American Notes
Play Description
A kaleidoscopic, surrealistic overview of contemporary America, set forth in the bizarre, highly theatrical style which characterizes this writer's distinctive voice. Produced by New York's highly regarded Public Theater, the play employs brilliantly imaginative avante-garde techniques to highlight both the dreams — and delusions — which infuse and motivate our modern world. The play is made up of a series of concurrent actions, some set in a tacky motel, some elsewhere, involving a group of disparate but curiously related people. There is the young night clerk, Pauline, who studies her high-school English Lit notebook, while growing increasingly fearful of the unseen and unwanted suitor who lies in wait in the motel parking lot; a raucous carnival barker touting his giant crocodile, Bonecrusher; a pair of seedy bar denizens who occasionally break into song; a dim-witted handyman, Chuckles, who performs pointless errands; a deranged scientist who believes that he is in contact with creatures from outer space; an abandoned woman who waits restlessly for a lover who will probably never return; and a mysterious drifter, Faber, who, somehow becomes the catalyst which fuses all these divergent elements into a cohesive, and often wildly funny whole. And, in so doing, makes the play both an encapsulation of the American myth and, at the same time, a telling comment on what is right — and wrong — with this myth.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“… it has a cumulative, atmospheric effect, tantalizing our senses at the same time it creates a haunting iconographic world … AMERICAN NOTES is itself sui generis — bearing the unmistakably original signature of Len Jenkin.” —The New York Times
“[AMERICAN NOTES] is a kind of anti-OUR TOWN. The weird backwater in which it’s set is a little surreal and a lot seedy, populated by nighthawks, drifters, pimps, and hucksters.” —Chicago Reader
“Twice as ingeniously written as any play in town …” —The Village Voice
“… a mythic vision of America …” —Drama-Logue
Author(s)
Len JenkinLen Jenkin is a novelist, playwright, director, and screenwriter. His novels include N Judah, New Jerusalem, and The Secret Life of Billy's Uncle Myron (with Emily Jenkins). Plays include DARK RIDE, PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT, CARELESS LOVE, MY UNCLE SAM, LIMBO TALES, THE DREAM EXPRESS, and LIKE I SAY. His works for the stage have been produced throughout the United States, as well as in England, Germany, France, Denmark, and Japan. His films include Blame It on the Night, Welcome to Oblivion, and American Notes. He has received many honors and awards, including three Obie awards for directing and playwriting, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Award, a nomination for an Emmy Award, and four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Mr. Jenkin holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Columbia University. He's a Professor in the Dramatic Writing Department, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and lives in New York City.
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypub.com
Related Plays
$15.00Play Description
A small theater company's next ill-advised production, a modern vaudeville, goes off the rails the night before opening. The cast rebels against Doc, the writer/director/star/producer, and chooses a midnight showing of the newest Star Wars movie over ironing out the show's kinks. Then, of course, they're sucked into a vortex and spit out into a world that resembles some of our most beloved films. It's up to Doc and his trusty sidekick, Boof, to go on a 3D adventure to rescue the cast and the show, and the entire theatrical art form. Part vaudeville, part Hope/Crosby Road Show, A 3D ADVENTURE is an inventive love letter to both the theater and the movies.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male, doubling, flexible casting, up to 15 actors)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
The play takes place in Priscilla’s bedroom, in a forest, and in the big blue sky outside. A friend named Peter comes to visit Priscilla. There is a wolf who lives in a fabulous land next door. It is a play about Priscilla who sets out in her mind to slay this beast that lurks outside her window.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Four businesspeople — Landry, Owens, Sanders, and Weaver — arrive in the morning at their skyscraper office and soon learn that their company is on the brink of collapse. At first upset and panicked at the news, they decide that this can instead be a chance to finally prove themselves — they'll come up with a proposal, a new business plan that will impress the company chairman and save both the business and their careers. What follows is an antic all-day, all-night effort, as the four race to complete the proposal by the next morning. At first they all work together. But after that effort collapses amid acrimony and finger-pointing, they break into two competing teams, each trying to outdo the other and win the chairman's final approval as they work feverishly all through the night. ENTERPRISE is fast-paced, edgy, semi-surreal comedy about business, ambition, skyscrapers, and office bathrooms.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male, flexible casting, up to 4 females or 4 males)Full Length Comedy (about 65 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
An industrialist in the near future utilizes every means possible to get an inventor to sign over his revolutionary creation that will inevitably change the world. Corporate greed never met creative angst with such dramatic and hilarious results.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Set in the fantastical, miserable village of Brood, Glen Berger's ingenious play conjures up a marvelously imaginative world peopled by a large cast of dreamers, schemers and would-be lovers. Tormented by the memory of a beautiful young girl he adored and lost, and saddled with the child she left behind as a painful reminder of their doomed romance, a village tinker turned poet tries to ease his pain by conjuring up a hilarious and extremely moving tale, a story made up for the young boy as they sit in front of the dying embers of their hearth. When the last spark is extinguished, we have gone along with them on a magical journey filled with music, shadow, and light, meeting along the way a town full of comically misguided characters and an enchanting young saleswoman of casket bell devices for the prematurely buried. A rich and delightful fairy tale for everyone who remembers what a great story sounds like.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 140 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
M and G's new apartment is nothing special — it really could be any generic New York City apartment — but they're hoping it's a place of healing, a new beginning after a traumatic encounter with a former friend. Unfortunately, the previous tenant of this apartment isn't a man who likes to let go … and he wasn't ready to move out. First, it's little things: their mail disappears, it feels like someone's watching them, he stops by occasionally just to say hi and see what they've done with the place. But soon, when G is called out of town for business, M is left alone, and before they know it, they wake up to find themselves immobilized and watching as the previous tenant begins to make the apartment his own again.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male, 2 actors may be male or female or nonbinary)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Uncle Sam was a novelties salesman who died one night, alone and broke, in a Pittsburgh hotel. But he was also a larger-than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew — who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story. His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive nightclub singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny, sometimes hair-raising episodes as the nephew “becomes” his uncle in his youth and journeys to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course — all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror. In the end it is really the landscape of the mind that is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the “truth” still remaining tantalizingly out of reach.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (5 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
JONAH is a rumination on the story of the man and the sea. Jonah's a man on the run. He hops a Greyhound to Joppa and then grabs a cabin on the ocean-bound Carnival Princess. Drinking away his sorrows at the ship's Grass Skirt Grill, the lounge band Sheila and the Lovetones plays him into a stupor before he tumbles into the waves. Len Jenkin's JONAH is a contemporary retelling of the unfaithful servant; some love stories about the evil city of Ninevah, a Dairy Queen, and of course, the whale.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (4 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
In the first play in LIMBO TALES, HIGHWAY, a man suddenly decides to drive to his girlfriend’s house, which is 200 miles away. He becomes obsessed with the thought that each car that passes may be his girlfriend coming to visit him — and as he begins to lose touch with time and place he becomes convinced that he has moved back to another century, another civilization. In the short INTERMEZZO, a Master of Ceremonies announces, in hilarious detail, all the exotic acts that will not be on the bill that evening. In the final play, HOTEL, a down-on-his-luck encyclopedia salesman sits in a flea-bag hotel room, eating Chinese food which is delivered by a disembodied arm, while listening to the squabbling of his neighbors and contemplating the aridity of his limbo-like existence.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (3 male)Full Length Drama (about 85 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
HICKORYDICKORY explores what would happen if we all had an internal clock telling us the time of our death. Someone has tinkered with Cari Lee’s mortal clock, so she’s stuck at 17 for eternity. Now she’s the same age as her daughter, Dale. But Dale’s worried about her own mortal clock — the one that tells her the day and time she’ll die. Dad’s an expert clock-smith, but some timepieces are not meant to be tampered with.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 150 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Subtitled “A History of Science (A Chronicle of Folly, Wisdom, and Madness),” PORT TWILIGHT has been described as “an end-times extraterrestrial vaudeville.”
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (6 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 85 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes