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–$15.95 Play 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
$15.00–$15.95 Play 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–$15.95 Play Description
What if Blanche Dubois didn’t go crazy? Or the Three Sisters actually made it to Moscow? When he discovers he’s fictitious, a never-seen character in an Oscar Wilde play, Bunbury joins forces with Rosaline, Romeo’s never-seen obsession from ROMEO AND JULIET. Together they infiltrate and alter classic literature, including giving ROMEO AND JULIET a happy ending.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Arrogant young Puerto Rican Fatima, who works as a counter girl at a fast-food restaurant, has been arrested for the murder of 14 people, poisoned at her workplace. Young attorney Jeremy has been assigned to defend her and asks a Latina colleague, Maritza, to be his translator. But Fatima refuses to talk to anyone but Maritza, and she's enough of a manipulator to get her way. Fatima claims she has been blessed — or cursed — with psychic powers. By merely clasping the hand of an individual, she says, she can immediately grasp everything about him/her including past, future, and innermost secrets. She tells Maritza that her murders were mercy killings: She “read” each of her victims and killed them because they wanted to die. Maritza is first incredulous, then indignant at Fatima's playing God. She firmly resists letting Fatima clasp her hand, but Fatima is persuasive, constantly shifting from pugnacious, foul-mouthed street girl to wise and wily seductress to gentle, compassionate young woman. Maritza finally offers up her hand, yielding her secrets and placing her fate in Fatima's grasp.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
A quirky, inventive, and fun play in which time is out of joint as married couple Jeff and Joan contend with ghosts, beasts, and witches banging on their windows, wafting through their rooms, and wielding butcher knives.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
This witty and passionate play explores the story of a man with Alzheimer's and at the same time turns into “a travel guide to Middle America conducted by aliens from outer space.” The play has a wonderful comic sensibility, but this is a chillingly painful play addressing postmodern society's collective nervous breakdown.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 
Play Description
In the second part of Tony Kushner's epic, the plague of AIDS worsens, relationships fall apart as new ones form, and unexpected friendships take form.
Production Info
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 220 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play 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
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
Electricity is the central metaphor and expressive image in this unusual love story which takes place in an electrical repair shop.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (1 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95 Play Description
Several years after tragedy impacted their lives, a family comes together once again for Thanksgiving dinner. While family members struggle to come to terms with residual anger, grief and guilt, Jack Canfora’s thought-provoking play explores how people cope with personal and collective catastrophe. Displaying surprising humor and biting wit, this Jericho, Long Island clan exposes their desperate strategies for resolution and redemption.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00 Play Description
García Lorca's passionate, lyrical tale of longing and revenge: a twentieth-century masterpiece.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (7 female, 3 male, bit parts)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Period Costumes