Helen’s Play
This play is included in the collection:
Play Description
Chicago, 1940. In the first act, Thomas, a successful playwright, his brother, Hal, with his wife, Helen, and son, Tom, wait out a storm in the playwright’s luxurious apartment. The playwright proposes to write a play just for his brother’s wife. The next afternoon, still snowbound, Thomas, Hal, and Helen visit the wealthy Pflaum-Smythes upstairs, while their high-spirited daughter, Effi, attempts to make the acquaintance of Tom, the boy, downstairs. The adults descend to witness a reading of Thomas’s new play, a story very much like that of Hal and Helen running off to Tahiti years ago, only Tom and Effi rise to play the parts. In the second act, a week later, beginning in Hal and Helen’s similar, but much less expensive apartment, Helen returns to announce that she has the lead in Thomas’s new play. The family celebrates. Late that night, Helen, who has been drinking, reveals to Tom that the price for being cast was high, followed by a couple of other revelations leading to her midnight departures for Thomas’s. At Thomas’s, Effi makes an unscheduled appearance in one of her mother’s evening gowns to demand the right to sit in on the rehearsals of Thomas’s new play. Helen arrives with Hal in close pursuit. Thomas makes a grim announcement, and all leave. Thomas sits down to work on his new script, which is subsequently enacted before us as a play within a play until Thomas’s final spoken stage direction brings the lights down.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“Here are some of the things I admire about Michael McGuire as a playwright:
He takes chances.
He understands that plays should be ‘about’ something.
He understands that playwriting must be a socially responsible act.
He understands that to be truly entertaining a play must involve us deeply.
He understands that each play must have its own identity — its own voice.
I wish all playwrights understood this.”
—Edward Albee
“McGuire’s writing is hauntingly thoughtful, inexorably true.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“As with all of Mr McGuire’s work, these plays are mysterious, lyrical, and full of strange, and often startling surprises.” —Christopher Martin, Founding Director, C S C Repertory
“This is not hit or miss experimentation, but the mature work of an artist with a love for words and a highly developed sensitivity for the theatrical.” —John Schneider, Artistic Director, Theatre X
“As I’ve suggested, what makes his plays special is their literariness. I don’t mean anything like mere rhetoric, but in the theatricality a verbal delicacy of feeling, with nuances of perception that you’d expect to find in more private forms. He was always, in the theater, resistant to those who were dismissing language because they never thought much of it, or even when they did because, in his view of theater, the beginning is the word. That may or may not be true, but if we’re going to have language on stage would that more playwrights had as fine a sense of it as Michael McGuire.” —Herbert Blau, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
“… a tightly controlled imagination … Mr McGuire’s aim is to keep testing the emotional limits of the audience until the last light goes out.” —D J R Bruckner, New York Times
Author(s)
Michael McGuire"McGuire's writing is hauntingly thoughtful, inexorably true." —Publisher's Weekly Michael McGuire has had plays produced by the New York Shakespeare Festival (with Kevin McCarthy and Bob Balaban) and the Mark Taper Forum (with Ken Mars and Nan Martin) among others, including the American Theatre of Actors in New York, the Source in Washington, DC, The Changing Scene in Denver, the Actor's Workshop of San Francisco and at theatres in Frankfurt and Stuttgart, Germany. THE SCOTT FITZGERALD PLAY was published by the University of Missouri Press. BACKPACKER was grand prize winner and produced at the 9th Annual Great Platte River Playwrights' Competition in 1997. There have been many staged readings, including ones at N Y U, the Living Theatre, Lamb's with Tammy Grimes and Bob Stattel, the Public, the Hudson Guild, the Organic in Chicago, the Odyssey in Los Angeles, and two at Lincoln Center with Tammy Grimes, Richard Merrill, and Michael Zaslow. Mr. McGuire's fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, New Directions in Prose & Poetry, and the Hudson Review. A collection of his stories, The Ice Forest (Marlboro Press), was named one of the "Best Books of the Year" by Publisher's Weekly. He has been writer-in-residence at several universities and directed a creative writing program; he has had residencies at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, been aided in his work by the National Endowment for the Humanities, named an Individual Artist Fellow by the Oregon Arts Commission, and awarded the Oregon Arts Foundation Theatre Award. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild.
