Love in a Thirsty Land
Play Description
A love story and a murder mystery, LOVE IN A THIRSTY LAND uses materials from an actual case, the first trial of a Jew for murder in the New World, 1875. The circumstances — a very religious young married man, alone in America, is accused of killing the young woman with whom it’s been rumored he has been having an affair. Flesh vs spirit, old world ways and the new drive the four character two-act play.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“What becomes of the old ways in the New World? That question is posed by Alan Glass in his absorbing, passionate new play, LOVE IN A THIRSTY LAND. Inspired by an 1875 murder case in Brooklyn, LOVE IN A THIRSTY LAND uses an adulterous love affair between immigrant Jews to address substantial and enduring issues like the future of Judaism in America, the attractions of assimilation and the temptations that pit inflamed flesh against a cold marriage. No play can be expected to do more than cast fresh and arresting light on problems like these, which have long defied easy solution. Yet in the end, with its innate intelligence and intensity, its vivid, sympathetic principals, its powerful love story, its air of mystery and its skillful evocation of a bygone era, LOVE IN A THIRSTY LAND manages to maintain its grip on philosophy and religion while telling its wrenching tale of doomed young love …” —Lawrence Van Gelder, The New York Times
Author(s)
Alan GlassAlan Glass's first full-length play, LOVE IN A THIRSTY LAND, was workshopped at the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York. It subsequently won first prize in the nationwide SUNY-Stony Brook University John Gassner Playwriting Competition, following which it was produced Off-Broadway by New York's Jewish Repertory Theatre in 2000. The New York Times reviewer called the play "absorbing and passionate." Among Alan Glass's other works, a one-act play, TRUTH IN ADVERTISNG, sending up greed on Madison Avenue, was workshopped at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and produced as part of several New York City play festivals. Recently retired from a career on Madison Avenue, Alan was the creator of many well known T V advertising campaigns. He is a life 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:
First presented by Jewish Repertory Theater, New York
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
A groundbreaking masterpiece of the modern theatre. The play tells the tale of a poor soldier, a barber in the army, who is overwhelmed by the military and forced to become a human guinea pig for quasi-medical research. Consumed by jealousy over his lover’s infidelity, Woyzeck is driven to despair, to madness, and to murder. Poignant and grotesque, insightful and all-too-human, the play broke every theatrical mold of its time, paving the way for theatre as we know it today.
Production Info
Cast: 16 total (4 female, 12 male, doubling, bit parts, children, extras)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
Play Description
Inspired by Feydeau’s wife’s obsession with giving the children laxatives, especially his eldest son, Jacques, every character is despicable for their moral cowardice and egoism, providing a hopeless (but hilarious) environment for child-rearing.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male, 1 child)Short Comedy (about 50 minutes)
Single Set
Period 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
Play Description
Two teens living in 19th-century Denmark are separated when the boy, Christian, mysteriously departs with Nina, an exotic older woman. The girl, Analiese, fearing Christian may be in danger, begins to search for him in a small boat, her only traveling companion being a small insightful Toucan. Alvarez reveals a world that is boldly theatrical and classically intelligent.
Production Info
Cast: 15 total (9 female, 6 male, flexible casting, nonspeaking roles)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 
Play Description
On the docks of late 18th-century Rhode Island, two runaway slaves, Adjua and Dembi, plan a desperate and daring run to freedom. When a chance encounter triggers an unexpected collision of worlds, painful truths are uncovered, and the brutality of past crimes spills into the next generation.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
A delightful seriocomedy about a prominent civil rights attorney who is a schlemiel on the home court in his relationships with his intractable aging father and budding lawyer son.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
Thomas Babe's study of the Gilded Age is, in the author's words, “a little of this, a little of that, part musical, part tragedy, part melodrama.”
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
Illinois, 1861: Without proof of insanity, Elizabeth Packard is committed by her husband to an asylum. Based on historical events, Emily Mann’s play tells of one woman’s struggle to right a system gone wrong.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (4 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$19.95–$20.00 Collection Description
This collection includes five long one-act plays: THE AWFUL TOOTH, BLASTED EVENT, DEAD WRONG, POTTY FAVORS, and SHE CAN’T BARE IT! Master Belle Époque farceur Georges Feydeau loosely based these brilliantly funny long one-acts on the failure of his own marriage. The plays, greatly admired in his time, were described by a prominent critic as “insane merriment, inextinguishable laughter.” With DEAD WRONG, the first play in the collection, Feydeau launched a new genre: the marital farce, the hell of couples. And “like the very great comic writers,” another critic noted, Feydeau “knows how to make the public laugh at his personal bitterness.” It was Feydeau himself who suggested that these five one-acts be collected under the title FROM MARRIAGE TO DIVORCE. This collection, which for the first time brings these plays together in English, honors that suggestion. Distinguished translator Laurence Senelick has taken care to preserve all of Feydeau’s stage directions as sure guides to staging the plays for maximum effect. DEAD WRONG: A husband and wife stay together by force of habit, their relationship based on nothing solid. The wife’s aggression and bitterness and the husband’s selfishness and irresponsibility are revealed, and their ferocious animosity unleashes such powerful comedy that it obscures the underlying darkness. POTTY FAVORS: Inspired by Feydeau’s wife’s obsession with giving the children laxatives, especially his eldest son, Jacques, every character is despicable for their moral cowardice and egoism, providing a hopeless (but hilarious) environment for child-rearing. SHE CAN’T BARE IT!: What to do about a wife going around the apartment in her nightie until lunchtime? BLASTED EVENT: Trapped in a misalliance, a husband is set upon by his wife, his in-laws, and the midwife. THE AWFUL TOOTH was the last new play of Feydeau to be produced in his lifetime, and its dentist’s chair offers a dose of sadistic hilarity. As translator Laurence Senelick notes, “Feydeau may be to dentists what Molière was to doctors.”
Plays in This Collection
Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
In this gripping ghost story an eccentric librarian discovers a weather-beaten book in a return bin — 113 years overdue. Sparked by a message left in its margins, she embarks on a magical quest that takes her around the world and 2,000 years into the past. With astonishing twists and turns, UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL draws us into an unforgettable odyssey.
Production Info
Cast: 1 total (1 female)Full Length Drama (about 65 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$50.00 Play Description
Rural Central Texas, 1909. A young Russian-Jewish immigrant, newly arrived in America through the port of Galveston, pulls his banana cart into the hamlet of Hamilton. Fleeing the vicious pogroms of his homeland, he has sought refuge in the land of the free. Able to speak only Yiddish, alone in the midst of a staunchly Christian community, he begs for shelter. Over the next 30 years, he makes a home and raises a family in this tiny town. THE IMMIGRANT is the story of a young Russian-Jewish couple and the local couple that take them in, as religion meets religion, culture meets culture, fear meets fear, and love meets love. This is the true story of Haskell Harelik, “the Immigrant.”
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes