- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“Pure, unadulterated magic … utterly beguiling … a high-spirited, imagination-filled escapade … Laura Eason’s exceptionally graceful adaptation of the Jules Verne classic … manages to be both wise and fun-filled … it lays its bets on enchantment and invariably comes up a winner … a show that should sail the world. Highly recommended.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“Light, cheerful and greatly entertaining … laudably committed to its theatricality … Eason’s staging is full of the visual imagination … It’s all a great deal of fun.” —Chicago Tribune
“An engaging, family-friendly show. Highly recommended.” —The Chicago Reader
“Eason’s affable adaptation plays up elements of Verne’s novel that are sometimes forgotten … Eason moves stylishly from set piece to set piece, from the cuckoo-clock orchestration of Fogg’s London life to teacups sliding across a shipboard table.” —Time Out Chicago
“A rollicking trek … Phileas Fogg, the imperturbable hero of AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS, has returned to New York … Never journeyed with Fogg? Allow me. He is a London bachelor of independent means so regular in his habits that he fires a manservant for serving him a cup of tea at the wrong temperature. One day, at his club, Fogg wagers 20,000 pounds that a man can now make it around the world in 80 days and sets off that same night, with his new valet Passepartout, a former tightrope walker, in baffled tow. Traveling by train, boat and sledge, rescuing a plucky Indian widow along the way, he treats time zones like his own personal hopscotch court … How exhilarating it must have been, in an era before discount cruises and air travel, when most readers would count themselves lucky to journey a town or two away. How thrilling is it now? Still pretty thrilling.” —Alexis Soloski, The New York Times
Author(s)
Laura EasonLaura Eason is the author of twenty plays, original work and adaptation, a musical book writer, and screenwriter. Selected productions of full-length plays include SEX WITH STRANGERS (Second Stage Theatre, NYC; Signature Theatre, DC; Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Chicago; Sydney Theatre Company, AU; published by Overlook Press); THE UNDENIABLE SOUND OF RIGHT NOW (Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre and Women's Project Theater, NYC; Rising Phoenix Rep, NYC); THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER (Hartford Stage, CT; New Victory Theater, NYC; People's Light & Theatre Company, PA; Actors Theatre of Louisville, KY; The Kansas City Repertory Theatre; The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis; Denver Center; published by DPS), and AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (New Vic and Royal Exchange, UK; Lookingglass Theatre Company; Baltimore Center Stage; published by Broadway Play Publishing). Produced short plays include: MR. SMITTEN (Humana Festival), CITI MOMS (Women's Project Theater, NYC), USA-001A (American Theater Company, Chicago), JACK AND THE COLLECTION (WET, NYC), LOST BOY IN THE RUINED CITY (Theatre Seven, Chicago), IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED (City Theatre, Miami), and LOST IN THE SUPERMARKET (Vital Theatre Company, NYC), among others. She wrote the book for the musicals DAYS LIKE TODAY, music and lyrics by Alan Schmuckler (Writers Theatre, Chicago) and SUMMERLAND, music by Jenny Giering, lyrics by Sean Barry (Chicago Shakespeare Theater commission). Additional plays include: THE VAST IN-BETWEEN (Denver Center commission, also developed by Vineyard Theatre, NYC), REMARKABLE INVISIBLE (Ambassador Theatre Group commission), EVERY REASON TO HOPE AND BELIEVE (Repertory Theatre of St. Louis commission), 40 DAYS (NEA grant, developed by New York Theatre Workshop), PLAINFIELD ACE (developed by Two River Theater, NJ and Atlantic Theater Company, NYC) and an adaptation of HANS BRINKER AND THE SILVER SKATES (Arden Theatre Company commission), among others. As a screenwriter, Laura wrote on season two and three of the Emmy-winning Netflix show House of Cards. She is an Ensemble Member and former Artistic Director of Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre (2011 Regional Tony Award). In New York, she is a member of Rising Phoenix Rep, New Georges, and a Women's Project Playwright's Lab alumna.
Jules VerneJules Gabriel Verne (1828 – 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright best known for his adventure novels and his profound influence on the literary genre of science fiction.
