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.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 11/1/2006 |
| Pages | 80 |
| ISBN | 9780881453164 |
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–$15.95
Play 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–$15.95
Play Description
The mysterious Mr Much contrives to convince ordinary Albert that he is a “little person” — but is he? Join one man’s struggle to distinguish reality from delusion in a world far more outlandish, but only slightly more absurd, than our own.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 75 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
This provocative chronicle, interspersed with fantasy sequences from Alice in Wonderland, traces the career of Charles Dodgson (better know as Lewis Carroll) from his first work on the immortal classic to his near downfall when accused of immorality.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (4 female, 7 male, doubling)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Arrogant young Puerto Rican Fatima, who works as a counter girl at a fast-food restaurant, has been arrested for the murder of 14 people, poisoned at her workplace. Young attorney Jeremy has been assigned to defend her and asks a Latina colleague, Maritza, to be his translator. But Fatima refuses to talk to anyone but Maritza, and she's enough of a manipulator to get her way. Fatima claims she has been blessed — or cursed — with psychic powers. By merely clasping the hand of an individual, she says, she can immediately grasp everything about him/her including past, future, and innermost secrets. She tells Maritza that her murders were mercy killings: She “read” each of her victims and killed them because they wanted to die. Maritza is first incredulous, then indignant at Fatima's playing God. She firmly resists letting Fatima clasp her hand, but Fatima is persuasive, constantly shifting from pugnacious, foul-mouthed street girl to wise and wily seductress to gentle, compassionate young woman. Maritza finally offers up her hand, yielding her secrets and placing her fate in Fatima's grasp.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play 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
$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–$15.95
Play Description
Christmas Eve. New York City. An aspiring writer and a struggling actress meet while looking at the famous holiday windows, and the characters in the displays come to life and look back at them, including a lecherous elf with eyes for Mrs. Claus; Scrooge and Tiny Tim arguing about being portrayed as zombies; a street-wise Little Match Girl; Jim from “The Gift of the Magi” enjoying his wife’s new androgynous haircut; and a jealous Joseph The Carpenter. A smart, sweet, slightly twisted holiday romantic comedy.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male, flexible casting, up to 17 actors)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A time-bending love story between two physicists. Described by The Chicago Sun-Times as “a deft little romantic screwball comedy with a very brainy twist. It brings to mind some of Tom Stoppard's more intellectual theatrical hijinks. But it's also the kind of work that might have beguiled such 1930s and '40s era film directors as Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, who probably would have hired Albert Einstein as a script consultant.”
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (1 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$10.00–$15.95
Play Description
A THOUSAND YEARS is a fantastical comic-book-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
$0.00–$15.95
Play Description
Three couples gather on the back deck of a very modest suburban home for a mid-summer barbecue where the hosts, Mike and Deb, struggle with feelings of inadequacy about their home decor, their clothes, their careers, their culinary skills, and pretty much everything else. Ash is a successful yuppy with impeccable taste but annoys the hell out of his wife, Lulu, who likes to get very drunk, very quickly. Win mistakes his obnoxious confidence for charm, and his new girlfriend, Glory, is just too young and beautiful to be tolerated by other women. Throughout the first act feelings are hurt over the difference between “Organic” and “All Natural” beef, who’s pregnant and who’s just put on a little weight, and a nearly crippling iPhone addiction. The superficial, neuroses-laden interpersonal squabbles bubble over to a flash of inept violence when Win makes what we learn is just one in a series of passes at Deb. As the act closes, the group discovers that the rest of the world has been literally falling apart during their little, terrible barbecue. Act Two takes place on the same deck for another barbecue to celebrate their one-year post-apocalypsiversary. In a year where the only way to measure success is survival, roles have reversed, and we explore how each character’s basic nature has allowed them to adapt and thrive or has pushed them to the brink of extinction.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A car crash. Three people dead. One of them naked. It’s up to a detective and a police officer to figure out what happened in this supernatural upside-down mystery.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
When Monty's family moves from Louisiana to a large city in Southern California, he and his siblings encounter a dangerous landscape where cruelty thrives among their peers, offering little comfort from their abusive home life. This gripping drama embraces the good and evil young people face alone in their lives.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male, extras)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes