Similar to the music world, female playwrights are not often known for their contributions in the drama department. Hence, this curation presents a list of plays by women writers in our catalog.
Best Man by
This bold new play from award-winning playwright Carmel Winters deals with the near-taboo topics of sex, power and parentage within modern relationships. Set in the intoxicating height of the boom and, finally, the sober fall of the bust, Best Man prompts a public reckoning of our most private struggles as questions of power within the family are examined with scorching insight. Following the nationwide success of the high-profile B for Baby tour by the Abbey Theatre, this world premiere is the second major work from one of Ireland's most exciting writers. Best Man will run at the Everyman, Cork from 21 - 29 June and then at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, from 16 - 27 July.
Cloud Nine by
First published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Fefu and Her Friends by
This is one of the best-loved Off-Off-Broadway plays of recent decades. In the innovative original production, which Fornes herself directed, the audience follows the lives of eight women in five different "environments." "Fornes is America's truest poet of the theater."--Erika Munk, Village Voice
The Flick (TCG Edition) by
Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama "Funny, heartbreaking, sly and unblinking...The Flick may be the best argument anyone has yet made for the continued necessity and profound uniqueness of theater." --Jesse Green, New York "Hilarious and ineffably touching...Ms. Baker's peerless aptitude for exploring how people grope their way toward a sense of equanimity, even as they learn to accept disappointment, is among the things that make her such a gifted writer...This lovingly observed play will sink deep into your consciousness." --Charles Isherwood, New York Times "This hypnotic, heartbreaking micro-epic about movies and moving on is irreducibly theatrical." --David Cote, TimeOut New York In a rundown movie theater in central Massachusetts, three underpaid employees sweep up popcorn in the empty aisles and tend to one of the last thirty-five-millimeter projectors in the state. With keen insight and a ceaseless attention to detail, The Flick pays tribute to the power of movies and paints a heartbreaking portrait of three characters and their working lives. A critical hit when it premiered Off-Broadway, this comedy, by one of the country's most produced and highly regarded young playwrights, was awarded the coveted 2013 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. ANNIE BAKER'S works include The Aliens (Obie Award), Body Awareness, Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award), Nocturama, and an adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries. Recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Steinberg Playwright Award and a New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She is a resident playwright at Signature Theatre.
The Heidi Chronicles by
The graduating seniors of a Seven Sisters college, trying to decide whether to pattern themselves after Katharine Hepburn or Emily Dickinson. Two young women besieged by the demands of mothers, lovers, and careers--not to mention a highly persistent telephone answering machine--as they struggle to have it all. A brilliant feminist art historian trying to keep her bearings and her sense of humor on the elevator ride from the radical sixties to the heartless eighties. Wendy Wasserstein's characters are so funny, so many-sided, and so real that we seem to know them from their Scene One entrances, though the places they go are invariably surprising. And these three plays--Uncommon Women and Others, Isn't It Romantic, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles--manage to engage us heart, mind, and soul on such a deep and lasting level that they are already recognized as classics of the modern theater.
Indecent (TCG Edition) by
When Sholem Asch wrote God of Vengeance in 1907, he didn't imagine the height of controversy the play would eventually reach. Performing at first in Yiddish and German, the play's subject matter wasn't deemed contentious until it was produced in English, when the American audiences were scandalized by the onstage depiction of an amorous affair between two women. Paula Vogel's newest work traces the trajectory of the show's success through its tour in Europe to its abrupt and explosive demise on Broadway in 1923--including the arrest of the entire production's cast and crew.
The Kilroys List, Volume One by
The Kilroys are a gang of playwrights and producers who came together in Los Angeles in 2013 to stop talking about gender parity in theatre and start taking action. In 2014, they released their first annual List: a vetted collection of plays written by female and trans writers, nominated by hundreds of professional artistic directors, literary managers, professors, producers, directors, and dramaturgs. This collection includes a monologue or scene from each play from the 2014 and 2015 editions of The List.
Mad Forest by
"Bristles with the intelligence and insight of a major writer." -Financial Times "Brilliantly ... evoke[s] the mood of a country through snapshot images." -Guardian "An act of moral commitment as well as theatrical virtuosity." -London Sunday Times Mad Forest explores the reactions of ordinary people to confused events, focusing in particular on two families. What emerges is the dreadful damage done to people's lives by repression and the painful difficulties of lasting change. Caryl Churchill's play about the Romanian revolution was written after she, the director and a group of students from London's Central School of Speech and Drama went to Romania to work with acting students there. The play was first performed in 1990, only three months after their return. Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Metamorphoses by
Called by Time the "theater event of the year," Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses brings Ovid's tales to stunning visual life. Set in and around a large pool of water onstage, Metamorphoses juxtaposes the ancient and the contemporary in both language and image to reflect the variety and persistence of narrative in the face of inevitable change. Nominated for three 2002 Tony Awards, including "Best Play," Metamorphoses earned Zimmerman a Tony for "Best Direction of a Play."
