Listen to It's Cold and It's Getting So Dark, produced by Play for Voices. (Musical sounds are heard. As if someone were practicing the trumpet. Then a long pause. And the narration begins.) SPEAKER 1: She wore a gentleman’s hat and with a trumpet in her hand directed a music that was audible only to her. At last you arrived on time. For once in my lifetime. Then she resumed singing, listening attentively to her inner music. She sang without words, syllables whose...

Listen to Please Enter Destination, produced by Play for Voices.   CHARACTERS HELENA: A young woman trying to find her place in the world—a place that, perhaps, doesn’t even exist. She is very straightforward and may seem nagging at times; in fact, though, she is a woman fighting against the decline of the world she lives in. HONZA: A morally weak, rather narrow-minded young man. He accepts the world as it is, without question. GPS DEVICE: A...

Listen to That Deep Ocean, produced by Play for Voices.     "Do you hear anything? Do you see any changes in the water?" (E.A.Poe) 0. Maelstrom I. Spring awakening II. Into the fire III. Abyss I IV. Into the air V. Intermezzo VI. The great flood VII. Abyss II VIII. Into the earth IX. Abyss III X. Return to Ithaca XI. Epilogue   Directions: Italicized text: male voice Scenes 0, III, VII, IX should sound similar to each other, and markedly different to the...

In this short play, Mansour Bushnaf turns his sharp eye and his searing critical mind to the vexed question of the interplay of the secular and the religious.  First. An Arab nightclub with male and female customers. The men are wearing black suits with red neckties, which look like official uniforms. The women are wearing tight pants. A waiter in a white suit and bow tie is handing out drinks. A woman is singing—or rather lip-synching—the song Salimah ya...

José Ignacio Valenzuela’s distrustful woman debates whether she ought to allow a stranger into her home.       Characters WOMAN MAN NEWSCASTER (voiceover) A living room with a small sofa, a television set switched on, and a door. There’s an old- fashioned phone beside the TV. We hear the sound of rainstorm: thunder and lightning. A woman is sitting on the sofa watching the TV. VOICEOVER OF THE NEWSCASTER  The police have issued no statements...

Miguel Alcantud and Santiago Molero present the mysterious call-and-response of a nameless man and the woman who appears to be holding him captive.    Characters HIM HER The room appears to be a bedroom but with a bit of everything thrown in. It looks like a kind of basement area or shed, although it is well set up. There is a bed, a piece of low furniture that could be a dresser or chest of drawers, and a chair. As the audience enters a man can be seen...

An Unfinished Play In Andrei Platonov’s unfinished play from 1938, two young orphans seek out their promised land.   Characters DUSYA, an orphan TATYANA FILIPPOVNA, DUSYA’s aunt ARCHAPOV ARKADY, the aunt’s husband MITYA, an orphan MITYA’s UNCLE A YOUNG WOMAN, the uncle’s girlfriend   ACT 1 Scene 1 (A room in the small old house of a tradesman. A dresser. Above it are photographs of the owners’ relatives; on it stand aging souvenirs and...

A Tragicomedy in Science Fiction Roberto Athayde’s extraterrestrials invite terrestrial concerns around man’s place in the world and in the universe at large.   Characters DR. ANTARIS   A Brazilian astronomer, an aficionado of UFOs. LOUIS               His assistant, an attractive young man. PERO                A...

Part Three Jerzy Lutowski takes us to Inquisition-era Spain, where intolerance demands a bold choice of a young Jewish woman.   House lights down. The measured peal of a bell. The doleful tune of a penitential psalm is heard. From the wings on the right three monks emerge, their cowls lowered over their faces. The middle one is carrying a black gonfalon, the other two carry lighted candles. They stop in mid-stage and turn to face the audience. On the gonfalon the words THE...

Kuo Pao Kun exposes the personal wreckage left in the wake of the state’s aggressive pursuit of international financial status in the 1960s. This was the first full-length play by Singapore’s theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun and was a sensation when it was first staged in 1968, drawing rave reviews. Starting from the 1960s, the Singapore government embarked on an economic strategy of attracting foreign investors and multinationals, and building up tourism as an economic pillar, often...

Playwright Lina Prosa follows an African refugee in Italy’s Alpine north. To an actor with powerful lungs, who is able to act in high altitudes with little oxygen. The reality. The source: the news. An African migrant, after having arrived in Lampedusa, is brought to a shelter in the Orobie Alps. He stays there for months waiting for his request for political asylum to be processed. The theater/one actor: The actor is seated on a chair. Next to him is an open refrigerator. The...

(Night. Nadie, an Indonesian domestic worker, lies beneath a mosquito net with Granny, the woman she was employed to look after.) GRANNY:  Mosquitoes. NADIE:       I put up the net. There can’t be mosquitoes. GRANNY:   Mosquitoes! NADIE:       Argh! You’re doing this on purpose! GRANNY:   Ha ha! It’s my pak . . . pak . . . (She slaps a mosquito with each “pak.”)...

In a story that spans more than two decades, scenes from armed conflicts in Beirut and Sarajevo are portrayed in a literary diptych as six diverse characters struggle for survival and self-definition from inside varying epicenters of chaos. Holiday Inn: Nights of Respite is the polyphonic account of these characters’ lives, which are extraordinarily intertwined. It is also a fearless inquiry into some of the darkest human impulses. In this excerpt from Sonia...

(Common room in a senior citizen home. Two elderly men in wheelchairs. The first is watching the one o’clock news, the second is devouring an apple pastry.) FIRST MAN: The nerve. Everyone cheers for him on the Heldenplatz and then he goes and cuts deals with the Russians. SECOND MAN: Yes, that was a mistake. But, come now, it was so long ago, at some point there’s got to be an end— FIRST MAN: That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about...

"His Majesty: The Stomach" is a play about the effects of colonial history on players who are deflated and absurd in the wake of it. It is particular to the postcolonial history of Africa, but it is also an allegory of absolute power and the grotesque narcissism the rulers exhibit even as their empire crumbles. It is also particular to the personal history of Sony Tansi, whose recurring theme of bodily malfunctions and disease mirror not only the politics he is critiquing but his own...

Introduction: War and Literature Two years ago I asked a carpenter who had done a good job for a friend to come to my home and build a bookcase that would house the many volumes scattered on the floor and under my bed for lack of space. The carpenter was a young, jovial man who enjoyed chatting when taking a break and sipping my Lebanese-Turkish coffee. Coffee encourages conversation, and each time we sipped coffee together, we'd get to know a bit more about each other. He was from...

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Natta Syng Sine Songar by Jon Fosse was first presented by the Rogaland Theatre in Stavanger, Norway in 1997. The English translation, Night Sings Its Songs, was translated and directed by Sarah Cameron Sunde for the U.S. debut of the play, and was first presented by Oslo Elsewhere, The Unbound Theatre, and Spring Theatreworks at the Culture Project's 45 Bleecker Theatre - 45 Below in New York City on June 5, 2004. Yah = Norwegian "ja" = yes Yah = American...

NOTE: Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" served as a springboard for Philip Boehm's theater piece Soul of a Clone, which premiered in January 2005 at Upstream Theater in St. Louis. The first of the play's three parts consists of a scientist presenting "found footage" that shows Kafka's ape-turned-human in St. Louis during the 1920's--corroboration of the lecturer's theory of "acute saltational mutation in primates." The second part, which is reprinted here, involves...

Characters: Siggi Grünebaum, an old diamond cutter Benny Schorsch, his partner Violetta Grünebaum-Moser, Siggi's daughter Roland Moser, her husband Elfie Schneider, a young woman The play takes place in the Diamond District of New York City, in the last year of the last century. Act 1 Lunchtime with Wagner New York City, 47th Street. It's a winter afternoon in the Diamond District. Siggi Grünebaum's small diamond store sits to the right of a passageway...

A Baghdad 2003 Lysistrata, adapted from Aristophanes' Play NOTE: El-Ramly's Salam El-Nisaa (A Peace of Women) is a nuanced adaptation of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, set in Baghdad only a few days before the US-led invasion. Here, a group of Iraqi women, some of whom have lost many male relatives during Saddam's wars with Iran, decide to do everything they can to stop the new impending war. They unite under the leadership of Labiba. Labiba is El-Ramly's Lysistrata...