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
Offbeat drama of a mother, father, and adult daughter living together inside an upscale Manhattan apartment. Daughter plays a cello and has a personality disorder. Her alter ego seduces her father who is a political media guru. Mother is conflicted in how to stop this awful charade.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
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
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
This witty and passionate play explores the story of a man with Alzheimer’s and at the same time turns into “a travel guide to Middle America conducted by aliens from outer space.” The play has a wonderful comic sensibility, but this is a chillingly painful play addressing postmodern society’s collective nervous breakdown.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A soon-to-be-married couple, Schiller and Arjay, take Schiller's parents on their first trip to Europe. Using his personal experience as a jumping off point, playwright Tom Jacobson takes the audience on an ominously comic journey during which guinea pigs play cricket, dead bodies talk, and the two couples learn what it means to be American in a world that no longer admires the U.S.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male, flexible casting, up to 4 women and 1 man or 4 men and 1 woman)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play 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
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
The story of a dysfunctional circus in which a fortuneteller has wrested control of the circus from her ringmaster. Beasts and dark shapes never seen on earth come forth to present, or disrupt, their acts. Until an absent clown, or child, finally comes back to lead the circus's opening parade.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (5 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
What if Blanche Dubois didn’t go crazy? Or the Three Sisters actually made it to Moscow? When he discovers he’s fictitious, a never-seen character in an Oscar Wilde play, Bunbury joins forces with Rosaline, Romeo’s never-seen obsession from ROMEO AND JULIET. Together they infiltrate and alter classic literature, including giving ROMEO AND JULIET a happy ending.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play 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–$15.95
Play Description
Unmarried cousins Eleanor and Lolly have inherited from their recently deceased aunt a historical house on the windswept Massachusetts coast. Only thing is, the place is haunted by the handsome young ghost of a swashbuckling 19-century smuggler who was hanged for his crimes. The local minister, Mr Butts, finds it all unbearably romantic. Eleanor, a worldly woman, is skeptical of the ghost’s existence, but spinsterish Lolly claims he visits her at night, and they’ve fallen in love. Has Lolly, Eleanor wonders, lost her mind? Moreover, how could the ghost possibly prefer Lolly to her? As the ghost continues his visitations, his reasons for the haunting are gradually revealed, and not only Lolly but even Eleanor and Mr Butts begin to fall under his spell, the surprising consequences of which may just land all three of them in jail in this delightful and otherworldly romantic comedy.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary 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
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
A romantic comedy with a Sci-fi twist. Troubled lovers, Roger and Susan, visit rural Vermont to work on their relationship. Possession by aliens was not on their list of problems … until they got there.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
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