Baby’s Blues
Play Description
Susan is a career woman with a seemingly perfect life, complete with sensitive husband and a brand new bundle of joy on the way. Beginning at the moment a very pregnant Susan goes into labor, the play follows her journey as she becomes a new mother, with a frighteningly inexplicable newborn to care for. Employing both realistic and surrealistic elements, BABY’S BLUES explores one woman’s descent into postpartum depression, but also brings into focus the difficult challenge of becoming a mother for the first time, as well as the fine line that sometimes exists between health and madness.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (5 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“BABY’S BLUES makes a strong impact through powerful dialogue … It takes an emotional dilemma and winds it tighter and tighter and tighter to a wrenching peak, leaving us vibrating with the final impact … BABY’S BLUES has undoubted immediacy.” —Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Tammy Ryan’s fiercely emotional and darkly disquieting play takes a frank and sympathetic look at one mother’s descent into serious psychosis brought on by the birth of her first child. Ryan works overtime to keep the story real yet understandable. It’s a tensely orchestrated hundred minute journey unrelieved by intermission, yet there are moments of humor and irony.” —Alice T Carter, Tribune Review
Author(s)
Tammy RyanTAMMY RYAN is a playwright and librettist whose work has been performed across the United States and internationally. She was awarded the Francesca Primus Prize by the American Theater Critic’s Association for her play LOST BOY FOUND IN WHOLE FOODS (Premiere Stages/Playwrights Theater of New Jersey.). Other plays include SOLDIER'S HEART, DARK PART OF THE FOREST (Premiere Stages) A CONFLUENCE OF DREAMING, BABY'S BLUES, FBI GIRL (Pittsburgh Playhouse), and THE MUSIC LESSON (Florida Stage/2001 Carbonell Award Best Production/2004 AATE Distinguished New Play Award). In addition, her play, TAR BEACH (Luna Stage), a finalist for the Terrance McNally Playwriting Award and a Jane Chambers Award honoree was included on “The List” of the most outstanding plays by women playwrights in 2014 compiled by the Kilroys. Ryan has held fellowships at Virginia Center of the Creative Arts, Hambidge Center, and the Sewanee Writers Conference. Her work has been featured in the National New Play Network’s National Showcase of Plays and has been read and developed at the New Harmony Project, Premiere Stages Play Festival, The Ignite Festival, The Lark and elsewhere.
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 The Rep, Pittsburgh
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
Nonprofessional
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A satirical piece which turns its sharp eye on political correctness, office politics, sexual harassment, religious persuasions, and societal and cultural norms. The actors don’t know which role they’ll play until the audience decides for them at each performance. The actors forge their own unique interpretations in any one of the 40,320 possible casting combinations that could confront them, creating a unique and hilarious interpretation of the show every night.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male, flexible casting)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
García Lorca's passionate, lyrical tale of longing and revenge: a twentieth-century masterpiece.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (7 female, 3 male, bit parts)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
In the second part of Tony Kushner's epic, the plague of AIDS worsens, relationships fall apart as new ones form, and unexpected friendships take form.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 220 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A wild ride through theatrical terrain that sears the senses and impacts the audience at a visceral place, which also manages to be hilariously funny and heartbreakingly real in the five core scenes of a young woman’s visit to the deathbed of her friend. Her moment of acknowledgment and comfort comes hard in the face of denial, moralizing, insane positive thinking, desperate chit chat, and the existential fears we all harbor about the end moments of life — the great mystery.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (5 female, 6 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A quirky, inventive, and fun play in which time is out of joint as married couple Jeff and Joan contend with ghosts, beasts, and witches banging on their windows, wafting through their rooms, and wielding butcher knives.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
In this unabashedly sentimental comedy, a cat named Samantha has just started living with a guy named Shuman who she believes is her true love. At first everything seems to be going great. Samantha can't get enough of Shuman, and she can't get enough of him. But soon Samantha realizes that Shuman doesn't always seem to understand her. Worse yet, Shuman doesn't always seem all that interested in trying to understand her. Things become truly problematic when one night Oscar, a sexy alley cat, shows up at the door. Suddenly Samantha begins to wonder whether she's an indoor or an outdoor cat. To make matters more complicated, a quirky aspiring cat therapist named Matilda inserts herself into the mix, thinking she can solve everyone's problems but only seems to make things worse. Eventually Samantha finds herself on a journey, both physical and emotional, that leads her to discover what having a home and being loved really mean to her. INDOOR/OUTDOOR is an allegory about the difficulties and joys of all manner of relationships.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Recently deceased lawyer and all-around schlemiel Simon Ackerman suddenly finds himself desperate to get into Hell, which, God forbid, turns out to be the better place to both visit and spend eternity. Struggling against the demons before him as well as the demons within, Simon encounters other proud denizens of Hell, including William Shakespeare, Frank Sinatra, Vlad the Impaler, and a chic, fashionable Mother Theresa, among others. At the end of his journey, Simon finds himself face to face with the most timeless conundrum of all — what do you do when you are finally being held accountable for your actions on Earth, being held accountable to a completely different set of standards, and most importantly, where do you truly wish to end up when you leave it?
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male, some doubling)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Several years after tragedy impacted their lives, a family comes together once again for Thanksgiving dinner. While family members struggle to come to terms with residual anger, grief and guilt, Jack Canfora’s thought-provoking play explores how people cope with personal and collective catastrophe. Displaying surprising humor and biting wit, this Jericho, Long Island clan exposes their desperate strategies for resolution and redemption.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A THOUSAND YEARS is a fantastical comicbook-bright flight of fancy through time examining the enduring power of love. After a terrible accident, Miriam’s husband David falls into a coma. Miriam leaves the hospital to clear her head and is abducted. She spends the next 1,000 years trying to get back to David. Obstacle after obstacle abound. At some point Miriam realizes she has one true enemy — the evil She Doctor. The She Doctor may or may not be Fate, Nature and/or Time. She meets many allies along the way. Like Jackson, a hermit who lives in a lighthouse and Nella who lost her girlfriend 500 years earlier and is lost at sea. To save David, Miriam must engage in a battle of the soul with the She Doctor. But can she win?
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Winner of the 1993 Tony Award for Best Play
Play Description
In the first part of Tony Kushner's epic, set in 1980's New York City, a gay man is abandoned by his lover when he contracts the AIDS virus, and a closeted Mormon lawyer's marriage to his pill-popping wife stalls. Other characters include the infamous McCarthy-ite lawyer Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a former drag queen who works as a nurse, and an angel.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 180 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Three years after Josie’s mother died, no one expects her to telephone from a bus station in North Dakota. This comic study of love and letting go gives a look at the disparity between what you expect and what is delivered.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (4 female, 1 male)Full Length Comedy (about 85 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
In the early 1950s, a psychologist sets out to write the definitive book on THE SEX HABITS OF AMERICAN WOMEN. Meanwhile, his wife is having an affair with his former student, his daughter can’t find love, and all his theories refuse to go unchallenged. Juxtaposed to the action in the 1950s is a present-day videographer making a documentary on precisely the same subject.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (5 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes