The Incendiary's Daughter

The beloved American musical that brought us “The Impossible Dream” turns its lens on modern love and society, especially as brought to the Playhouse stage by director Mark Lamos in our award-winning 2018 production. In this play within a play, Cervantes has not yet finished his manuscript for Don Quixote—he sits in jail awaiting trial during the Spanish Inquisition. Fourteen actors portraying Cervantes and his fellow prisoners bring to life the great odyssey we all know of a questing knight tilting at windmills and battling for the love of the fair maiden Aldonza.

An ambitious New York socialite plans an extravagant dinner party as her businessman husband, Oliver, contends with financial woes, causing a lot of tension between the couple. Meanwhile, their high-society friends and associates, including the gruff Dan Packard and his sultry spouse, Kitty, contend with their own entanglements, leading to revelations at the much-anticipated dinner.

A boozing young man in love with his co-worker finds that everyone around him, even his pompous and condescending best friend, is changing into a rhinoceros.

A British Company in the WWI trenches await an inevitable German attack in this 1988 adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's play.

The lively João Grilo and the sly Chicó are poor guys living in the hinterland who cheat a bunch of people in a small town in Northeastern Brazil. When they die, they have to be judged by Christ, the Devil and the Virgin Mary before they are admitted to paradise.

Labor Day in a small Kansas farm town. Hal, a burly and resolute drifter, jumps off a dusty freight train car with the purpose of visiting Alan, a former college classmate and son of the richest man in town.

Based on the Reginald Berkeley stage play, this compelling historical drama offers a depiction of the life story of Florence Nightingale, the young 19th-century Englishwoman famously drawn to a career in nursing. Traveling to Turkey during the Crimean War, Florence gains a reputation for being devoted to the care of wounded soldiers and for pioneering higher standards for sanitary hospital conditions.

A man and woman meet by chance at a romantic inn over dinner and, although both are married to others, they find themselves in the same bed the next morning questioning how this could have happened. They agree to meet on the same weekend each year—in the same hotel room—and the years pass each has some personal crisis that the other helps them through, often without both of them understanding what is going on.

The other party is in disarray. Five men vie for the party nomination for president. No one has a majority as the first ballot closes and the front-runners begin to decide how badly they want the job.

A lighthouse keeper and his daughter are in trouble on two fronts--if the authorities find out he is going blind they will remove him, and a gang of liquor-smugglers is trying to destroy the lighthouse so they can land their illegal cargo on shore without being spotted.

A widowed father has to deal with two complex issues: while he is searching for "Miss Right," his son, who is in his 20s and gay, is searching for "Mr. Right."

China, during the rule of the Qing Dynasty. The arranged marriage between Wang Lung, a humble farmer, and O-Lan, a domestic slave, will endure the many hardships of life over the years; but the temptations of a fragile prosperity will endanger their love and the survival of their entire family.

Dr. Muller, a friend to all, finds pleasure in turning the goodness in people to evil ends. He meets Marie Matin and her fiancée, Georges Roben, while viewing a new painting, "The Martyr--Truth Crucified by Evil." Marie declares that the picture was wrong--evil could never triumph over truth--and though Muller says he agrees with her, he plots to prove otherwise.

In France, 1917, an alcoholic captain is afraid that his new replacement, his sweetheart's brother, will betray his downfall.

Dennis, owner of a rubber plantation in Cochinchina, is involved with Vantine, who left Saigon to evade the police. When his new surveyor arrives along with his refined wife Dennis is quickly infatuated by her.

In the years after his graduation Allen Shepherd has become a successful novelist and has married Jane Anderson. A firm proponent of traditional sex roles, Shepherd leaves Jane when she accepts a teaching post at Oxford. He later changes his views, and the couple is reunited.

In the search for a single good person in the province of Sezuan, three gods finally find only poor street girl Shen Te, whom they reward with a large gift of money. Now wealthy, Shen Te is now so exploited by all men that she has no choice but to slip into the shoes of her hard-hearted cousin, Shui Ta. Accused of murdering the missing Shen Te, the supposed Shui Ta confesses his dual role and the gods avoid a conviction. But Shen Te aka Shui Ta is now abandoned by all humans and also by the gods – helpless in the world.

It's summer vacation, but two high schoolers have been instructed to clean the (empty) swimming pool. As they sweep the pool, they initially discuss school life, love and makeup. But it isn't long before their worries begin to overflow and their thoughts intersect.

Inspired by a 1975 American touring production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” he visited as a young man, Dmitry Krymov’s “Everyone is Here” is a memory piece, a starting point for a flight of imagination and immersion into his own past. Wilder’s “Our Town” is superimposed on the personal memories of Krymov, his biography and events from his family life. The structure of the play gives rise to an interweaving of events, memories, reminiscences, fantasies, associations, dreams - a carefully planned, as if random confusion, which in the finale leads the viewer to a keen awareness of their own life.

After moving from New York City to Indiana, a 12 year old navigates his parents' divorce, his impending bar mitzvah and his new school's social circles.