Drama

Characters: 2 male, 3 female

Combination interior and exterior set.

Loved by audiences and critics nationwide, this compassionate and reflective play about two women coping with loneliness and loss was also successfully presented Off Broadway. The women are the last members of a rural commune founded in the 60's. One's husband was killed in Vietnam and she still clings to his memory. The other's wisecracking husband is hospitalized and dying. Both women find the courage to accept their "narrow bed" and get on with their lives.

"McLaughlin is a good writer who writes good talk; . . . the large chunks of soliloquy are interesting and moving. Women will surely love this play . . . of] such welcome warmth." N.Y. Post .

"A penetrating study of friendship and idealism under stress." N.Y. Times .

Note: excellent source of monologues.

Full Length, Drama

Characters: 5 female

Unit set.

Maxine, a search and rescue pilot, returns in midwinter to her childhood home in the Adirondacks. There she conducts a search for a girl who, while on a field trip in the mountains, was abducted by a stranger in a black pick up truck. The search lasts for three days. Each night Maxine must face the girl's distraught mother, Dessa, and her own grandmother, Zofia, a reclusive Polish refugee. In sleep, Maxine is prey to nightmares and fragmented memories of a mother who abandoned her in childhood and was lost to insanity. Cherry Jones starred Off Broadway in this powerful consideration of the notions of loss, motherhood and the vexed yearning for release.

"Emotionally powerful ... and intensely satisfying." Seattle Times.

From "The Persians"
"Defeat is impossible
Defeat is unthinkable
We have always been the favorites of fate.
Fortune has cupped us
In her golden palms.
It has only been a matter
Of choosing our desire. Which fruit
To pick from the nodding tree."

This chilling passage is from Ellen McLaughlin's new adaptation of "The Persians "by Aeschylus, the earliest surviving play in Western literature, an elegy for a fallen civi-lization and a warning to its new conqueror. As Margo Jefferson wrote in the "New York Times," "The play is a true classic: we see the present and the future right there, inside the past. And when writers give us a 'new version' (a translation or adaptation) of a classic, they both serve and use it. They serve the playwright's gifts by refusing to simplify. But they can't just imitate. Every age has its own rhythms and drives. The classic must make us feel the new acutely. Ellen McLaughlin serves and uses "The Persians "with true power and grace."

Also included in this volume: "Iphigenia and Other Daughters "(from Euripides and Sophocles); "The Trojan Women "(Euripides); "Helen "(Euripides); and "Lysistrata "(Aristophanes), all powerfully realized and as relevant today as when they were first performed.

Ellen McLaughlin's plays include "Days and Nights Within, A Narrow Bed, Infinity's House" and "Tongue of a Bird," which have been widely produced. She is a past finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was the co-winner of the Great American Play Contest. Also an accomplished actor, Ms. McLaughlin is most known for having originated the part of the Angel in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America," appearing in every U.S. production throughits Broadway run.