The Oldest Boy by
In this moving exploration of parenthood, an American mother and a Tibetan father have a three-year-old son believed to be the reincarnation of a Buddhist lama. When a Tibetan lama and a monk come to their home unexpectedly, asking to take their child away for a life of spiritual training in India, the parents must make a life-altering choice that will test their strength, their marriage, and their hearts. The Oldest Boy is a richly emotional journey filled with music, dance, puppetry, ritual, and laughter--Sarah Ruhl at her imaginative best. A meditation on attachment and unconditional love, the play asks us to believe in a world in which sometimes the youngest children are also the oldest and wisest teachers.
A raisin in the sun : a drama in three acts by 
The Remains of Maisie Duggan by
Now I'm dead there'll be changes. I won't keep rolling over. I won't wag my tail at every insult and injury! Kathleen Duggan has rushed home to Ireland upon hearing the news that her mother, Maisie, has died. Only when she gets back to the house, she finds that her mother is alive and well. Almost. However, after a routine car accident, Maisie believes that she is now dead and wandering around the homestead, awaiting her funeral. Still able to talk to her childish adult son and her violent, temperamental husband, she will no longer be silenced by the male-dominated, pugnacious atmosphere that has kept her quiet all these years. So when Kathleen comes back for the 'funeral', Maisie expects to find her final resting place, safe from the threat of domestic violence once and for all. The Remains of Maisie Duggan received its world premiere on the Peacock stage of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in autumn 2016.
Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again by
Chicago, May 21, 1924. Nathan Leopold Jr., age eighteen, and Robert Loeb, age nineteen, killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. They were quickly apprehended when Leopold's glasses were found near the corpse. Clarence Darrow defended them, pleading eloquently against capital punishment. A wildly experimental and inventive new play that does not behave. Playwright Alice Birch has put together a grouping of vignettes that ask how to revolutionize language, relationships, work, and life in general w
Ruined by
Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama "A powerhouse drama. . . . Lynn Nottage's beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports."--Linda Winer, Newsday "An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world's brutalities. Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won't expect."--David Cote, Time Out New York A rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage's extraordinary new play. The establishment's shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already "ruined" by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution. Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing and uncommonly human story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage. Lynn Nottage's plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Fabulation, and Intimate Apparel, winner of the American Theatre Critics' Steinberg New Play Award and the Francesca Primus Prize. Her plays have been widely produced, with Intimate Apparel receiving more productions than any other play in America during the 2005-2006 season.
The Vagina Monologues by
The international sensation, "a compelling rhapsody of the female essence" (Chicago Tribune), relaunched with new material for its 20th anniversary. A landmark in women's empowerment-as relevant as ever in the age of #MeToo-that honors female sexuality in all its complexity It's been more than twenty years since Eve Ensler's international sensationThe Vagina Monologuesgave birth to V-Day, the radical, global grassroots movement to end violence against women and girls.This special edition features six never-before-published monologues, a new foreword by National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson, a new introduction by the author, and a new afterword by One Billion Rising director Monique Wilson on the stage phenomenon's global impact. Witty and irreverent, compassionate and wise, this award-winning masterpiece gives voice to real women's deepest fantasies, fears, anger, and pleasure, and calls for a world where all women are safe, equal, free, and alive in their bodies. Praise forThe Vagina Monologues "Probably the most important piece of political theater of the last decade."-The New York Times "This play changed the world. Seeing it changed my soul. Performing in it changed my life. I am forever indebted to Eve Ensler and the transformative legacy of this play."-Kerry Washington "Spellbinding, funny, and almost unbearably moving . . . both a work of art and an incisive piece of cultural history, a poem and a polemic, a performance and a balm and a benediction."-Variety "Often wrenching, frequently riotous. . . . Ensler is an impassioned wit."-Los Angeles Times "Extraordinary . . . a compelling rhapsody of the female essence."-Chicago Tribune
Rona Munro (b.1959) is a Scottish writer, best known for writing the last serial of the original Doctor Who. Throughout her career, she has not only written plays for television, but for radio broadcasts and theatre as well.
Her play The Maiden Stone takes place in Northeast Scotland during the nineteenth century, telling stories of multiple families struggling to survive in a harsh world. In a published text accompanying this work, Munro states that her inspiration for the setting of the play comes from her birthplace. Performed in 1995, this play received the Peggy Ramsay Award.
Use the Drama Online database to check out the rest of her works, as well as browse plays by other women authors!