| Jordan Harrison grew up on an island near Seattle.
His play Doris to Darlene recently premiered at Playwrights Horizons and his play Amazons and Their Men was produced Off-Broadway by Clubbed Thumb. Mr. Harrison's plays Act a Lady, Kid-Simple, and Fit For Feet premiered in the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and have been produced all over the country. His play Finn in the Underworld had its world premiere at Berkeley Rep under the direction of Les Waters. Mr. Harrison's work has also been produced or developed at Actor's Express, American Theater Company, Ars Nova, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, NYTW, Perishable Theatre, PlayLabs, Portland Center Stage, Seattle Rep, Soho Rep, SPF, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, and Williamstown Theatre Festival.
Mr. Harrison is the recipient of the Kesselring Fellowship, the Heideman Award, a Theater Masters' Innovative Playwright Award, two Jerome Fellowships and a McKnight Grant from The Playwrights' Center, a Lucille Lortel Fellowship, and a NEA/TCG Playwright-in-Residence Grant with The Empty Space Theatre. He has received commissions from Arden Theatre Company, Berkeley Rep/Actors Theatre of Louisville, Cypress Films, Guthrie Theater/Children's Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, and South Coast Rep. His plays are published by Playscripts, Inc., Samuel French, Smith and Kraus, and Heinemann.
A graduate of the Brown University MFA Playwriting program, Mr. Harrison is a resident playwright at New Dramatists and an Associate Artist with The Civilians. He has taught playwriting at Brown, The Playwrights' Center, and SUNY Purchase. With Sally Oswald, he edits Play A Journal of Plays, dedicated to reinventing the life of plays on the page. |
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Comedy
Full-length, 90-100 minutes
3 females, 3 males
$75.00 per performance; $8.99 per book
When the men of a small Prohibition-era town decide to put on a play dressed in "fancy-type, women-type clothes," the whole community is affected: gender lines blur, eyebrows raise, identities explode, and life and art are forever entangled. A thoughtful and exuberant Midwestern fable about the woman in every man, the man in every woman and the power of theatre to uncover both. Accompanied by accordion.
(This play is also available in the collection Humana Festival 2006: The Complete Plays.)
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| "The [2006 Humana] Festival's most uproarious comedy, a farce of outlandish proportions, takes on and celebrates the art of theater itself...Part Waiting for Guffman and part Dangerous Liaisons, Act a Lady's dizzying gender-bending explores the theater, the fallibility of stereotypes and the joys of accordion music with a deft wisdom..." |
| --Tony Brown, Cleveland Plain Dealer |
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$14.95 per book
Discover a monologue book like no other. Actor's Choice: Monologues for Men gives you an extraordinary array of cutting-edge new monologues, from comedic to dramatic and everything in between. Unlike other monologue books, the source of every monologue is easily accessible -- each play is available through one website (www.playscripts.com), where you can read nearly the entire published script online for free. Explore the work of today's most celebrated theatrical voices, including Naomi Iizuka, Mac Wellman, Tanya Barfield, Jordan Harrison, Tony Award winner David Henry Hwang, and many more!
Also in this series:
Actor's Choice: Monologues for Women
Actor's Choice: Monologues for Teens
Actor's Choice: Scenes for Teens
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$14.95 per book
Looking for the perfect monologue? Actor's Choice: Monologues for Teens is here to help. From hilarious comedy to cutting-edge drama and everything in between, an exciting selection of monologues is at your fingertips. Unlike other monologue books, the source of every monologue is easily accessible -- each play is available through one website (www.playscripts.com), where you can read nearly the entire published script online for free. From classwork to competitions to auditions, this book has you covered!
Also in this series:
Actor's Choice: Scenes for Teens
Actor's Choice: Monologues for Women
Actor's Choice: Monologues for Men
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| "This is an excellent monologue book for middle and high school students with applications for competition as well as use in drama, speech, or English classes." |
| --Terrilyn Fleming, The Midwest Book Review |
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$14.95 per book
Discover a monologue book like no other. Actor's Choice: Monologues for Women gives you an extraordinary array of cutting-edge new monologues, from comedic to dramatic and everything in between. Unlike other monologue books, the source of every monologue is easily accessible -- each play is available through one website (www.playscripts.com), where you can read nearly the entire published script online for free. Explore the work of today's most celebrated theatrical voices, including Naomi Iizuka, Rinne Groff, Jane Martin, Pulitzer Prize winners Lynn Nottage and David Lindsay-Abaire, and many more!
Also in this series:
Actor's Choice: Monologues for Men
Actor's Choice: Monologues for Teens
Actor's Choice: Scenes for Teens
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Drama
Full-length, 80-90 minutes
2 females, 2 males
$75.00 per performance; $8.99 per book
In this contemporary Gothic tale, Gwen and her sister Rhoda are packing up the belongings -- and the secrets -- in their crooked childhood house. When Gwen's wayward son Finn arrives to harvest the more fashionable heirlooms, he meets a neighbor who is not what he seems. Finn's sexual curiosity draws him down into the fallout shelter, and into the heart of an unfinished ghost story. A sexually-charged thriller about what can happen when grief goes unspoken.
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| "At times, the tension in this 'psychosexual horror story' is stretched so fine that it seems the entire audience is holding its collective breath... A riveting, at times astonishing journey." |
| --Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle |
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$19.95 per book
NOTE: This book contains 10 plays. To perform any of the plays, each must be licensed separately.
Humana 2006: The Complete Plays collects all ten plays produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville during the 30th anniversary season of the Humana Festival of New American Plays. The seven full-length plays and three ten-minute plays in this anthology encompass many of the most eclectic and exciting new voices in theater today -- from a technology-reliant man learning to listen to a planet on the verge of apocalypse (Natural Selection); to a left-leaning American citizen's doomed chance to give the President an earful (Listeners); to a group of Depression-era men who put on a fundraiser, and in the process find themselves transformed by more than just the ladies' costumes they don (Act A Lady). Alternately painful, subversive, hysterically funny, and poignant, these plays ask you to engage with characters and worlds you think you know, and then look again with new eyes.
To purchase this book of 10 plays, click "Add to Shopping Cart" above. To perform an individual play, click on its title below:
Three Guys and a Brenda by Adam Bock
Natural Selection by Eric Coble
Low by Rha Goddess
Act A Lady by Jordan Harrison
Sovereignty by Rolin Jones
Listeners by Jane Martin
Hotel Cassiopeia by Charles L. Mee
The Scene by Theresa Rebeck
Six Years by Sharr White
Neon Mirage by Liz Duffy Adams, Dan Dietz, Rick Hip-Flores, Julie Jensen, Lisa Kron, Tracey Scott Wilson, and Chay Yew
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| "If you have any doubt that regional theatre in America is vital and thriving, then you missed this year's Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky." |
| --Newsweek |
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Comedy
Full-length, 90-100 minutes
3 females, 3 males, 1 either
(6-11 actors possible: 3-5 females, 3-6 males)
$75.00 per performance; $8.99 per book
Moll, a girl who invents things, wins the science fair with a machine for hearing sounds that can't be heard. But when a shapeshifting Mercenary steals the invention (and her heart), she must embark on a quest to save noise as we know it. Accompanied by the last boy-virgin in the eleventh grade, Moll crosses chasms and rafts rivers into a world where sound is always more than what meets the ear. A quirky fable of innocence and experience, featuring live sound effects, mutinous onomatopoeia, and a host of woodsy temptations.
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| "Stuffed with whizbang sight and sonic gags, sci-fi tropes, fanciful language and self-referential pokes at its own loopiness, Kid-Simple is the work of a fertile, rambunctious imagination...Harrison is an exhilarating wordsmith." |
| --Misha Berson, Seattle Times |
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Comedy/Drama
Full-length, 70-80 minutes
3 females, 3 males
$75.00 per performance; $8.99 per book
When the mastodons escape, Jame needs another exhibit for the Museum. Luckily, he has a friend with wonderful bones. The Curator is delighted with her new specimen, but she can't help wondering: Who, or what, is behind the mysterious exodus of flora and fauna? An elegiac and absurd look at the intersections of memory and desire, set to the tune of a music box.
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| "An ironic-absurdist meditation on untenable sentiments and immortal longing...Harrison's work is vibrant and fresh." |
| --Seattle Weekly |
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