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:
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
The play chronicles the selfless acts of Janusz Korczak, the teacher and director. Korczak strove to give the children of the Warsaw Ghetto a sense of normalcy despite the horrific conditions and eventually chose to leave with them for the Treblinka death camp.
Production Info
Cast: 13 total (4 female, 9 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00 Play Description
It is a few years after the end of World War II. Billy Maitland, a young wheelchair-bound ex-Army Corporal is the sole remaining patient in a VA hospital when a new patient, Flight Commander Simon Trevelyan, arrives — accompanied by his American ex-WAAF wife. When Billy, who worships FDR, discovers that his new fellow-patient was a former pilot in the Royal Air Force, he insists the cynical and disillusioned Simon join him in reliving the war, with Billy pretending to be FDR and Simon pretending to be Winston Churchill. In a time before PTSD was identified and when treatment for the effects of the horrors of war were little understood, their doctor thinks this play-acting might help them recover from the physical and mental traumas of their combat experiences. As the two servicemen's extremely different personal and historical stories unfold, HOTEL VICTORY portrays the aftereffects of battle and contrasts war as it is experienced by the Grand Figures of history vs. the way it is experienced by the men and women they send into the fight.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
In 1948, Los Angeles Tribune reporter Hisaye Yamamoto puts her job at risk when she joins forces with civil rights pioneer Bayard Rustin to desegregate Bimini Baths.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.95 Play Description
Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler's LA RONDE, JITTERBUGGING: SCENES OF SEX IN A SOCIETY is set in 1947. A cycle of brief sexual encounters in a seaside New England hotel begins with the seduction of a soldier by a whore and ends with the seduction of that whore by the mayor. The play contrasts the sadness of the manipulative liaisons with the surface optimism of period songs.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
Play Description
Simone Weil, a French girl of Jewish extraction whose death in 1943 was caused primarily by self-imposed starvation, is the subject of this striking theatrical exploration into the nature of faith and spirituality. APPROACHING SIMONE gives fascinating insights into this extraordinary woman who was later canonized as a saint.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (6 female, 10 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
Bill and Bob entertain young troops who are to be sent overseas to fight. They keep photo albums and correspond as often as possible. The young men put down Mrs B Batchelor as next of kin so that Bill and Bob will be notified if they're killed. When the father of one of the dead soldiers arrives, seeking to discover who Mrs B Batchelor is, he is stunned to learn that his son took part in gay parties and sex.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (3 male)Short Comedy (about 45 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
TWO SEPTEMBER is set in post-WWII Vietnam, when Ho Chi Minh had visions of a free country and a newly formed House UnAmerican Affairs Committee blacklisted a young, female American writer who believed in truth, justice, and a humane social order.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 75 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
WORLD SET FREE is the story of the top-secret race to produce the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. Brilliantly eccentric Hungarian scientist Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi tell the story of the fevered work of a unique collection of scientists that were gathered at the University of Chicago in April of 1942. WORLD SET FREE explores the meeting place between the scientists' secret culture, the popular culture of the time, and a world on the brink of atomic power.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
This gem of a play evokes the days of youth and innocence as young Americans were being shipped off to World War II.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
SOMEWHERE IN THE PACIFIC takes place on a troop ship at the end of World War II. The ship's captain is haunted by the death of his son in battle, and the young marines under his command are terrified and restless as they are stalked by an invisible enemy.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (9 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95 Play Description
Set against the chaotic aftermath of World War II, this play intimately explores the fragility of family relationships. In 1945, five years after being evacuated to Canada, 17-year-old Peter returns to London. His parents are now dead, and his three older sisters await his arrival.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes