Monday Night Specials Archive
Ungodly Pursuit
Monday Night Specials
The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church puts a priest under scrutiny.
Mona/Lina
Monday Night Special
The reclusive daughter of a notorious artist must either banish her ghosts or live with them for the rest of her life.
Please note that this reading will contain strong language.
Drive
Monday Night Special
It’s the near future, and long-haul trucks are electric and self-driven. Life will have to change for the men and women truckers who hang out in small-town Iowa’s Drive Bar. But change isn’t always a bad thing.
Please note that this reading will contain strong language.
The Broken Closet
Monday Night Special
A family struggles with grief and guilt after losing a beloved member to heroin addiction. A powerful story of loss and hope.
Sid & Howard
Monday Night Special
An antic comedy that imagines a could-have-been meeting of terror-meister H.P. Lovecraft, New Yorker wit S.J. Perelman, and the mystery woman who changed Lovecraft’s life.
Monday Night Special – Dear Edvard
Love story, biopic, psychological exploration, and family drama. A new music-theater piece about the life and loves of Norwegian artist Edvard Munch.
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Monday Night Special – Hound and Fox
Please note that this reading is SOLD OUT. The blacklisted screenwriter J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t let go. Based on a true story.
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Monday Night Special – Of Solitude
Life is too just hard to do alone. A hilarious, soulful comedy about five young people, each wounded by loss, who come together and connect.
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Monday Night Special – Nuclear Family
They care about you, they give you advice, they stick with you. Problem: Advice differs. And it’s all good. Solution: You stick with them. It’s a family. Yours?
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Monday Night Special – Caveat Emptor
A special evening to benefit the MacDowell Colony, one of the country’s leading artists’ residency programs
A bittersweet comedy about love and redemption.
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Monday Night Special – The Duel
A dark, exotic tale of love and violence, adapted from Chekhov's only novella.
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Dystopian Daze
Monday Night Special
In 2025, LA is a police state, and Jake and Molly's daughter Anna has bolted from home to live free from her fearful parents. When Anna returns, she brings with her a guest who makes life even scarier. A dark comedy about love and tyranny.
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The Eleventh Hour
Monday Night Special
A young woman seeks the truth about her brother's death on the final day of combat in World War I -- and discovers that heroism is more complicated than she imagined.Based on a highly partisan investigation into the army's treatment of American soldiers.
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She Exits, Laughing
Monday Night Special
Fortysomething Julie flees her marriage and moves in with her widowed mother-a comedy about how it's never too late for anything.
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The Garbologists
Monday Night Special
When a veteran sanitation worker and the new woman on the job find something on their route too valuable to throw out, they're forced to reappraise in each other what they mistook for trash.
Please Come to Boston
Monday Night Special
A songwriter trying to make it in LA in 1975 faces challenges with his marriage, a new baby, and a provocative and talented nineteen year-old neighbor. A musical play about the healing power of the creative process.
Based on the song by Dave Loggins.
The Room Where I Was Held
Monday Night Special
Josh Salazar, a young war correspondent, has just survived a kidnapping abroad, and is recovering at home with his parents. But when Josh's girlfriend pays a visit from Kabul, we learn the truth about why he took on his most dangerous assignment, and at what cost.
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Light Up The Sky
Monday Night Special
Join Christopher Hart for an extra special evening that includes a reading of the first act of LIGHT UP THE SKY, a timeless comedy about "life imitating art", followed by a discussion about Mr. Hart's own magical life with his parents, theatrical legends Moss Hart and Kitty Carlisle Hart.
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Kirk at the San Francisco Airport Hyatt
Monday Night Special
Presented in association with the MacDowell Colony
Kristina’s handicapped father Kirk has lived in the San Francisco Airport Hyatt for five years with his Ethiopian nurse/girlfriend - but now he's running out of money.
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Between Worlds: Refugee and Immigrant Voices
Monday Night Special
A collage of poems, prose, letters, and scenes by women and men from many continents and centuries.
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Gene Play
Monday Night Special
With Paul Levine
Based on real-life events in Cambridge, MA. in 1976 and 2017, a new drama about the ongoing controversy over the ethics and politics of gene editing.
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The Green Rose
Monday Night Special
At the turn of 20th century England, love blooms in many varieties. But beware of the prick of the Green Rose.
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Cotton Mill Girls
Recollections of remarkable women - their hard times and high spirits
Queens
When you're working so hard to move forward, what gets left behind? A dark and funny look at two generations of immigrant women.
Grandma’s Hands
In the tumultuous summer of 1969, two sisters deal with their aging mother and old sibling rivalries, and discover that love and the ‘Black Revolution’ are not such strange bedfellows.
View DetailsA Month in the Country
An idyllic summer on a Russian estate turns into a hotbed of love, passion, and intrigue.
Full of Grace
Exploring the universal intersection of faith and sexual identity through first-person accounts of LGBTQ Catholics.
Blessed and Highly Favored
What do you do when your mother likes God better than you?
The Babylonian Talmud
The power of memory and loss and the unique relationship between a Jewish boy and the man who saved him.
THE BABYLONIAN TALMUD, written by West Tisbury and NYC resident Sig Van Raan, is based on the real-life experiences of the Van Raan family in the 1940's and 1950's. MJ Bruder Munafo is directing the reading with actors Peter Stray, Ella Dershowitz, Jonathan Lipnick and 9 year-old Dillon Fondren.
The Shell Collection
by Wendy Kesselman
Two girls, one shell collection, a dark secret and threats of bullying - all in one short play.
View DetailsCoco at the Ritz
by Gioia Diliberto
A new play inspired by a real life incident - the arrest and interrogation of Coco Chanel by the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) near the end of World War II.
View DetailsGalileo’s Torch
by James Reston, Jr.
This new play is the outgrowth of James Reston, Jr.’s 1994 biography, Galileo: A Life, which was called by the Washington Post “brilliant,” and “masterful.”
View DetailsBack the Night
A new play by Melinda Lopez
There's an epidemic of violence on campus. And Em isn't going to take it anymore. But when her best friend is assaulted, she makes some unexpected discoveries. Sometimes you do the wrong thing for the right reason.
View DetailsClub Meds
A new musical / dramedy. Lyrics by Sarah Safford. Book by John Reynolds. Composers: Tanya Leah, Jonathan Monro, Natalie Lovejoy and Rob DelGaudio.
Welcome to “Club Meds”, a chemotherapy session/support group run by the volunteer and cancer survivor extraordinaire, Marjean Macgraw! A musical mixing humor and pathos tells the story of three very different people affected by cancer and by each other.
View DetailsGreen Fields
by Peretz Hirschbein, Translated by Nahma Sandrow
The original play from which the most popular and beloved of Yiddish films was adapted. A love story among country folk.
A dramatic reading celebrating Jewish traditions - co-sponsored by the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center Program Committee, in the Harriet B. Freedberg Learning Center of the MV Hebrew Center.
Summerfolk
A new play by Carol Rocamora, inspired by Gorky's work
It's 1904, in an idyllic summer community outside Moscow (very much like Martha's Vineyard). Soon the vacationers' halcyon days are interrupted by a celebrity arrival, who turns their tranquil world upside down.
View DetailsThe Same Man – Saturday Afternoon Special
George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, two giants of English literature, meet and converse in the summer of 1949.
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The Same Boat
With their marriage on the rocks, a wealthy Connecticut couple embarks on their summer sailing vacation to the Vineyard. They are joined by an unexpected crew member - a young bohemian artist/dancer/model/past life regression therapist. High jinks on the high seas abound as husband and wife are seduced and their lives are transformed by their mysterious nautical guest.
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77%
Former title, SCHOONER
A play about modern marriage - Eric's wife is out of town closing a big business deal, he just blew his last job, the kids are acting out and his mother-in-law just moved in. Have you ever wanted to sail away?
