26 Books Published by Theatre Communications Group on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, James Ijames’ Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare’s masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbecue in the American South.

Juicy—a young, queer, Southern man, who is grappling with questions of identity—is visited by the ghost of his father (Pap) at his mother’s wedding/family barbeque. Pap demands that Juicy avenge his recent murder. How will Juicy, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man, trying to break a cycle of trauma and toxic masculinity, avenge his father’s premature death? Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare’s masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbeque in the American South.

A funny, moving, and urgent new play from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage.

In this razor-sharp new comedy, a truck stop sandwich shop offers its formerly incarcerated kitchen staff a shot at reclaiming their lives. Even as the shop’s tough-as-nails owner tries to keep them under her thumb, the motley crew of line cooks are given purpose and permission to dream through their shared quest to create the perfect sandwich.

"Furious and incandescent… Harris writes so blisteringly that the actors could just let the language’s flames carry them along." —Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

An explosive epic that examines the cyclical nature of violence, Is God Is follows twin sisters who undertake a dangerous journey to exact revenge upon their father at the behest of their dying mother.

"Aleshea Harris turns theater into a monument, ephemeral but real, to ongoing pain. You can’t tear down a statue that never shows up outside." —Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker

What to Send Up When It Goes Down is a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-Blackness in America. It is a challenge to us all: to heal through expression, expulsion, and movement.

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

“To watch this show is to enter, by some urgent, bawdy magic, an ecstatic and infinitely more colorful version of the famous surreal lithograph by M. C. Escher: the hand that lifts from the page, becoming almost real, then draws another hand, which returns the favor. Which came first? A Strange Loop is complex, teasing, thrilling.” —Vinson Cunningham, New Yorker

Usher is a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical: a piece about a Black, queer writer, working a day job he hates while writing his original musical. This blistering musical follows a young artist at war with a host of demons—not least of which are the punishing thoughts in his own head—in an attempt to understand his own strange loop.

An astounding new play about race and power in America, explored through the lens of a family drama.

“Dazzling and ruthless…one of the most exquisitely and systematically arranged ambushes of an unsuspecting audience in years…a glorious, scary reminder of the unmatched power of live theater to rattle, roil and shake us wide awake.” —New York Times

Grandma’s birthday approaches. Beverly is organizing the perfect dinner, but everything seems doomed to go awry—the silverware is all wrong, the radio is on the fritz, and the rest of the family can’t be bothered to lift a hand to help. And yet, what appears at first to be a standard family dramedy takes a sharp, sly turn into a startling examination of deep-seated paradigms about race in America.

“And that’s what is remembered.
That’s what people see in the dark times when they look back.
They see sparks of light that help them continue.”
Known for her distinctive lyrical dialogue and powerful sociopolitical themes, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most innovative and ambitious playwrights in the contemporary theatre world. In reaction to the extraordinary events of the first 100 days of the presidency of Donald J. Trump, one of America’s most distinguished artists has created a unique and highly personal response to one of the most tumultuous times in our history. For each day, Parks created a play diary to capture and explore the events as they unfolded and to try and make sense out of a state of uncertainty, confusion, and chaos. An everyman’s guide to the Trumpian universe.

Winner of the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize

"Searing and sensationally funny… As raw in its language and raucous in spirit as it is smart and provocative."—The New York Times"Funny, smutty and enticingly subversive… . A toxically satiric portrait of American life."—Washington Post"When I told my mother that a theater was putting on my play Bootycandy, her response was, ’What?! Bootycandy? These white folks are going to let you put on a play called Bootycandy?!? Are they crazy???’ And my response was, ’Yes. Yes indeed.’"—Robert O’HaraSutter is on an outrageous odyssey through his childhood home, his church, dive bars, motel rooms, and even nursing homes. The journey uncovers characters who are at once fascinating, zany, controversial, and even a bit smutty, painting a portrait of life as a societal outlier. Based on the author’s personal experience, Bootycandy is a kaleidoscope of sketches that interconnects to portray growing up gay and black. This subversive, uproarious satire crashes headlong into the murky terrain of pain and pleasure and … BOOTYCANDY!Robert O’Hara is a playwright and director. His play Antebellum received a world premiere production from Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, and earned him a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding New Play. He reworked The Wiz for its revival at La Jolla Playhouse. He wrote and directed the world premiere of Insurrection: Holding History (Public Theater, Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Play). As a director, he has won an Obie Award and an NAACP Best Director Award and has worked at acclaimed theaters throughout the United States.

“American theater needs more plays like Naomi Wallace’s The Liquid Plain—by which I mean works that are historical, epic and poetic, that valorize the lives of the poor and oppressed.”—Time Out New YorkOn the docks of late eighteenth-century Rhode Island, two runaway slaves find love and a near-drowned man. With a motley band of sailors, they plan a desperate and daring run to freedom. As the mysteries of their identities come to light, painful truths about the past and present collide and flow into the next generation. Acclaimed playwright Naomi Wallace’s newest work brings to life a group of people whose stories have been erased from history. Told with lyricism and power, The Liquid Plain was awarded the 2012 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play. This sweeping historical saga has enjoyed acclaimed runs at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Signature Theatre in New York.Naomi Wallace is a playwright from Kentucky. Her plays, which have been produced in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, include In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Things of Dry Hours, The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East, And I and Silence, The Hard Weather Boating Party , and The Liquid Plain. Awards include the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (twice), Joseph Kesselring Prize, Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, Obie Award, Horton Foote Award for Most Promising New American Play, MacArthur Fellowship, and the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Drama.

The Book of Grace offers further evidence that Suzan-Lori Parks thinks big even when she thinks small The family portrait she paints here is nothing less than a map of a nation that is divided within itself and poised to fall This play is infused with an exciting emotional ambiguity that transforms its characters into people of splendidly confused humanity. Ben Brantley, "New York Times"

Suzan-Lori Parks has laid out the conflicts among these characters with such economy and clarity that they run like a taut steel cord throughout the play; it s as lean and direct a drama as she s written. —Robert Faires, Austin Chronicle

Encouraged by his stepmother to return home to South Texas, a young man reunites with his abusive father, unearthing an explosive combination of deep-seated passion and ambition. Described by Suzan-Lori Parks as a companion piece to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, this fierce and intimate three-person drama premiered in 2010 at New York’s Public Theater, and is published here with the playwright’s final, revised text.

Finalist, 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama “The finest work yet from this gifted writer.”The New York TimesOffered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and pe

"Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic, and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won’t expect."—Time Out New York"Lynn Nottage’s work explores depths of humanness, the overlapping complexities of race, gender, culture and history—and the startling simplicity of desire—with a clear tenderness, with humor, with compassion."—Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwrightIn her first new play since the critically acclaimed Ruined, Lynn Nottage examines the legacy of African Americans in Hollywood in a dramatic stylistic departure from her previous work. Fluidly incorporating film and video elements into her writing for the first time, Nottage’s comedy tells the story of Vera Stark, an African American maid and budding actress who has a tangled relationship with her boss, a white Hollywood star desperately grasping to hold onto her career. Stirring audiences out of complacency by tackling racial stereotyping in the entertainment industry, Nottage highlights the paradox of black actors in 1930s Hollywood while jumping back and forward in time and location in this uniquely theatrical narrative. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark premiered in New York in 2011 and received subsequent productions at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse in fall 2012 and Chicago’s Goodman Theatre and The Lyric Stage Company of Boston in spring 2013.Lynn Nottage’s plays include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined; Intimate ApparelFabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por’Knockers; and POOF!

“The concluding work in one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken… a play that could well be Mr. Wilson’s most provocative.”Ben Brantley, The New York Times“Radio Golf is a rich, carefully wrought human tapes

Set during the civil rights movement, at the lunch counter of Memphis Lee’s diner.

August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle (10 plays covering 10 decades)

1. 1900s - Gem of the Ocean (1904)
2. 1910s - Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1911) - NY Drama Critics Circle Award
3. 1920s - Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1927)
4. 1930s - The Piano Lesson (1936) - Pulitzer Prize
5. 1940s - Seven Guitars (1948)
6. 1950s - Fences (1957) - Pulitzer Prize
7. 1960s - Two Trains Running (1969)
8. 1970s - Jitney (1977)
9. 1980s - King Hedley II
10. 1990s - Radio Golf (1997)

Series introduction by John Lahr with individual volumes introduced by Laurence Fishburne, Tony Kushner, Romulus Linney, Marion McClinton, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Phylicia Rashad, Ishmael Reed, and Frank Rich.“No one except perhaps Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater.”—John Lahr, The New Yorker “Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story… . For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned.”—Tony KushnerAugust Wilson’s Century Cycle is “one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken” (The New York Times). With it, Wilson dramatizes the African American experience and heritage in the twentieth century, with a play for each decade, almost all set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Wilson’s extraordinary lifework—completed just before his death in October 2005—is presented here for the first time in its entirety. Art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired. Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American… . The cycle of plays that I have been writing since 1979 is my attempt to represent that culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves. The characters in the plays still place their faith in America’s willingness to live up to the meaning of her creed. It is this belief in America’s honor that allows them to pursue the American Dream even as it remains elusive… . They shout, they argue, they wrestle with love, honor, duty, betrayal; they have loud voices and big hearts; they demand justice, they love, they laugh, they cry, they murder, and they embrace life with zest and vigor… . In all the plays, the characters remain pointed towards the future, their pockets lined with fresh hope and an abiding faith in their own abilities and their own heroics.—August Wilson

“Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the most important dramatists America has produced.”Tony Kushner   “The plan was that no matter what I did, how busy I was, what other commitments I had, I would write a play a day, every single day for

“No one except perhaps Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater.”—John Lahr, The New Yorker“A swelling battle hymn of transporting beauty. Theatergoers who have followed August Wilson’s career will find in Gem a touchstone for everything else he has written.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times“Wilson’s juiciest material. The play holds the stage and its characters hammer home, strongly, the notion of newfound freedom.”—Michael Phillips, Chicago TribuneGem of the Ocean is the play that begins it all. Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson’s decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th century—an unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prize–winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson. Aunt Esther, the drama’s 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life. Gem of the Ocean recently played across the country and on Broadway, with Phylicia Rashad as Aunt Esther.Earlier in 2005, on the completion of the final work of his ten play cycle-surely the most ambitious American dramatic project undertaken in our history-August Wilson disclosed his bout with cancer, an illness of unusual ferocity that would eventually claim his life on October 2. Fittingly the Broadway theatre where his last play will be produced in 2006 has been renamed the August Wilson Theater in his honor. His legacy will animate the theatre and stir the human heart for decades to come.

“Lynn Nottage’s work explores depths of humanness, the overlapping complexities of race, gender, culture and history—and the startling simplicity of desire—with a clear tenderness, with humor, with compassion.” —Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrightIntimate Apparel: “Thoughtful, affecting new play … with seamless elegance.”—Charles Isherwood, VarietyFabulation: “Robustly entertaining comedy … with punchy social insights and the firecracker snap of unexpected humor.”—Ben Brantley, The New York TimesWith her two latest plays, “exceptionally gifted playwright” (New York Observer) Lynn Nottage has created companion pieces that span 100 years in the lives of African American women. Intimate Apparel is about the empowerment of Esther, a proud and shy seamstress in 1905 New York who creates exquisite lingerie for both Fifth Avenue boudoirs and Tenderloin bordellos. In Fabulation Nottage re-imagines Esther as Undine, the PR-diva of today, who spirals down from her swanky Manhattan office to her roots back in Brooklyn. Through opposite journeys, Esther and Undine achieve the same satisfying end, one of self-discovery.Lynn Nottage’s plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Mud, River, Stone; Por’ Knockers; Las Menias; Fabulation and Intimate Apparel, for which she was awarded the Francesca Primus Prize and the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award in 2004. Her plays have been produced at theatres throughout the country, with Intimate Apparel slated for 16 productions during the 2005–2006 season.

This collection includes Lynn Nottage’s best known work, Crumbs from the Table of Joy, which has been produced widely since its premiere in May 1995 and which the Chicago Tribune hailed as "a complex and thought provoking new play." Also included are Mud, River, Stone, Poof, Por’Knockers and her latest work, Las Meninas, inspired by the playwright’s research into the African presence in 17th century Europe.Lynn Nottage lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her plays have been produced in many theatres across the U.S. including Second Stage (NY), South Coast Rep (Costa Mesa), Yale Repertory Theatre (New Haven), Alliance Theatre (Atlanta) and Steppenwolf (Chicago). She has won the Heideman and the White Bird awards and was a runner-up for the Susan Blackburn award.

?Césaire’s Tempest, in translation by Richard Miller, is a sprightly and song-filled enchantment. The luminous intelligence of Mr. Césaire’s meditation on the absurdities of colonialism shines through the antics of the bewildered characters.” ?New York Times

?The weapon of poetry may be Césaire’s greatest gift to a modern world still searching for freedom. As one of the last truly great ?universalists’ of the twentieth century, he has had a hand in shaping or critiquing many of the major ideologies and movements of the modern world. In his own words: ?Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.’” ?from the Introduction

Césaire’s rich and insightful adaptation of The Tempest draws on contemporary Caribbean society, the African-American experience and African mythology to raise questions about colonialism, racism and their lasting effects.


AIMÉ CÉSAIRE was a world-renowned poet, essayist and dramatist, whose best known works include Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, The Tragedy of King Christophe and A Season in the Congo. He was the founding editor of Tropiques, which was instrumental in establishing the use of surrealism as a political weapon. He co-formulated the concept of ?negritude,” which urges black Africans to reject assimilation and cultivate consciousness of their racial qualities and heritage. Césaire held a number of government positions in his native Martinique, including that of mayor of Fort-de-France. Césaire died in 2008.

RICHARD MILLER has translated many books, both nonfiction and fiction, including works by Roland Barthes, Brassa? and Albert Camus, as well as poetry, many articles and a number of plays. Among his more recent translations are Scent by Annick Le Guérer and Beethoven’s Ninth by Esteban Buch, which was published in 2002. He lives in Paris.

"In the Blood" is an extraordinary new play…It is truly harrowing…we cannot turn away, and we do not want to. The play strikes us as Hawthorne claimed his first glimpse of the scarlet letter struck him, with "a sensation not altogether physical yet almost so, as of a burning heat, as if the letter were not of red cloth but of red-hot iron. "—Margo Jefferson, "The New York Times" The playwright who "has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way [John Heilpern, "New York Observer" and "Vogue"]," has written two haunting riffs on Hawthorne’s "The Scarlett Letter: In the Blood" and "Fucking A."

Hester La Negrita of "In the Blood" is an unapologetic mother of five illegitimate children—"my treasures, my five joys"—who practices writing the alphabet to help herself "one day get a leg up. The letter A is as far as she gets. Hester Smith of "Fucking A" works the only job available—abortionist to the lower class, in order to save for a reunion picnic with her imprisoned son. Her branded A bleeds afresh every time a patient comes to see her.

These are two mature, beautifully crafted, inventive and poetic plays by one of the most unique voices writing for the stage today.

Suzan Lori-Parks is also the author of "The America Play and Other Works" and "Venus," both published by TCG. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling

“Wilson’s melody here is the mournful sound of what might have been, a blues-tinged tale about a driven, almost demonic man. He’s a petty thief named King who will stop at nothing for a better life… . King Hedley is a big play, filled with big emotions and big speeches. These aria-like monologues are rich in humor, heartbreak and the astonishing details that go into creating real people. With his latest arrival on Broadway, Wilson only has the first and last decades of the twentieth century to chronicle—it’s been quite a journey. King Hedley will only add to that towering achievement.”—Michael Kuchwara, Associated Press“What makes Wilson America’s greatest living playwright—aside from his gift for dialogue, which blends searing poetry with uncompromising realism—is the bracing humanism with which he provides insight into the struggles and aspirations of all individuals.”—Elysa Gardner, USA TodayKing Hedley II is the eighth work in playwright August Wilson’s 10-play cycle chronicling the history of the African American experience in each decade of the twentieth century. It’s set in 1985 and tells the story of an ex-con in post-Reagan Pittsburgh trying to rebuild his life. Many critics have hailed the work as a haunting and challenging tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.August Wilson is the most influential and successful African American playwright writing today. He is the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Fences, The Piano Lesson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running and Jitney. His plays have been produced all over the world, as well as on Broadway.

A collection of eight plays by the acclaimed performer and civil rights activist John O’Neal.

Performer and activist John O’Neal is best known for his Junebug Jabbo Jones cycle of plays, and for founding Junebug Productions and co-founding the Free Southern Theater. Revitalizing the memory of the civil rights movement and the knowledge that the movement is not over, O’Neal was awarded the prestigious Ford Foundation Award for The Leadership for a Changing World for his work in the theatre. His career as a playwright, performer, and leader has spanned more than fifty years.

Suzan-Lori Parks continues her examination of black people in history and stage through the life of the so-called ""Hottentot Venus,"" an African woman displayed semi-nude throughout Europe due to her extraordinary physiognomy; in particular,

""Parks has burst through every known convention to invent a new theatrical language, like a jive Samuel Beckett, while exploding American cultural myths and stereotypes along the way…. She’s passionate and jokey and some kind of genius.""—V