Transatlantica
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
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
Press Quotes
“You have to admire a venturesome spirit like Kenny Finkle, the young author of TRANSATLANTICA … a lunatic fable that considers love and death and fate in a series of ever more preposterous iterations … you laugh at its zany nonsense and reflect upon it philosophically as well.” —Bruce Weber, The New York Times
“It’s hard to adequately praise a show as good as TRANSATLANTICA, because running down a list of all the things that are entertaining and brilliant about it spoil the surprise of discovery, and part of the sheer joy of experiencing this show is not having any idea what’s coming next. It’s only minor hyperbole to say that TRANSATLANTICA has everything that is good and true about theatre (genius dialogue, characters randomly breaking into song, melodramatic deaths, sword fights, etc). It is, simply, the best show I’ve seen this year.” —Danny Bowes, nytheatre.com
Author(s)
Kenny FinkleKenny Finkle's plays include INDOOR/OUTDOOR (Off-Broadway @ DR2, SPF, Trinity Rep, Portland Stage, Hangar Theatre) ALIVE AND WELL (Old Globe, Virginia Stage Company), PENELOPE OF ITHACA (Hangar Theatre), TRANSATLANTICA (Flea Theatre, Operating Theatre Company), A THOUSAND YEARS (FIU Theatre Festival), JOSH KEENAN COMES OUT TO THE WORLD (high school tour — Hangar Theatre), SYD ARTHUR (Keen Company/Keen Teens). INDOOR/OUTDOOR and PENELOPE OF ITHACA, A THOUSAND YEARS are published by Broadway Play Publishing. ALIVE AND WELL and TRANSATLANTICA will be published by BPPI in 2015. INDOOR/OUTDOOR is also published in Smith and Kraus' "Best Plays of 2006" anthology. SYD ARTHUR is published by Samuel French. He is a recipient of a NYFA fellowship, a NYSCA grant, was awarded University of Illinois' Inner Voices prize and has received commissions from Ford's Theatre, Virginia Stage Company, Theatreworks, USA, Canton Theatricals, Matt Murphy Productions, Keen Company and the Hangar Theatre among others. He received his MFA from Columbia University's Playwriting Program and his BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He is an Adjunct Professor of Theatre at Marymount Manhattan College as well as a Teaching Artist for the DreamYard Project in the Bronx. Finkle is working on a graphic novel musical experience for audiences of 3 entitled U R STAR. The piece has been work-shopped at the Orchard Project and will continue development this fall at A.R.T in Cambridge.
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 in New York City by The Flea Theater
Jim Simpson, Artistic Director; Carol Ostrow, Producing Director,
in April 2002
Subsequently presented by The Operating Theater Company
in association with New York Theatre Workshop
in October 2010
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
$11.95–$15.00Play Description
This provocative chronicle, interspersed with fantasy sequences from Alice in Wonderland, traces the career of Charles Dodgson (better know as Lewis Carroll) from his first work on the immortal classic to his near downfall when accused of immorality.
Production Info
Cast: 11 total (4 female, 7 male, doubling)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
A brilliantly conceived and highly theatrical experience in absurdist drama, in which the audience is taken on a wild and funny metaphysical journey into the fertile imaginations of the diverse characters whose bizarre stories are deftly interwoven into the fabric of the play. DARK RIDE is comprised of a series of vignettes involving characters who, at first, appear to bear no relation to each other. A mysterious figure gives a scholar an ancient manuscript to translate; a thief steals an enormous jewel; a woman assures us that life is all coincidence; a dream-like waitress serves her customers all manner of thoughts and suggestions but no food. The images are bizarrely funny and provocative and, in time, coalesce into a pattern of driving concerns and obsessions that come into focus when the various characters finally meet at an oculists convention in Mexico City. Phantasmagoric, the play takes us on a journey that, in the final essence, transcends the physical world to explore the inner recesses of the mind.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (4 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 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
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Subtitled “A History of Science (A Chronicle of Folly, Wisdom, and Madness),” PORT TWILIGHT has been described as “an end-times extraterrestrial vaudeville.”
Production Info
Cast: 12 total (6 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 85 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
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
HICKORYDICKORY explores what would happen if we all had an internal clock telling us the time of our death. Someone has tinkered with Cari Lee’s mortal clock, so she’s stuck at 17 for eternity. Now she’s the same age as her daughter, Dale. But Dale’s worried about her own mortal clock — the one that tells her the day and time she’ll die. Dad’s an expert clock-smith, but some timepieces are not meant to be tampered with.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (3 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 150 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00Play Description
A small theater company's next ill-advised production, a modern vaudeville, goes off the rails the night before opening. The cast rebels against Doc, the writer/director/star/producer, and chooses a midnight showing of the newest Star Wars movie over ironing out the show's kinks. Then, of course, they're sucked into a vortex and spit out into a world that resembles some of our most beloved films. It's up to Doc and his trusty sidekick, Boof, to go on a 3D adventure to rescue the cast and the show, and the entire theatrical art form. Part vaudeville, part Hope/Crosby Road Show, A 3D ADVENTURE is an inventive love letter to both the theater and the movies.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male, doubling, flexible casting, up to 15 actors)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
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
Battling obstacles both grand and trivial in eighteenth-century France, two little-known scientists strive mightily to advance humanity’s understanding of life and the universe at the heady height of the Age of Enlightenment.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (2 female, 5 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period 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
$15.00–$15.95Play Description
Susan is a career woman with a seemingly perfect life, complete with sensitive husband and a brand new bundle of joy on the way. Beginning at the moment a very pregnant Susan goes into labor, the play follows her journey as she becomes a new mother, with a frighteningly inexplicable newborn to care for. Employing both realistic and surrealistic elements, BABY’S BLUES explores one woman’s descent into postpartum depression, but also brings into focus the difficult challenge of becoming a mother for the first time, as well as the fine line that sometimes exists between health and madness.
Production Info
Cast: 7 total (5 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$0.00–$15.95Play 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