Pilgrims of the Night
This play is available below and is also included in the collection:
Play Description
Trapped during a storm in a ferry terminal with no food, no electricity, and no cellular signal, these pilgrims of the night pass the time sharing salacious tales that range from adultery to a biblical flood.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“In the six tales of PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT, and in the framing narrative, Jenkin explores many of the raw nerve ends in our society; the deep need to believe an absolute, while at the same time reveling in the gratification of the present; the difference between titillation and satisfaction; the bizarre nature of reality; and the real nature of the bizarre.” —Times (Seattle)
“Jenkin’s PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT is a wonderful combination of innocence and guile, primitive impulses and sophisticated craft. Zombies, a headless woman, an island paradise, an erotically frustrated fry cook, a psychopathic neurosurgeon, a silver fairy, and a formerly live deer all make memorable impressions.” —Post-Intelligencer (Seattle)
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:
First produced at New City Theater, Seattle
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 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
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
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
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
JONAH is a rumination on the story of the man and the sea. Jonah's a man on the run. He hops a Greyhound to Joppa and then grabs a cabin on the ocean-bound Carnival Princess. Drinking away his sorrows at the ship's Grass Skirt Grill, the lounge band Sheila and the Lovetones plays him into a stupor before he tumbles into the waves. Len Jenkin's JONAH is a contemporary retelling of the unfaithful servant; some love stories about the evil city of Ninevah, a Dairy Queen, and of course, the whale.
Production Info
Cast: 9 total (4 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 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
M and G's new apartment is nothing special — it really could be any generic New York City apartment — but they're hoping it's a place of healing, a new beginning after a traumatic encounter with a former friend. Unfortunately, the previous tenant of this apartment isn't a man who likes to let go … and he wasn't ready to move out. First, it's little things: their mail disappears, it feels like someone's watching them, he stops by occasionally just to say hi and see what they've done with the place. But soon, when G is called out of town for business, M is left alone, and before they know it, they wake up to find themselves immobilized and watching as the previous tenant begins to make the apartment his own again.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male, 2 actors may be male or female or nonbinary)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
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
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
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
Pony up, America! Equestria is a land of friendship. Equestria is a land of magic. Equestria is Ben’s apartment in rural Pennsylvania. Every Tuesday night, Ben hosts “The Rust Belt Ponies Meet-Up Group for Adult Fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” Sharing fun with these friends is a wonderful place to be. After all, nothing bad can happen in Equestria … But when an ominous neighborhood watch brigade starts patrolling the streets, fear and paranoia creep into the circle of friendship. The outside world is turning more violent and authoritarian, and it is sucking our heroes into an entirely different story. A timely new comedy that explores the rise of a new social order and how the currents of history, normalization, and fear can sweep up even the most generous bronies.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$0.00–$15.95 Play Description
In WOLF IN THE RIVER, Adam Rapp explores love and neglect, the challenges of poverty, the dangerous cost of shiftlessness, the simple notion of leaving a place behind, and the value of a girl.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male, ensemble chorus)Full Length Drama (about 105 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
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
FIVE OF US deals with the parallel lives of New York tenement dwellers, who live next door to each other but whose paths do not cross until one fateful moment, which spells disaster for them all. One apartment is occupied by Mark, a young writer who churns out pornography while planning the “big novel” he will someday write, and his live-in girlfriend, Lee, an anthropology grad who works as a waitress. Their next-door neighbor is Herman, a mentally deficient messenger who speaks in a language all his own and amuses himself by calling 800 numbers to make hotel reservations he has no intention of keeping. When Lee is offered a chance to join an anthropological expedition to Sri Lanka, Mark is faced with a crisis — the loss of both her companionship and her income. With the connivance of his ex-con buddy, Eddie, a street-smart would-be mercenary, Mark decides to prop up his finances by robbing Herman's apartment, in the misguided belief that the poor eccentric has been hoarding money. But, instead, what they find is the bizarre detritus of a stunted life — a life which is abruptly ended when Herman, coming upon them, is startled into a fatal epileptic fit. Fearful and guilt-ridden, Mark and Eddie try to cover their tracks — but as the play ends it is also clear that no matter how far or fast they flee they will never escape the spectre of the lonely misfit whose pathetic world they have so thoughtlessly and fatally shattered.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes