Victor is a ruthless fashion designer in the 1970s at the top of his game. Esme, his glamorous protege and muse, is pushed aside when an ordinary Midwestern woman inspires Victor to make his artistry accessible to the masses. A generation later, a woman grappling with a healthy dose of self-loathing must wrestle her own family demons to find her way through the world of fashion that won't give a woman her size a second look. Skipping back and forth in time, Everything You Touch is a viciously

Characters: 3 male, 2 female A noir-ish meditation on brutality A possibly rogue g-man stalks a stalled-out artist with a suspicious affinity for accident victims. Traps are set, traps are sprung, and everyone gets caught. Roadkill Confidential attempts to tackle, with style, humor and high theatricality, mediated violence and the numbness it produces, and, whether in art or in global politics, the ends can justify the means. "Roadkill Confidential, a new work by Sheila Callaghan, is intriguing to watch..it's a sick sitcom, it's a thriller, it's a parody, it's a commentary on the art world, it's a -- this one's borrowed from the script's title page -- 'noir-ish meditation on brutality.' - The New York Times "This multi-media spectacle...ransacks familiar pop-cultural genre conventions to deliver a smart and stylish cautionary tale of an artist who gets caught up in the savagery of her own art." -Variety "Sheila Callaghan, like many playwrights, operates best when she's angry...dry her out with a nice, warming rage, and her work crackles...Callaghan parodies brilliantly..." -Time Out New York

Comedy Characters: 3 male, 3 female, flexible casting Chained to his desk in the basement of customer service hell, Segis suddenly finds himself set free in the CEO's penthouse-but is it a dream? This raucous reinvention of Pedro Calderon de la Barca's Life is a Dream gleefully skewers corporate America with razor-sharp wit "Enjoyably stylish [with an] antic pace and witty aesthetic" - Washington Post "Ambitious, often uproarious." - City Paper "A pizzazz-filled concoction that skewers corporatism with a generous supply side of laughs. [Callaghan] is without doubt the purveyor of top-shelf American wit." - Metro Weekly "[Callaghan has] a keen eye for the outlandish. Exudes the kind of infectious zaniness that occasionally attracts cult followings." - Variety "I can't remember the last time a play made me laugh so hard. Between the chuckles and belly laughs, the dialog is surprisingly layered, and gives the audience plenty to think about. Fever/Dream is about as funny as the sharpest Hollywood comedy, and far more rewarding." -BrightestYoungThings.com

Characters: 1 male, 3 femaleSingle Set On a secluded Greek island, an American ex-pat pursues his passions: winemaking and his breathtaking young wife. Then, on the eve of Reagan's inauguration, the first tasting of the new wine is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of August's former lover. Inspired by Greek tragedy, Lascivious Something combines evocative language with sympathetic yet deeply flawed characters straight out of Euripides.

"Definitely worth spending an undeniably tense evening with, right through an unexpected twist at the end." -Associated Press "Sheila Callaghan has created a great premise and fascinating characters, her writing intertwining wine and blood and sex as painful but necessary life forces." - Back Stage "Sometimes dreamlike, often shocking, Lascivious Something is at once both fraught and languorous, its most powerful moments found in the quietest revelations or silent stares. Go with an open mind and you are certain to find that your cup runneth over with ideas by the final bow." - The Collective Magazine "Callaghan, whose previous work might be described as post-feminist punk incursions into the poetic turf of early Sam Shepard, here employs a more linear narrative line to push her personal-is-political agenda." - LA Weekly "Blown Away...Honest, captivating from beginning to end. I can't recommend it enough" -CBS News

Dramtic Comedy / 1-2m, 3f / Simple Set Anima's sphere of desperation and self-destruction is invaded by the arrival of her perky new roommate, Christa. Moved by a particularly malevolent statue of the Virgin Mary and a houseplant named Susan, Anima and Christa soon enter into a profound and intimate friendship that incurs traumatic results. "Brilliantly and poetically rendered... Callaghan's] playful sense of language and her attunement to her characters are enthralling." - Time Out Chicago "Scab...is a textbook example of promising work, written with a yen for interesting language and liberally salted with well-observed details of the lives of newly minted adults...the play shines." - The New York Times "Darkly funny forays into the surreal...Callaghan shows talent in the inventive fantasy sequences...A stylish production." - The Village Voice

Comedy / 1m, 2f / Simple Set Ever since their school blew up, Moth and Belly have taken to stalking an illegal internet cafe in the hopes o/ f one day being allowed in. They take particular interest in Leather, a skittish older man doing research in the cafe. Leather is a self-proclaimed "freelance scholar" from a foreign land with a sketchy past and a sticky secret. Leather begins to fall head over heals in love with Moth... but what about Belly? This play explores the effects of rampant capitalism on a country that is ill-prepared for it. "Bold and engaging, We Are Not These Hands is as fun as it is engaging...Rich in detail and full of humor and pathos." - Oakland Tribune "Swaggering eccentricity...Callaghan takes a lavish mud bath in a broken language...Ripe apocalyptic slang; at its best, it's racy and unrefined, the kind of stuff you might imagine kids in the back alleys of a decaying world might sling around." - The Washington Post "The gap between rich and poor yawns so wide it aches in Sheila Callaghan's We Are Not These Hands, but much of the ache is from laughter. Hands is a comically engaging, subversively penetrating look at the human cost of unbridled capitalism on both sides of the river...the anger of the play's social vision is partly concealed by its copious humor, emerging more forcefully after it's over...Hands bristles with bright, comic originality, particularly in depicting the limitations of its people." - San Francisco Chronicle

Comedy / 2m, 3f / Simple Set A scream is heard throughout the stratosphere. It is the voice of the lamp. Louise is selling this expensive family heirloom to keep her daughter April in school and cease her more sordid "consultant" profession. April rushes home with lover in tow to halt the proceedings and save the lamp, but it has been intercepted by a quiet and bizarre middle-aged couple with a haunting secret. Attempts to reclaim the lamp are made, as a misplaced father slowly fades to white in the background. ..".A gutsy writer with a gift for creating vivid images rooted in the emotional life of her characters." - The New York Times ..".Troubled and precocious college dropout April is described to her mother, Louise, as 'stunningly brilliant' - a line that fits her creator, Sheila Callaghan. The odd characters populating Crawl, Fade to White frantically eat dirt and twist menacingly. Audiences trying to process this engagingly quirky new play might find themselves gaping 'like they're watching the cosmos disrobe.'" - Time Out New York

Comedy / Characters: 2m, 3f A pair of radical feminist ex-strippers scour the country on a murderous rampage against right-wing pro-lifers, blogging about their exploits in gruesome detail. Meanwhile, a scruffy screenwriter named Owen tries to bang out his magnum opus in a hotel room as his best friend Rodney ("The Rod") holds forth on rape and other manly enterprises. When Owen decides to incorporate the strippers into his screenplay, the boundaries of reality begin to blur, and only a visit from Jane Fonda can help keep worlds from blowing apart. Sheila Callaghan's That Pretty Pretty; or, The Rape Play is a violently funny and disturbing excavation of the dirty corners of our imaginations. "Mind-blowing images and soul-crushing language flowing wildly." -Back Stage "A submersion in the anarchy of ambivalence: variously a rant, a riff, a rumble - about our notions of naturalism, objectification, perversity, and beauty ... There's sass and sarcasm in Callaghan's high-energy punk writing." -John Lahr, The New Yorker "Raunchy, savvy... the twisted, caffeinated world of the show imagines the collective subconscious of a culture where girls never stiop going wild... Callaghan] push(es) her audience's buttons with an aggressive treatment of some of the darker corners of the human psyche." -The New York Times

Full Length, Comic Drama / 3m, 4f / Unit Set It's June 16, 2004. Samantha Blossom, a chipper woman in her 40s, wakes up one June morning in her Upper East Side apartment to find her life being narrated over the airwaves of public radio. She discovers in the mail an envelope addressed to her husband from his lover, which spins her raw and untethered into an odyssey through the city.... a day full of chance encounters, coincidences, a quick love affair, and a fixation on the mysterious Jewel Jupiter. Jewel, the young but damaged poet genius, eventually takes a shine to Samantha and brings her on a midnight tour of the meat-packing district which changes Samantha's life forever-or doesn't. This 90 minute comic drama is a modernized, gender-reversed, relocated, hyper-theatrical riff on the novel Ulysses, occurring exactly 100 years to the day after Joyce's jaunt through Dublin. Wonderful... Sheila Callaghan's pleasingly witty and theatrical new drama that is a love letter to New York masquerading as hate mail... Callaghan] writes with a world-weary tone and has a poet's gift for economical description. The entire dead city comes alive... -New York Times. DEAD CITY, Sheila Callaghan's riff on James Joyce's ULYSSES is stylish, lyrical, fascinating, occasionally irritating, and eminently worthwhile... the kind of work that is thoroughly invigorating. -Backstage.

One of Manhattan's most established play festivals, the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival fosters the work of young writers, giving them the exposure of publication and representation. The festival resulting in this collection was held July 15th-20th, 2008 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on 42nd Street in New York City. From the initial submission pool, approximately 50 plays were chosen to be performed over a period of one week. A panel of judges comprised of New York area theater professionals, critics, and educators nominated one or more of each evening's plays as finalists. The final round was then held on the last day of the Festival. Out of these plays, six winners listed below were chosen by Samuel French, Inc. to receive publication and licensing contracts. Contents: F*cking Art Ayravana Flies or A Pretty Dish The Thread Men The Dying Breed The Grave Juniper; Jubilee

Sheila Callaghan is one of the most distinctive playwrights working in the theater today. Fiercely political, unblinkingly experimental, yet emotionally true, her writing is a refreshing combination of the compelling and the controversial.
This volume collects three of her most recent plays to date. It includes: "Lascivious Something," a heart-rending and disturbing exploration of failed love and shattered idealism at the dawn of the Reagan era, it follows a lapsed activist's attempt to start life anew on a vineyard in Greece and what happens when the woman he left behind tracks him down; "Roadkill Confidential," a noir-ish meditation on brutality and the intersection between fear and art, focused on an artist who uses the corpses of dead animals found on the side of the road as the medium for her creations; and "That Pretty Pretty; Or, the Rape Play," which imagines our girls gone wild culture spiraling out to its most extreme ends while exploring issues of beauty, objectification, perversity, and naturalism in current society.