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:
Originally produced by Lookingglass Theater, Chicago
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
Upcoming and Recent Productions
Professional
Nonprofessional
Related Plays
$19.95–$20.00Collection Description
This collection includes five long one-act plays: THE AWFUL TOOTH, BLASTED EVENT, DEAD WRONG, POTTY FAVORS, and SHE CAN’T BARE IT! Master Belle Époque farceur Georges Feydeau loosely based these brilliantly funny long one-acts on the failure of his own marriage. The plays, greatly admired in his time, were described by a prominent critic as “insane merriment, inextinguishable laughter.” With DEAD WRONG, the first play in the collection, Feydeau launched a new genre: the marital farce, the hell of couples. And “like the very great comic writers,” another critic noted, Feydeau “knows how to make the public laugh at his personal bitterness.” It was Feydeau himself who suggested that these five one-acts be collected under the title FROM MARRIAGE TO DIVORCE. This collection, which for the first time brings these plays together in English, honors that suggestion. Distinguished translator Laurence Senelick has taken care to preserve all of Feydeau’s stage directions as sure guides to staging the plays for maximum effect. DEAD WRONG: A husband and wife stay together by force of habit, their relationship based on nothing solid. The wife’s aggression and bitterness and the husband’s selfishness and irresponsibility are revealed, and their ferocious animosity unleashes such powerful comedy that it obscures the underlying darkness. POTTY FAVORS: Inspired by Feydeau’s wife’s obsession with giving the children laxatives, especially his eldest son, Jacques, every character is despicable for their moral cowardice and egoism, providing a hopeless (but hilarious) environment for child-rearing. SHE CAN’T BARE IT!: What to do about a wife going around the apartment in her nightie until lunchtime? BLASTED EVENT: Trapped in a misalliance, a husband is set upon by his wife, his in-laws, and the midwife. THE AWFUL TOOTH was the last new play of Feydeau to be produced in his lifetime, and its dentist’s chair offers a dose of sadistic hilarity. As translator Laurence Senelick notes, “Feydeau may be to dentists what Molière was to doctors.”
Plays in This Collection
Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
The best known play by one of the most performed French playwrights — a sparkling 18th-century comedy of manners based on the simplest of plot devices, the exchanging places of master and valet, mistress and maidservant.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male, 1 bit part)Full Length Comedy (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
“ANTONY is not a melodrama, ANTONY is not a tragedy, ANTONY is not a stage play. ANTONY is an acting-out of love, jealousy and anger in five acts.” —Alexandre Dumas (père)
Production Info
Cast: 14 total (6 female, 9 male, extras)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Eric Overmyer’s sparkling adaptation and synthesis of Beaumarchais’s THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO and Ödön von Horváth’s FIGARO GETS A DIVORCE. FIGARO/FIGARO follows the iconic characters of Figaro, Susanna, the Count and Countess Almaviva, and other favorites through the ups and downs inherent in all relationships — husband and wife, master and servant, family ties and the like.
Production Info
Cast: 17 total (6 female, 11 male)Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.95Play Description
The story of a young woman forced into an unhappy marriage to her dull, sickly cousin and smothered by her overbearing aunt. When her husband's childhood friend enters her life, it leads Thérèse into a torrid affair that sets her spirit free for the first time but with shattering consequences. Steeped in the atmosphere of 19th-century France with a darkly rich foreboding.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Harpagon thinks that his children are costing him too much money and must be married off. He has found an old man who won’t demand a dowry for his daughter, Elise, and a rich widow for his son, Cleante. Unfortunately Elise is already in love with Harpagon’s servant, and his son is in love with the penniless Mariane, whom Harpagon has already decided to take as his own wife.
Production Info
Cast: 13 total (4 female, 9 male)Full Length Drama (about 105 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
A lawyer, facing mortality, desperate to find the son he drove away years before, travels in the dead of night to a mysterious cave. There he engages the services of a wizard, who conjures up visions of the romantic, adventurous, perilous life the lawyer’s son has been living since his father expelled him from home. THE ILLUSION, freely adapted from Pierre Corneille’s L’ILLUSION COMIQUE, is Kushner’s most joyfully theatrical play, a wildly entertaining tale of passion and regret, of love, disillusionment and magic.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (2 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Alfred de Musset’s 1832 play depicts Lorenzo de Medici, the 16th-century Florentine nobleman who killed his tyrannical cousin but did not establish a republican government afterwards and was forever disgraced by a debaucherous past.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (4 female, 8 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$15.00Play Description
The sweep of Eleanor’s entire life — from her early marriage to Louis VII, King of France, through her marriage to Henry II of England, to her imprisonment, reign and death — is encompassed in this action-packed, highly literate drama. Through every challenge, Eleanor, with her grace and independence — in a world which expected women to stay in their place — triumphs, as wife, soldier, mother, queen and patron of the Courts of Love.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (5 female, 11 male, doubling possible)Full Length Drama (about 140 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Constance Congdon's witty verse adaptation of Molière's timeless classic, in which a religious conman infiltrates the household of a gullible man and his exasperated family, has lent itself to productions set in modern-day Texas, New Orleans, and even The Sopranos' New Jersey.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (5 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes