Shorter, Faster, Funnier (eBook)

Asian chefs cite five flavor notes--sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and spicy--without which no meal is complete. While assembling the plays in this anthology, the editors enjoyed a dazzling range of comedic hors d'oeuvres. From laugh-out-loud funny to subtly amusing, caustic, witty, or outrageous, there are as many flavors of comedy as there are sense of humor. We read over 400 short plays and monologues to create this all-you-can-eat comic buffet. We found delectable morsels by celebrated humorists Christopher Durang (Funeral Parlor), David Ives (The Blizzard), Warren Leight (Norm-Anon), Mark O'Donnell (You Know Who Else I Hate?), and Theresa Rebeck (The Contract), inspiring monologues by actor/playwrights Halley Feiffer (Thank You So Much fo Stopping), Dan Berkowitz (Sourpuss), and Tony Award winner Mary Louise Wilson (Tirade), plus enough superb audition pieces, two-handers, and ensemble plays to satisfy laugh-hungry actors, readers, and audience members. We chose monologues of all lengths, from Liz Ellison's swift Gabrielle and Elizabeth Wong's spiky Ripper Girl to Jeffrey Hatcher's epic Match Wits with Minka Lupino, from his monologue trio Murderers. Pete Barry's irascible businessman extends his free fall from a plane to hilarious lengths in Nine Point Eight Meters per Second per Second. Jane Shephard's Long Distance reveals a man's thorny encounter with a former classmate, while Edwin Snchez's Ernesto the Magnificent fiercely paints a performance by an embittered sword swallower. There's also a wealth of play for two actors. Amy Herzog's Christmas Present, Mark Harvey Levine's The Rental, and Garth Wingfield's Mary Just Broke Up with This Guy put unique spins on the staple of comedy, boy meets girl. In Anton Dudley's romantic Getting Home, boy meets hunky Indian cabdriver. The couple in Eric Lane's Curtain Raiser tackles an abandoned Woolworth building, in Wayne Rawley's The Scary Question, another couple bonds over zombies. There are graceful duets for young actors, including Samara Siskind's Bar Mitzvah Boy, Megan Mostyn-Brown's The Woods Are for Suckers and Chumps, Michael Mitnick's Life without Subtext, and Ean Miles Kessler's bullet-paced Brotherly Love. Senior actors will cherish Peter Handy's bittersweet Friendship and Drew Larimore's The Anniversary, quite possibly the first play about retirees in postapocalyptic Siberia. Three plays for two actresses--Nicole Quinn's lyrical Sandchair Cantata, Laura Shaine's poignant The Whole Truth & Nothing but the Bluetooth, and Barbara Wiechmann's salty duet for obsessed Realtors, 36 Rumson Road--treat women's darkest anxieties with a refreshingly light touch. On the testosterone side, Dan Kois's The Rumor outs a surprising scandal in men's sports, Gary Winter's I Love Neil LaBute deftly skewers the playwright dubbed 'America's reigning misanthrope,' and Dana Yeaton's Men in Heat bares the mysteries of the male biological clock. Genders bend freely in Adam Bock's Three Guys and a Brenda, in which all four title characters are played by actresses. Nina Shengold's Double Date upends political correctness by taking 'joined at the hip' at face value, while Jacquelyn Reingold's A Very Very Short Play sparks an airplane romance between a one-foot-tall woman and a twelve-foot-tall man, both played by actors of average height. Rob Ackerman's You Have Arrived also encourages very non-traditional casting, as...