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A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City
An unlikely pair of strangers — a twentysomething foul-mouthed comedienne and a world-weary middle-aged tech geek — are brought together unexpectedly when their cancer-stricken mothers become roommates in the hospital. Together, these two very lost people must negotiate some of life’s heaviest problems — and make some of the world’s more inappropriate jokes — as they learn to laugh through their pain and to lean on each other when all they want to do is run away.
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Murder
Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav
This morally and ethically complex drama is written by the most prolific and most produced playwright of modern Israel. Levin's theatre art permits no facile judgments among the relationships of Middle East inhabitants and their families. His metaphors can help us see, even as they belie, our conventional explanations. Levin never takes the easy way out of an uneasy situation. MURDER is a prime example of his daring.
This reading is co-sponsored by the Martha's Vineyard Hebrew Center Program Committee in the Harriet B. Freedberg Learning Center of the MVHC.
Exposed
A scorching satire on the extreme political and religious right in our country. Alternating prose, verse, and music, and loosely based on Moliere's Tartuffe, it follows the career of a hypocritical televangelist running for Congress in Texas, and the wealthy entrepreneur eager to finance his campaign and perhaps throw his daughter into the deal as well. Funny, ferocious, and offensive, it is destined to tickle the funny bone and scratch the pious nerve ends.
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Not Constantinople
An elderly couple settles into the Witness Protection Program in a gated community in Boca Raton. The husband unwittingly befriends a hit man with a contract on him. But when the husband develops Alzheimer's, the hit man develops a conscience: why kill a guy who won't know his own name soon? Time to send another hit man - a woman with an MBA.
Yes, this is a dark comedy.
Father-Land
*This performance has been cancelled* After being disowned by his family, the grandson of a recently deceased German doctor arrives in America from Germany with a secret and a passionate request that both moves and enrages the adult son and daughter of a World War II American prisoner of war.
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Tevye, Two Daughters, and a Cow
Translated from the Yiddish by Julius & Frances Butwin
In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Broadway opening of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, the Martha's Vineyard Playhouse revisits three of Shalom Aleichem's original tales of Tevye and his family. Here, without spectacle, is the simplicity of the shtetl, the grit and gumption, the struggles, and the joyous loves of a world which is no more.
Joann Green Breuer, devisor, directs several terrific island talents.
This reading is co-sponsored by the Martha's Vineyard Hebrew Center Program Committee in the Harriet B. Freedberg Learning Center of the MVHC.
Sweetened Water
A house on Martha's Vineyard is the setting for this play about Cynthia, a recent widow dealing with her sorrow and an uncertain future; and Richard, a priest who has just lost his mother. At the suggestion of their mutual friend, Sara, Richard moves into Cynthia's house for a quiet retreat. Themes of grief, faith, intimacy and secrets are paramount as these three individuals come to terms with events that have now bound them inextricably together.
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My address is still Walton have you forgotten it?
A play made for the set of Charlie Rose, presenting a host of interviewers and guests, and one intriguing translator.
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Dirty Pictures
In a true story of love and betrayal, in 1960 three gay Smith College professors are arrested for looking at pictures of naked men, and their lives are destroyed. By Dinitia Smith, author and longtime cultural correspondent for the New York Times.
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On Religion
Molly Purves and Leslie J. Stark
ON RELIGION is a dramatized contemplation on the complex issues of faith and religion in modern society. Grace, a militant atheist professor, clashes with her born-again son, Tom. When he is suddenly killed in a suicide bombing, the conflict between her grief and her principles threatens to rip her and her family apart.
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The Second Girl
The family of James Tyrone gathered in the living room in August 1912 and the events of that day play out in the great American Classic, Long Day's Journey Into Night. The Second Girl tells the story of what went on in the kitchen on that day between the immigrant Irish servant girls, Bridget and Cathleen and the chauffeur, Jack Smythe. It evokes the love and despair of the big house while detailing the thrill, the tragedy and the triumphs that occur when you sacrifice one home for another.
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