How is It That We Live
Play Description
HOW IS IT THAT WE LIVE OR SHAKEY JAKE + ALICE traces the arc of the lives of two lovers through the years, from the first kiss to the last goodbye and everything in between. On the road, in an indelible American landscape, Shakey Jake + Alice launch themselves on a poetic quest as they dance to the end of love.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male, doubling)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“Haunting, poetic and achingly tender, the pitch perfect HOW IS IT THAT WE LIVE OR SHAKEY JAKE + ALICE conveys love in a way that will leave you thinking about what it means for two hearts to be entwined for the brief flash of the human life span. It’s as if someone forgot to tell playwright Len Jenkin that new plays are not supposed to be this good … The story and structure are deceptively simple. We meet Shakey Jake and Alice as teens, huddling for shelter, laughing, questioning, proclaiming their love and confusion under the bridge. Years pass between scenes that take us to young adults whose lives didn’t turn out as they’d hoped, and finally to elderly people facing challenges beyond their control … Two supporting characters serve as charismatic narrators, characters and catalysts in multiple roles, not unlike El Gallo in The Fantasticks or the Leading Player in Pippin … The biggest wow goes to Jenkin, the Obie Award–winning playwright who has reached for the stars in HOW IS IT THAT WE LIVE and, somehow, managed to bring one down to twinkle … HOW IS IT THAT WE LIVE is, in the end, a play about the human condition that doesn’t condescend, simplify or slip into sentimentality. Amid life’s inevitable disappointments and fears, it beats with hope that love is real and prevails. Shakey Jake and Alice aren’t famous or rich. They don’t change the world by the standards we usually apply to people who are deemed to be making a difference. But their love for each other turns out to be more important than being remembered for a brief sojourn on the earth. In fact, this play suggests, that may be the only important thing. Shakey Jake tells Alice that when they come back in another life, even if she’s a tree, he will find her and love her. The marvel and joy is that you believe it.” —Nancy Churnin, Dallas News
Author(s)
Len JenkinLen Jenkin is a novelist, playwright, director, and screenwriter. His novels include N Judah, New Jerusalem, and The Secret Life of Billy's Uncle Myron (with Emily Jenkins). Plays include DARK RIDE, PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT, CARELESS LOVE, MY UNCLE SAM, LIMBO TALES, THE DREAM EXPRESS, and LIKE I SAY. His works for the stage have been produced throughout the United States, as well as in England, Germany, France, Denmark, and Japan. His films include Blame It on the Night, Welcome to Oblivion, and American Notes. He has received many honors and awards, including three Obie awards for directing and playwriting, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Award, a nomination for an Emmy Award, and four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Mr. Jenkin holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Columbia University. He's a Professor in the Dramatic Writing Department, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and lives in New York City.
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–$15.95 Play Description
The play takes place in Priscilla’s bedroom, in a forest, and in the big blue sky outside. A friend named Peter comes to visit Priscilla. There is a wolf who lives in a fabulous land next door. It is a play about Priscilla who sets out in her mind to slay this beast that lurks outside her window.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
When a statue of the legendary Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku comes to life, he relates his story to the Hawaiian children.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)Full Length Comedy (about 80 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Battling obstacles both grand and trivial in eighteenth-century France, two little-known scientists strive mightily to advance humanity’s understanding of life and the universe at the heady height of the Age of Enlightenment.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (2 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
They seemed like the perfect couple. Attractive. Well-educated. Affluent. Why did the husband brutally murder his wife and take his own life? Aaron and Henry, two young wannabe screenwriters at a writer's retreat struggle with crippling blocks as they seek to solve the mystery. Shawn, an academic teetering on the edge of insanity grapples with her own possible involvement in the killing, while writing a book about America’s obsession with violence. Meanwhile, the murder victim's sister attempts to reconstruct the truth from the ashes of her late sister's diary, becoming a celebrity in the process. What really happened that violent night, and will any of them come close to uncovering the truth?
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 
Play Description
Four businesspeople — Landry, Owens, Sanders, and Weaver — arrive in the morning at their skyscraper office and soon learn that their company is on the brink of collapse. At first upset and panicked at the news, they decide that this can instead be a chance to finally prove themselves — they'll come up with a proposal, a new business plan that will impress the company chairman and save both the business and their careers. What follows is an antic all-day, all-night effort, as the four race to complete the proposal by the next morning. At first they all work together. But after that effort collapses amid acrimony and finger-pointing, they break into two competing teams, each trying to outdo the other and win the chairman's final approval as they work feverishly all through the night. ENTERPRISE is fast-paced, edgy, semi-surreal comedy about business, ambition, skyscrapers, and office bathrooms.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male, flexible casting, up to 4 females or 4 males)Full Length Comedy (about 65 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Part murder mystery, part unrequited romance, and part absurdist debacle about the denial and transcendence of death, TRANSATLANTICA tells the story of Dr Reginald Reinhold, whose psychoanalytic session with an eccentric patient, Ilyria (of the land of Ilyria), is interrupted by his wife with news that she is dying. By coincidence, Ilyria too is dying, as is every subsequent visitor to his home — a parade of increasingly eccentric guests. With death dancing at every door, Dr Reinhold is forced to confront his own peculiar relationship with mortality. The setting is the parlor of Dr Reinhold's mansion (festooned with mythical taxidermy and curious artifacts) on the shores of the fantastic continent of Transatlantica, a topsy-turvy world where gardens are planted with cake and lovers grow into trees.
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 fantastical “Kafkaesque” journey through time and space.
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (6 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
A kaleidoscopic, surrealistic overview of contemporary America, set forth in the bizarre, highly theatrical style which characterizes this writer's distinctive voice. Produced by New York's highly regarded Public Theater, the play employs brilliantly imaginative avante-garde techniques to highlight both the dreams — and delusions — which infuse and motivate our modern world. The play is made up of a series of concurrent actions, some set in a tacky motel, some elsewhere, involving a group of disparate but curiously related people. There is the young night clerk, Pauline, who studies her high-school English Lit notebook, while growing increasingly fearful of the unseen and unwanted suitor who lies in wait in the motel parking lot; a raucous carnival barker touting his giant crocodile, Bonecrusher; a pair of seedy bar denizens who occasionally break into song; a dim-witted handyman, Chuckles, who performs pointless errands; a deranged scientist who believes that he is in contact with creatures from outer space; an abandoned woman who waits restlessly for a lover who will probably never return; and a mysterious drifter, Faber, who, somehow becomes the catalyst which fuses all these divergent elements into a cohesive, and often wildly funny whole. And, in so doing, makes the play both an encapsulation of the American myth and, at the same time, a telling comment on what is right — and wrong — with this myth.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Uncle Sam was a novelties salesman who died one night, alone and broke, in a Pittsburgh hotel. But he was also a larger-than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew — who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story. His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive nightclub singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny, sometimes hair-raising episodes as the nephew “becomes” his uncle in his youth and journeys to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course — all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror. In the end it is really the landscape of the mind that is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the “truth” still remaining tantalizingly out of reach.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (5 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
HICKORYDICKORY explores what would happen if we all had an internal clock telling us the time of our death. Someone has tinkered with Cari Lee’s mortal clock, so she’s stuck at 17 for eternity. Now she’s the same age as her daughter, Dale. But Dale’s worried about her own mortal clock — the one that tells her the day and time she’ll die. Dad’s an expert clock-smith, but some timepieces are not meant to be tampered with.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 150 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Abraham Zobell is a man like other men. No better, not much worse. But, unlike other men, he has a vital need to lay flowers on an ocean grave before it's too late. Though he's recovering from a recent heart attack, Abe rejects the pleas of his wife and the advice of his doctors, rips out his IV, and sets out on a pilgrimage to the sea. Along the way, he encounters ghosts and memories, music and moonlight, pilgrim strangers, and even stranger friends.
Production Info
Cast: 14 total (6 female, 8 male, doubling)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
When the Ring family of Rhode Island assembles to take the family portrait, they somehow get it dreadfully wrong and must do the century all over.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male, doubling, bit parts)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes