To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday
This play is available below and is also included in the collection:
Play Description
A grieving widower must accept his wife's death to save himself and his relationship with his daughter. David loves his wife, Gillian. Unfortunately, she died two years ago. David deals with his grief by continuing his romance with her “ghost” during walks on the beach at night. While David lives in the past, other family problems crop up in the present. Brother and sister-in-law Paul and Esther visit to try to help David's daughter, Rachel. She has lost her mother and needs her father to snap back into the real world for her sake.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (5 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“… Though TO GILLIAN begins as a simple dramatization of its hero’s obsessive mourning, it gradually expands to become a richer form of family drama … [Mr Brady] writes with a rueful sophistication that keeps his story’s sentimentality at bay … TO GILLIAN is peppered with sharp, evenhanded observations about the tenuous ties that connect husbands and wives and parents and children … if TO GILLIAN is a play that sends a ghost flying out of [the] heavens, its appeal derives from its author’s keen sensitivity to life down here on earth.” —Frank Rich, The New York Times
“This first major work by Michael Brady has well-dimensioned characters, solid conflict, piquant writing and gives off a warm, affirmative glow … When it has become not uncommon to encounter plays with no sympathetic characters, audiences will respond affectionately to everyone In GILLIAN. Working on a small canvas, the author is in impressive control of his material …” —Richard Hummler, Variety
Author(s)
Michael BradyMichael Brady's first play, SARA, was produced by Equity Library Theatre in 1980 at Lincoln Center. KORCZAK'S CHILDREN won the first Jesu Award in Playwriting and was produced by the Boston College Dramatics Society in 1982. TO GILLIAN ON HER 37TH BIRTHDAY was developed through the literary department of The Ensemble Studio Theatre and M Square Entertainment and moved to Circle-in-the-Square. GILLIAN was awarded the Oppenheimer Award for best play of 1983, and was produced as a film in 1996 by Sony Pictures. Other stage works include: TWO BEARS BLINKING, produced by New Theatre of Miami, SEMPER FI, produced by The Gloucester Stage Company, and HARD TIME, Main Street Stage, North Adams, Massachusetts. TO GILLIAN ON HER 37TH BIRTHDAY, KORCZAK'S CHILDREN, SEMPER FI, and TWO BEARS BLINKING are published by Broadway Play Publishing Inc. Michael's play TITLES was given a staged reading in July 2013 by the Berkshire Playwrights Lab in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. TITLES received another reading at Memberfest at The Ensemble Studio Theatre in November 2013. Both readings were directed by Giovanna Sardelli. Mr. Brady is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Ensemble Studio Theatre. In addition to his writing, Michael served for several years as the Program Officer for Artists for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, overseeing a grant giving program for literary, visual, and performance artists. He lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts with his wife, Patricia Jacobsen-Brady.
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:
Opened at Ensemble Studio Theater, New York, then moved to a commercial run Off-Broadway at Circle In the Square
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
Upcoming and Recent Productions
Nonprofessional
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95Play 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–$15.95Play Description
Recently deceased lawyer and all-around schlemiel Simon Ackerman suddenly finds himself desperate to get into Hell, which, God forbid, turns out to be the better place to both visit and spend eternity. Struggling against the demons before him as well as the demons within, Simon encounters other proud denizens of Hell, including William Shakespeare, Frank Sinatra, Vlad the Impaler, and a chic, fashionable Mother Theresa, among others. At the end of his journey, Simon finds himself face to face with the most timeless conundrum of all — what do you do when you are finally being held accountable for your actions on Earth, being held accountable to a completely different set of standards, and most importantly, where do you truly wish to end up when you leave it?
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male, some doubling)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A wild ride through theatrical terrain that sears the senses and impacts the audience at a visceral place, which also manages to be hilariously funny and heartbreakingly real in the five core scenes of a young woman’s visit to the deathbed of her friend. Her moment of acknowledgment and comfort comes hard in the face of denial, moralizing, insane positive thinking, desperate chit chat, and the existential fears we all harbor about the end moments of life — the great mystery.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (5 female, 6 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
A romantic comedy with a Sci-fi twist. Troubled lovers, Roger and Susan, visit rural Vermont to work on their relationship. Possession by aliens was not on their list of problems … until they got there.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Christmas Eve. New York City. An aspiring writer and a struggling actress meet while looking at the famous holiday windows, and the characters in the displays come to life and look back at them, including a lecherous elf with eyes for Mrs. Claus; Scrooge and Tiny Tim arguing about being portrayed as zombies; a street-wise Little Match Girl; Jim from “The Gift of the Magi” enjoying his wife’s new androgynous haircut; and a jealous Joseph The Carpenter. A smart, sweet, slightly twisted holiday romantic comedy.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male, flexible casting, up to 17 actors)Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Offbeat drama of a mother, father, and adult daughter living together inside an upscale Manhattan apartment. Daughter plays a cello and has a personality disorder. Her alter ego seduces her father who is a political media guru. Mother is conflicted in how to stop this awful charade.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (2 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A car crash. Three people dead. One of them naked. It’s up to a detective and a police officer to figure out what happened in this supernatural upside-down mystery.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
The mysterious Mr Much contrives to convince ordinary Albert that he is a “little person” — but is he? Join one man’s struggle to distinguish reality from delusion in a world far more outlandish, but only slightly more absurd, than our own.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Comedy (about 75 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
When Monty's family moves from Louisiana to a large city in Southern California, he and his siblings encounter a dangerous landscape where cruelty thrives among their peers, offering little comfort from their abusive home life. This gripping drama embraces the good and evil young people face alone in their lives.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (4 female, 4 male, extras)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
In the early 1950s, a psychologist sets out to write the definitive book on THE SEX HABITS OF AMERICAN WOMEN. Meanwhile, his wife is having an affair with his former student, his daughter can’t find love, and all his theories refuse to go unchallenged. Juxtaposed to the action in the 1950s is a present-day videographer making a documentary on precisely the same subject.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (5 female, 3 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A time-bending love story between two physicists. Described by The Chicago Sun-Times as “a deft little romantic screwball comedy with a very brainy twist. It brings to mind some of Tom Stoppard's more intellectual theatrical hijinks. But it's also the kind of work that might have beguiled such 1930s and '40s era film directors as Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, who probably would have hired Albert Einstein as a script consultant.”
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (1 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes