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–$15.95Play Description
Ghosts drift through Strindberg's haunted and haunting dreamscape where a student idealizes the inhabitants of a stylish Stockholm apartment building, only to discover that their lives, perhaps even life itself, may be a kind of hell from which salvation can only be achieved through suffering.
Production Info
Cast: 14 total (7 female, 7 male, bit parts)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
O JERUSALEM centers around an American State Department official who becomes entangled in Middle Eastern politics before and after September 11, 2001. Along the way, the protagonist encounters a Palestinian woman from his past.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95Play Description
In Strindberg’s classic, Miss Julie, the daughter of a powerful count, enters into a dangerously flirtatious relationship with a footman on her father’s estate. The critics have described Richard Nelson’s adaptation as “tight, sharp, idiomatic.”
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.95Play 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
$15.00Play Description
A Play with Music — the music of Frederic Chopin. George Sand had many lovers — but the one to whom she was most attached, and who almost ruined her life, was Frederic Chopin. His illness and dependency, the rivalries of two artists living under the same roof, the conflicting demands of two careers, all these batter the relationship. But most damaging is what the affair does to her family. Sand is hailed as an icon of female liberation. In GEORGE AND FREDERIC we see what can be the consequences of that liberation. Her rebellious daughter, Solange, embraces the tenets of feminism as an excuse for wild behavior, eventually causing the final rift between her mother and her mother’s lover. To assert his own creativity in this maelstrom, Maurice, George’s doting and doted-upon son, creates puppets of each member of this explosive ménage, puppets who, throughout the play, comment wryly on all the heated goings-on with humor, irony, and wit.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 125 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
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Nikolai Gogol’s classic and hilarious satire of bureaucratic ineptness and corruption in a first-class translation by Laurence Senelick.
Production Info
Cast: 27 total (6 female, 21 male)Full Length Drama (about 140 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play 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–$15.00Play Description
In the Garden of Eden and crosscutting to New York, the enactment and re-enactment of Adam, Lilith, and Eve take the stage as the two women confront one another and the very identify of metaphysical woman. A love triangle which defies the heavens, supernatural Lilith will not willingly disappear from this world.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.95Play Description
The story of a young woman forced into an unhappy marriage to her dull, sickly cousin and smothered by her overbearing aunt. When her husband's childhood friend enters her life, it leads Thérèse into a torrid affair that sets her spirit free for the first time but with shattering consequences. Steeped in the atmosphere of 19th-century France with a darkly rich foreboding.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play 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
$15.95Play Description
The play tells the story of a ragtag troupe of actors as they head West during the Gold Rush, seeking fortune and fame and performing Shakespeare for enthusiastic ’49ers. But with stiff competition, romantic entanglements, and an Indian chief who sees himself in King Lear, their ambitious cross-country adventure is complicated by the teeming challenges and glories of the new American frontier. Embracing elements of Shakespearean comedy and American vaudeville, HOW SHAKESPEARE WON THE WEST is a jubilant celebration of the human spirit.
Production Info
Cast: 13 total (4 female, 9 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes