by Maria Micheles
A former writer picks up photography, emulating Diane Arbus, pursuing and shooting marginalized and wayward people, from Iraqi veterans, hospice patients, addicts, a flag waving man.  Though her provocative subjects propel her to early success, when she starts re-entering the realities of what’s captured in her photographs, she realizes she might have encroached in a world she doesn’t know how to navigate in.

by Julie Weinberg
Cinderella’s terrified understudy, a cruise ship crooner and his shipwrecked marriage, a couple of disgruntled rich kids, two sisters at war over a sick mother, a poor little almost-rich girl in 2045 and a bunch of neurotic misfits --- what do they all have in common?  

by Robert Fieldsteel

Familial bonds are tested when the patriarch leaves a will that greatly favors one son over the other. 

Unabashed talk about money brings out the absurdity and pain of economic disparity and conditional love within one family. 

by Vincent Marano

Set in Reagan Era New York City, CONFIRMATION is a comedic drama that examines the emotional commerce that lies beneath our personal relationships. Inner-city school teacher Joe Kortig has moved into a new apartment after a grueling breakup. However, a fresh start remains elusive. Joe's boundary-challenged mother, Marie is worried that Joe is going through an identity crisis, his long-time friend Myra wants to renew their physical relationship and his best friend David has a sexual encounter with one of Joe's male students. As Joe struggles with the needs all around him, the consequences of David's fling bear down on him in the form of school Principal Father Cohan.

by Margo Hammond

It’s 1928 in the Horseshoe slum of Jersey City, NJ and “No Irish Need Apply”. Hungry to escape his low status, Teddy Devlin aligns himself with the notorious boss mayor, Frank “I’m the law” Hague. While proud to be a part of the machine that empowers the Irish, Teddy struggles to accept the damage it does to all the other immigrants. It's the American way, but is it the right way?

by Katarzyna Müller

On the eve of the next big election, strangers trapped in a subway car on the Red Line in Chicago grapple with issues of identity, fear, and who gets to call themselves American.

by Dana Leslie Goldstein

GO DOWN, MOSES tells the story of two old friends - and civil rights warriors - whose comfortable lives in academia are thrown into chaos by the arrival of a female student who embodies everything they fought for when they were young.

by David Dannenfelser

Many years before Prince Hamlet fights to avenge his father's death, Court Jester Yorick fights to save King Hamlet’s life. Warrior, confidant, spy, in a world of secret intrigues and murderous intents, the resident fool at the Castle Elsinore is anything but.

by Joseph Kesselring

A drama critic learns on his wedding day that his beloved maiden aunts are homicidal maniacs, and that insanity runs in his family.

by D. Tucker Smith

“We are two strangers who got married and created a third.” This is Cheryl Simon’s hopeless description of her family. Her 15-year old son Sebbie has been expelled from his private school and now spends his days locked away in his bedroom playing LAKE OF ETHOS, an online virtual reality game. Her aloof husband, Bruce, an investment banker is staging the biggest deal of his career. When Cheryl decides to leave the family and hole up in her dental office, she creates a vacuum that lures the three of them into the quest to reach ETHOS. What they find there will change their lives forever.

by Jay Strong

SINGLETON explores issues of family, memory and identity through the lenses of race and dementia. An estranged father, his half-forgotten son, and the lonely caregiver caught between them struggle to unravel a disappearing past and find meaning in an uncertain present.

by Stuart Warmflash

When your world collapses, does your life end or begin?

by Leegrid Stevens

Charlie is happily surprised when his long absent daughter unexpectedly visits with joyful news of her pregnancy. However, as cracks begin to appear in her story and she is involuntarily committed to a mental institution, Charlie is forced to confront a truth that, until now, he has refused to see. A Peregrine Falls is a play about a family on the brink of collapse and the stories they tell each other to try to stay together.

by Robert Barnett

Two actors -- PETER TARMICHAEL, an older successful soap opera actor, and JOANNA BLITZ, a struggling young actor -- meet onstage at a regional theatre for the first read-through of The Unknown God, a new two-character play. He will be playing a priest teaching theology at a university; she will be playing the student with whom he becomes romantically, and tragically, involved. While rehearsing the play and in performance, Peter and Joanna develop a complicated off-stage relationship; they become mirrors of each other's hopes and regrets...past and future.

by Michael McGovern

It’s another “Big Chill”, this time 30 years later as a gathering of friends in their 60’s, with a young millennial in their midst, experience an evening of strong emotions, unbridled joys and deep longings.

