These Flowers Are for My Mother
This play is included in the collection:
Play Description
A comedy with tragic overtones, THESE FLOWERS ARE FOR MY MOTHER concerns husband, Adam, and wife, Eden, who are locked in a custody battle for their gifted son, Alan, whom Eden believes is in need of her nurturing to realize his potential. While the boy is the master of ceremonies for much of the play, the action revolves around which parent will get him and whether he will be able to achieve a compromise solution involving boarding school and summer camp. Another driving element is the pursuit of Eden by child psychologist, Dr Wright, who is fascinated by her while being available to either parent as a hired “expert witness.”
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
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.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 6/1/1999 |
| Pages | 198 |
| ISBN | 9780881451603 |
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
Darwin and Jo Smith, and their seventeen-year-old son, Ronnie, seem to be the typical Middle American conservative family. Darwin works as a systems analyst. Jo teaches community college. Ronnie is a high school baseball standout with big league aspirations. One night before dinner, they are paid a surprise visit from Commander Abraham Lincoln of Central Security, who claims to have information concerning their daughter, Lucy, an American soldier. Lincoln claims that Lucy was captured by the enemy in a foreign war and decapitated. But, thanks to the top-secret Operation Hydra, military doctors have been able to save her life by surgically reattaching her head. A combination of intense drama and surreal dark comedy, HOME FRONT explores the personal and social consequences of war.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
Eddie Sanchez has never been out of New York City until now when he takes relics of his dead mother to her sister in Nautla, a tiny village on the Gulf Coast of Mexico where his parents were born. He meets a leper, a lovely girl, his aunt and uncle, a strange itinerant worker and her son, in that order. But there is no order. Nautla is no place for strangers, and Eddie isn’t the only stranger. The result is a deplorably beautiful mess of love, death, betrayal, and ineptitude.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Rural Central Texas, 1962. Dave, still lives in the old family home that his father built. The family is still the only Jewish family in this isolated country town. As his son Nathan faces the (to him) bizarre prospect of becoming Bar Mitzvah, his wife Rachel faces an even greater crisis of faith. As Dave encounters the remoteness of his community, and the even further distance from the faith of his father, his entire family faces the legacy left behind by their immigrant forebears: What do the Jews believe? This is a fictionalized account of the next generation of the family introduced in THE IMMIGRANT, and the second play in Mark Harelik’s Texas saga of one Jewish-American family.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
Ibsen's classic of social realism concerns a village doctor, Dr. Stockmann, who discovers that the town's spa is polluted. The town relies on the spa as its primary source of income. When the mayor is confronted with the situation, he chooses to lead the effort to silence Dr. Stockmann.
Production Info
Cast: 15 total (4 female, 11 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes
Play Description
Two baby-faced would-be criminals decide to rob the home of two women of advanced age who live in contention with their past, their present, their future, and each other. The brats get more than they’ve bargained for, including possible great futures behind bars in Joliet.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male, 2 Children)Full Length Drama (about 85 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
A boy’s best friend has died after an accident whilst cleaning his gun. It is Christmas Eve, and he talks to his friend’s father after a church service. Next day he goes to his friend’s house to give cookies to the father and the brother of the dead boy. He is soon caught up in a whirlwind of events. First they all go and see the grandmother, then they go to bail out the mother from jail, and all the time he is being used as a sounding board for a family who have not yet come to terms with the death
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Four middle-school girls, played by adults, remind us of what it meant to be eleven years old and how adulthood is perhaps less removed from the needs and desires of childhood than we may wish to acknowledge or admit.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (4 female)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Ralphy, a young gay man, is dying of AIDS and vents his rage on his parents. He leaves and hitch-hikes across America sending his parents a constant stream of abusive and angry letters. All the while he is getting sicker. At home his mother and father have to face hard truths about their son and their now sexless marriage. Decent people trying to do the right thing, they do not understand their son’s attitude toward them. When they discover where he is, they are faced with the decision of whether to leave him there as he wishes or to bring him home to die.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (1 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 65 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
High atop a railroad trestle that spans a bone dry creek, two teenagers plan to race across the bridge against an oncoming locomotive. At first their scheme adds excitement to life in a small factory town during the Great Depression, then sensual experience awakens dangerous passions in an era of stifled ambitions. With theatrical flourish and lyrical finesse, Naomi Wallace delves into a world where people struggle to change lives that bear down upon them.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
An urban family of three is faced with a medical crisis upon a second financial crisis. Structured as a memory play, this story for four actors highlights the surfacing identify of a young man caught between filial loyalty and freedom. As the mother attends to both men, a domineering father is in free fall.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
In this witty adventure for young audiences by MacArthur “genius” award winner Naomi Wallace, a young girl called Noil finds herself in a strange new place, and must accomplish three and a half magical tasks before she can return home. Noil is clever and resourceful, and with some assistance from a singing narrator and a talking roach, she emerges from the hole in her sweater in time for breakfast.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (4 female, 3 male, Flexible Casting)Full Length Comedy (about 85 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes