Hardball
Play Description
What happens when news becomes entertainment and politics become a performance? Virginia Eames, an aspiring political pundit, attempts to negotiate her way through the constantly shifting landscape of cutthroat commentary and learns what it takes to be a star.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (4 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“Nice girls do not finish first in Victoria Stewart’s trenchant and entertaining topical drama, HARDBALL. Girls with the sharpest elbows do … [and] Virginia has a pair of elbows that could splinter concrete … Smart, persuasive and nervy in its view of opinion journalism run amok. Stewart clearly boned up on Fox News, CNN and MSNBC gabfests … HARDBALL incisively dissects the inside game of media punditry — and exposes it as, at worst, a zero-sum game for us all.” —Misha Berson, The Seattle Times
Author(s)
Victoria StewartVictoria Stewart has received the Francesca Primus Award, a McKnight Advancement Grant, the Helen Merrill Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award (finalist), and the Jerome Fellowship as well as residencies at Ucross/Sundance, Hedgebrook, Hermitage, Tofte Lake, Sewanee Writer's Conference and the Donmar Warehouse. Her plays include RICH GIRL (Florida Studio Theatre, The Old Globe, Theatre 502, George Street Playhouse, Cleveland Playhouse, Lyric Stage), MERCY WATSON TO THE RESCUE! (Olympia Family Theater, Magik Theatre, Children's Theatre Company, Marin Theater Company), HARDBALL (Live Girls Theatre!, SPF), FISSURES (LOST AND FOUND) (Actors Theater of Louisville), CLANDESTINO (Mixed Blood), LIVE GIRLS (Urban Stages, WHAT, Stage Left, Eternal Spiral Project), 800 WORDS: THE TRANSMIGRATION OF PHILIP K. DICK, (Caravan Theater, Live Girls Theatre!, Workhaus Collective), THE MEANING OF MAGGIE (Rose Theatre), an adaptation of Henry James' THE BOSTONIANS and a new play OPHELIA REDUX. She's written projects for HBO and Youtube Red. She's a founding member of the Workhaus Collective, an Affiliated Writer with the Playwrights' Center, a member of WGA West and the Playwrights Union of Los Angeles. Victoria graduated from the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa.
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:
HARDBALL premiered at Live Girls! Theater in Seattle.
The play was developed with support from the Helen Merrill Award,
the Playwrights’ Center Jerome Fellowship program,
SPF (Summer Play Festival),
and the Women Playwrights Festival
co-produced by the Seattle Repertory Theatre and Hedgebrook.
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
$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
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
In HOMEBODY/KABUL, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Tony Kushner, author of ANGELS IN AMERICA, has turned his penetrating gaze to the arena of global politics to create this suspenseful portrait of a dangerous collision between cultures. Written before 9/11, this play premiered in New York in December 2001 and has had subsequent highly successful productions in London, Providence, Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles. This version incorporates all the playwright’s changes over the past two years and is now the definitive version of the text.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (3 female, 8 male, multiethnic cast)Full Length Drama (about 215 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.95Play Description
THE GABRIELS trilogy chronicles a year in the life of a neighboring family who reunite in real time at three different points across 2016 to celebrate, remember, and wait for the world to change. History and politics, art and culture, love and hate are all on the table as the Gabriels gather in the kitchen of the house they grew up in — ultimately revealing the deep, human impact of one of the most extraordinary years in American history. Part Two, WHAT DID YOU EXPECT?: Financial problems are escalating for the Gabriels, causing a cascade of complications, as the election looms before them.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (5 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 105 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
JoAnne Akalaitis' exploration of America as an immigrant and refugee society is complex, timely, and highly theatrical: a collage of images and events, documentary and testimony, that asks us to look again at the pressures and liberties of life in a foreign culture. GREEN CARD both describes and creates, for performers as well as audiences, the cacophony of sounds and barrage of images that confront those newly arrived in this land. The play moves from Ellis Island to Los Angeles, a city many consider the Ellis Island of the eighties.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (5 female, 6 male, multiethnic, flexible casting)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
No politician is as beloved as New York City Mayor John Kendrick, the four-term hero who triumphed during crisis and eliminated homelessness. But if the truth the mayor is hiding comes to light, it could leave New York in ruins. As cataclysm looms, New Yorkers’ lives intersect, leading a power-hungry aide, a struggling author, and a loud-mouthed journalist to uncover a devastating series of lies. History, legacy, and death collide while a city races toward the worst disaster it has ever faced. The destruction will be tweeted.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.95Play Description
The Apples reflect on the state of their family and discuss memory, manners and politics as polls close on mid-term election night 2010 and a groundswell of conservative sentiment flips Congress on its head.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
Three years ago, Sarah Kennedy thought she was hired as a translator for a corporate military prison in Baghdad, only to discover that she would be acting as an interrogator instead, retrieving information from prisoners of war — by any means necessary. Now, Lily Strauss, a disgraced reporter in the waning days of newspaper journalism, must uncover Sarah's story, cutting through webs of corporate lies and government deception until finally faced with the choice between her own journalistic ideals and the devastating consequences of telling the truth. A political thriller, ON THE HEAD OF A PIN is an exploration of who watches the watchers and what happens when they look away.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (5 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 170 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.95Play Description
THE GABRIELS trilogy chronicles a year in the life of a neighboring family who reunite in real time at three different points across 2016 to celebrate, remember, and wait for the world to change. History and politics, art and culture, love and hate are all on the table as the Gabriels gather in the kitchen of the house they grew up in — ultimately revealing the deep, human impact of one of the most extraordinary years in American history. Part One, HUNGRY: To the rhythm of peeling, chopping and mixing, HUNGRY places us in the center of the Gabriels’ kitchen. The family discusses their lives and disappointments, and the world at large and nearby, as they struggle against the fear of being left behind and the challenge to find resilience in the face of loss.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (5 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Based on the true events surrounding the groundbreaking table tennis tournament that marked a decisive new chapter in US–China relations, PING PONG is the story of the extraordinary young man who played the game that changed the world and the political actors who were playing him. With Nixon and Mao on either side of the court, free-spirited hippie Glenn Cowan reaches across the net to usher in a fragile new friendship between two great countries in this funny, incisive, and wildly imaginative new play about the little moments of history that set up the big ones.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male, doubling, bit parts)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.95Play Description
THE GABRIELS trilogy chronicles a year in the life of a neighboring family who reunite in real time at three different points across 2016 to celebrate, remember, and wait for the world to change. History and politics, art and culture, love and hate are all on the table as the Gabriels gather in the kitchen of the house they grew up in — ultimately revealing the deep, human impact of one of the most extraordinary years in American history. Part Three, WOMEN OF A CERTAIN AGE: It is election night as the Gabriels economic woes worsen. They have worked hard and played by the rules, and yet they are slipping from the middle class. Is there hope to be had?
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (5 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
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