What these “aging hippies” have gone through in life brings about a multitude of revelations for themselves as well as their new young friend. Over the course of a long night each character accepts the “thorns” in their lives as they begin a journey toward the perfect way to age to perfection.

A poignant, and often humorous celebration of growing old and all the wonders and mysteries that go with it.

by Fred Pezzulli

A young girl from Indiana in 1938 goes to Europe in search of adventure. She undergoes many adventures beginning with a shipboard romance on the way to France and ending seven years later with the fall of Berlin.

by Ben Alexander

A serial killer who douses her targets with red wine, a math professor who falls in love online with a mysterious Russian opera singer, a Thanksgiving dinner done in by Donald Trump, and a world where falling is an unpardonable sin: it all happens in this evening of Ben Alexander's old and new one-act plays.

by Tony Sportiello

How far are you willing to compromise in order to survive?  A financially strapped theater company is given the chance to save themselves from bankruptcy but only if they agree to cast a washed up movie star as the lead in their new play.  A comedy for our times.

This reading will be held on the WorkShop Main Stage.

written & performed by Rich Orloff

The true story of Rich's adventures in underground therapy, with MDMA (a.k.a. Ecstasy) and psilocybin mushrooms, inspired by cutting-edge experiments to help people heal from deep psychological wounds. A tale of one person's journey towards reconciliation with the soul, with a slight detour for an appendectomy. And maybe a few wise-ass comments along the way.

by Greg Oliver Bodine

A veteran CIA station chief, forced into retirement after the murder of a defecting Russian spy, is visited by his successor a year later when revelations about a possible mole inside the Agency are revealed. With careers on the line and reputations to protect, what ensues is a cat and mouse tête-à-tête of intrigue and betrayal about who murdered the defector and why.

This reading will be held on the WorkShop Main Stage.

by Leegrid Stevens

Charlie is happily surprised when his long absent daughter unexpectedly visits with joyful news of her pregnancy. However, as cracks begin to appear in her story and she is involuntarily committed to a mental institution, Charlie is forced to confront a family secret that he has, until now, refused to see. Charlie rushes to repair the relationship with his daughter before she vanishes again. A Peregrine Falls is a play about a family fighting to stay together.

by Sarah Elisabeth Brown

When bisexual polyamorous Vanessa meets a charismatic stranger with a new view of life, her feminine and masculine sides become divided, and she must grapple with whether he's her soulmate or a Machiavellian puppeteer.

A Science Faction Play by Richard Kent Green

Four people participate in an experiment to perfect and enhance the human body with microscopic, robotic technology.

a comedy by Rich Orloff

PLAYING DOCTOR is a trio of outrageously comedic one-acts set in a hospital, including the bawdy tale of a couple on their first date who become stuck together during a passionate moment, the bawdier tale of a lonely janitor who leaves his fly open during a nuclear accident and ends up with a three-foot penis, and a comic fantasia about a VERY pregnant woman who gives birth to her fears about childbirth and motherhood. Rated RF for Really Funny.

by Joe Butler and Natalie Mosco

Hearts in the City, a play with music, considers how neighbors and friends, living like “eggs in a crate” in adjacent, rent-controlled apartments in a West Village walk up help each other through personal trials, discover a new kind of strength, a new definition of family, and a way to “be not afraid to love.”

by Margo Hammond

A matriarchal story about 3 generations of women (grandmother, 2 adult daughters and 2 grand-daughters) attempting a reunion. “Same as a Singed Cat” is an old Maine saying referring to the cat who seeks warmth under the stove only to wake up singed from being too near the fire.  Likewise, the women in this play attempt the warmth of closeness but experience combustion when their past is reignited.

by Sarah Elisabeth Brown

When bisexual polyamorous Vanessa meets a charismatic stranger with a new view of life, her feminine and masculine sides become divided, and she must grapple with whether he's her soulmate or a Machiavellian puppeteer.

by Natalie Bates

Overnight is an exploration of the impact on the friendship between two women--Lisa whose marriage is troubled and Barbara whose is grievously ill.  What happens when the superficial gestures of support aren't enough. The play explores the unknown regions of a deeper companionship.

by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Adapted by Tony Sportiello

The year is 1888, the place is England, and the head of Birlstone Castle, John Douglas, is brutally murdered.  The clues include a missing wedding ring, a hammer, a bloody footprint and a single dumbbell.  So complex is the situation that Britain's leading consulting detective is called to investigate.  Taken from the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear is a taut whodunit which will have audiences guessing until the end.

by Timothy Scott Harris

Time stops on disparate characters as we travel back and forth through tales of sexual equality,  life and death, and the meaning of art in this cultural battleground of America.