Dark Part of the Forest
Play Description
Joan moves from the city to the country with her air traffic controller husband and their twelve-year-old daughter in search of peace and safety. Instead the move creates a growing sense of anxiety in Joan. When young girls begin to disappear, her anxieties are confirmed and the growing tension begins to tear apart the family. Interweaving fairytales with Joan’s memories of her own sexual coming of age, DARK PART OF THE FOREST follows Joan back through her fears until she can emerge transformed.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“Tammy Ryan should have called her new play ‘The Dark Part of the Marriage’ instead of the DARK PART OF THE FOREST … in the play’s potent debut … Joan and Bill’s faltering marriage is the main event. What’s also intriguing about DARK PART OF THE FOREST is the abundance of fairy tale imagery … Ryan has written no fairy tale, though. She can be grimmer than the Grimm brothers — but just as enigmatically entertaining.” —Peter Filichia, The Star-Ledger
“Hauntingly poetic language.” —Anna Rosenstein, In Pittsburgh
“… compact, poetic, turbulent writing … a vivid appreciation of how dark the forest that surrounds us can be … a topic this is both timely and eternal …” —Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“There are few contemporary plays … that leave audiences frozen in their seats … the writing is eerily real …” —Keren Schultz, The Westfield Leader
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 | 8/15/2011 |
| Pages | 68 |
| ISBN | 9780881455007 |
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:
Premiered at Premiere Stages at Kean University
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
$15.00
Play Description
A funny, zany, and strangely touching tale of two performers in a carnival sideshow who plot to assassinate a rural sheriff and then kill themselves.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 75 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$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
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Meg and Jack were childhood sweethearts, who got married, and when their daughter, Hannah, was born, Meg stayed home with her, while Jack worked. They were happy. Then their church hired a new pastor. Flash forward … Jack is dead, and Meg is fighting the church she fled for custody of Hannah. Now that Meg is about to see Hannah for the first time in two years, the clock is already ticking. She will only have 12 visits to convince Hannah, who is openly hostile toward her, to leave the church she loves and its promise of salvation, to live with Meg — the mother who left her behind.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (3 female, 1 male, doubling)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
John Greer has a charmed life: he is a professor at a renowned university, a beloved father, and he is about to be named Poet Laureate. He owes much of his success to his wife, Diane, who aggressively shepherds his career. But when their daughter and her new boyfriend return home for the weekend, hidden secrets emerge that threaten to destroy the image he has cultivated in both his public and private lives. POETIC LICENSE is a biting drama set against the cutthroat “publish or perish” world of academia and explores how one person’s past can shape his art, his family, and in this case his future.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 80 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Lorca's extraordinarily powerful drama, the last he wrote before his assassination, explores the darkness at the heart of repression. When Bernarda's husband dies, she locks all the doors and windows. She tells her grown-up daughters to sew and be silent. “There are eight years of mourning ahead of us. While it lasts not even the wind will get into this house.” But locks can't hold back the growing tide of desire.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (11 female)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Sharon and Billy, sister and brother, are typical adolescents growing up in a tract home in 1950's Southern California. But when fifteen-year-old Sharon finds herself pregnant, their adolescence comes to an abrupt end.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A play about love, sex, ambition, and the Arab American experience, ROAR is the story of a Palestinian American family living in Detroit in the wake of the first Gulf War. Karema and Ahmed Yacoub work long hours in their liquor store while their teenage daughter, Irene, relentlessly pursues a career as a pop star. All hell breaks loose when a notoriously sexy and scandalous relative, Hala, gets thrown out of Kuwait and arrives on the doorstep without a return ticket.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Carol, an underappreciated and seemingly invisible suburban homemaker, finds herself wondering what the hell happened to her life. She rediscovers stifled thrill and passion in the secret, sexy world of cyberspace. As her husband obsesses over their local property tax assessment and the cost of their current kitchen renovation, the state of their marriage (along with their roof) is about to collapse under the weight of what they haven’t addressed. Their 17-year-old “activist” daughter, who is about to leave the nest and save the world, is torn between going to college or Tibet. Taking place in Pittsburgh during the summer of 2001, Carol solicits a face-to-face meeting with her online lover in New York City. When fantasy collides with reality in his studio apartment, Carol confronts the choices she’s made against the desires she has suppressed in the quest for self-fulfillment.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
When Claudine meets Henry, a starving artist, she falls head over heels. Her mother, a financial guru, has her doubts. Is Henry everything her daughter has been looking for? Or is he after only one thing? A modern-day adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, RICH GIRL is about women and their relationship to men, mothers, and money, in that order.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (3 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.95
Play Description
BBC correspondent David Mazower (Sholem Asch’s great-grandson) described THE GOD OF VENGEANCE as “admired, translated, parodied, panned, banned, prosecuted, withdrawn, forgotten, revived, celebrated.” An international sensation after its 1907 world premiere in Berlin at Max Reinhard’s Deutsches Theater, Asch’s play quickly became the first Yiddish drama performed in translation across Europe and America. Notoriety was a key part of its success. Nearly every production sparked some level of controversy due to the script’s conflicting themes of hypocrisy and religious faith, rebellion and tradition, its brothel setting, graphic domestic violence, “gutter poetry” reminiscent of Wedekind, and an unprecedented erotic scene of lesbian seduction. This pre-Holocaust drama is today circumscribed by a very different post-Holocaust world, but THE GOD OF VENGEANCE remains one of the great urban dramas of the Yiddish Theatre repertoire.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (7 female, 5 male, bit parts)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes