play has 18 characters and is intended to be performed by only 2 women. Captain Cobalt is an up-and-coming superhero trying to balance her heroic deeds with her secret identity, Cyanna Conda, the lowly pet store clerk. She battles everything from giant squid monsters to cheese-themed supervillains, encountering any number of bystanders (and a love interest) along the way. The final showdown, however, is with Captain Cobalt’s nemesis, the nefarious Dr. Killington, the mad scientist who insists that SHE is the hero of the story. Captain Cobalt et. al. encourage lots of audience interaction (cheering and booing especially) along the way. The set can be as stripped-down or elaborate as the production pleases, but the most important part…all the props are bananas. (Yes, actual literal bananas. The kind that pop when you throw them.)
  • CAST SIZE: 2W
  • RUNNING TIME: 90+ minutes
  • ROYALTY RATE: $75 per performance
t’s 1976.  The Bicentennial.  Consciousness Raising.  The Bionic Man.  In a suburb of New York City, three women are waging their own personal revolutions.
Joyce is just turning forty, and she doesn’t seem unhappy about it.  She’s got a big house, an understanding, older husband, a couple of college-age kids.  She’s charismatic, confident, a perfect hostess, and completely unfulfilled.  Nina, a decade younger than Joyce, with a small child, is new in town.  She’s overeducated and overanxious, but the valium her psychiatrist husband is prescribing for her should help with all that.  When Joyce’s welcome wagon arrives at Nina’s door, the women hit it off.  They embark on an increasingly intimate relationship.  This is nothing new for Joyce, but for Nina, it changes everything. 
Meanwhile, Joyce’s 18-year-old daughter – Stacia – is just starting college.  But she already knows everything, including what’s best for herself and everyone else.  Away from home for the first time, Stacia is experimenting with the power of her own sexuality, and she has nothing like the constraints her mother had at that age.  
Both very funny and very serious, DAUGHTERS of the SEXUAL REVOLUTION explores the kind of courage it takes to be faithful – not just to your partner but to yourself – especially when you’ve never had a role model for that kind of thing.  
  • Cast Size: 3W 3M
  • Running time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
These unique collections of drama and comedy one-act plays, written by professional women screenwriters, will enthrall audiences worldwide.  From dysfunctional family relationships, unrequited love, coming-of-age issues, historical pieces about prejudice and discrimination, to life-altering accidental run-ins and absurd communication problems, these plays are crafted by writers trained to entertain for television and film, now turning their talents to the stage.
These anthologies will make you laugh and cry. From fighting over mattresses, confiding secrets to a stranger on an airplane or confronting a cheating spouse, these plays are about the moments that can potentially change a life. GUILDED plays are diverse, ranging from stories of Chinese immigrants, to a young Latina finding romance, to teenage fashion angst and childhood monsters who threaten in the dark. Take your pick from the women of GUILDED, each one is a gem.

This collection contains the following plays:

Foodie by Zoila Amelia Galeano

The Apology by Sharon Soboil

Take-Off by Linda Shayne 

Hysteria by Susan Cinoman

Happy Talk by Valérie A. Brotski 

Sizzler by Ellen Ancui

The Pinky Promise Dissolution Service by Tracy Held 

The Monster in the Dark by Catherine Wignall
 
These unique collections of drama and comedy one-act plays, written by professional women screenwriters, will enthrall audiences worldwide.  From dysfunctional family relationships, unrequited love, coming-of-age issues, historical pieces about prejudice and discrimination, to life-altering accidental run-ins and absurd communication problems, these plays are crafted by writers trained to entertain for television and film, now turning their talents to the stage.
These anthologies will make you laugh and cry. From fighting over mattresses, confiding secrets to a stranger on an airplane or confronting a cheating spouse, these plays are about the moments that can potentially change a life. GUILDED plays are diverse, ranging from stories of Chinese immigrants, to a young Latina finding romance, to teenage fashion angst and childhood monsters who threaten in the dark. Take your pick from the women of GUILDED, each one is a gem.

This collection contains the following plays:

The Wife and Other Woman by Maria Elena Rodriguez

Gaslighting by Monique Sorgen             

Gam Saan by Amy Joe

Natural Son by Cheryl L. Davis

Boot Night by Carissa Kosta                    

Fifteen Candles by Linda Dillon Moya                       

Silver Linings by Susie Singer Carter 
 
Army wife Kate faces the toughest night of her life after learning of an attack at Camp Freedom, the Iraqi base camp where her new husband, Ray, is deployed. Unable to get information of whether Ray is dead or alive, Kate cries herself to sleep fearing the worst only to be visited three times by visions of Ray – a past, present, and (possible) future version of the man she loves. Through these interactions, the audience learns how they fell in love, the unique challenges of being a military couple and how overwhelming it is to be separated during war. This love story crescendos with sharp feelings, dramatic moments, and even some comedic levity all while draped in the constant uncertainty of whether Ray is already dead. Clues to Ray’s fate will keep the audience guessing until the play’s emotional climax, which delivers a new appreciation and admiration for military couples.
  • Cast Size: 2M 1W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Mourning a matriarch is hard enough without her head sitting on the kitchen table talking to you every day. This peculiar situation is a reality for Robert, a wannabe playwright stuck in the family business after the untimely decapitation of his mother. As Robert and his father go at each other's throats, Mama plots the best way to reunite with the rest of her body.
  • Cast Size: 2M 2W
  • Running Time: 90+. minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Set in the far distant future, One Empire, Under God – an epic, dystopian drama in two acts – tells the story of how an emotionally disturbed young man – with the help of virtual media technology – is able to rise to political power by inciting an uprising against America’s openly atheist president, and subverting democratic and military rule throughout Western civilization, paving the way for him and his descendants to rule for generations to come. Every step toward a more perfect union is followed by an enormous reactionary backlash. That historical trend remains very much alive in the future, as seen in this provocative indictment of nationalism, imperialism, and religious extremism.
  • Cast Size; 6M 4W 4NB
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
“The Three Graces” moves Chekov’s “Three Sisters” to a segregated army base in the South during World War II where three daughters of a Black General deal with love, friendship, racism, and sibling rivalry. The play celebrates The Three Graces of every woman of color: Brilliance, Joy, and Flowering.
While this play captures the differences still existing between the North and the South, as well as the stresses that arise between parents and children, siblings, and men and women, it is primarily a play about one family’s life together, with the warmth and memories of the past.
It is a joyful celebration of Black lives with an emotional and dramatic ending. The work is also historic in how it accurately depicts how Black soldiers were treated at the time, thanks to playwright Zane A. Coleman who served in a military base like the one depicted in the play.
  • Cast Size: 6M 5W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
Dina Kummerspeck, a filmmaker in a small country that isn’t America, has been taken by the newly-fascist government and tortured for making supposedly seditious films. Now returned home under house arrest with an electric shackle on her ankle, she and her husband Tomas invite over their actor friends for a party, but unbeknownst to them, it’s going to be a secret reading of Dina’s new screenplay loosely based on her torture.
  • Cast Size: 3M 3W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
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
IN REHEARSAL!

THE FOLLOWING PLAYS ARE CURRENTLY IN REHEARSAL ON STAGES ACROSS THE U.S.
BONUS PLAY 1!!
HELLMAN v. McCARTHY is based on the greatest literary feud in modern American history.  On January 24, 1980, Mary McCarthy, famed novelist, critic, and memoirist, appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and declared that “every word [Lillian Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’”  Hellman went ballistic and sued McCarthy, Dick Cavett, Cavett’s production company, and PBS for libel.  The lawsuit, which spanned more than four years, was the talk of the literary community.  Dick Cavett played himself in the critically acclaimed world premiere at the Abingdon Theatre Company.
  • Cast Size: 4M 2W
  • Running Time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance
BONUS PLAY 2!!

Currently rehearsing in Oslo, Norway.
Walter L Newton’s adaptation of the Joanne Greenberg novel – Debra Klein created the Kingdom of Yr as a form of defense from her frightening reality. In childhood, Debra suffered frequent abuse from her anti-Semitic peers and neighbors. At first Yr was a safe-haven, but over time the gods of Yr became tyrannical dictators who ruled Debra’s every word and action. At the age of 16, Debra was committed to a mental hospital with schizophrenia. This is the story of her remarkable cure.
  • Cast Size: 5M 6W
  • Running Time: 2hrs
  • Royalty: $60 per performance
BONUS PLAY 3!!

Currently rehearsing in multiple cities for regular productions and contests.
The year is 1895 and Sarah Bernhardt is the greatest actress to ever grace the Victorian stage – just ask her! The “Divine Sarah” fears, however, her once bright star may be fading with all the attention suddenly being lavished on a talented, younger rival. When she stumbles across an incredible new script written by a naïve, but up-and-coming playwright, though, Sarah is convinced her path to theatrical immortality is assured… until her rival also gets her hands on a copy. Throw in a fuss-budget theatre manager, a stern Teutonic maid, a nimble-footed usher, plus a hilarious jumble of confusions and complications – and the stage is set for the ultimate showdown as the two dueling divas cross wits and blades in this frantically funny farce!
  • Cast Size: 3M 3W 6M/W
  • Running time: 90+ minutes
  • Royalty Rate: $75 per performance

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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