Hit the Wall
Play Description
It’s the summer of ’69, and the death of music icon Judy Garland has emboldened her gay followers. A routine police raid on an underground Greenwich Village hotspot erupts into a full-scale riot, the impetus of the modern gay rights movement. That’s the well-known, oft-rehearsed myth of Stonewall, anyhow. Smash that myth against the vivid theatrical imagination of playwright Ike Holter, add a howling live rock ‘n’ roll band, and you get HIT THE WALL. Remixing this historic confrontation reveals ten unlikely revolutionaries, caught in the turmoil and fighting to claim “I was there.”
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (3 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
- Reviews
- About the Author(s)
- About the Book
- Special Notes
- Productions
Press Quotes
“The words ‘I was there,’ intoned repeatedly by the characters in HIT THE WALL, give Ike Holter’s play about the 1969 Stonewall riots the self-consecrated holiness of solemn testimony. But the crucial refrain is: ‘The reports of what happened next are not exactly clear.’ Given the extent to which urban legend and documented research of the events have blurred together over the decades, any dramatic consideration of Stonewall must embrace the mythology. So Mr Holter’s impassioned evocation of the sparks that ignited the gay rights movement … are strongest when stylized interpretation eclipses conventional realism … Watching the characters strut through a liberating dance that erupts into chaos and violence when police lights pierce the smoky haze gives the sense of being caught up in that momentous clash … Among the most fully realized figures are Carson, a black drag queen as fearful as he is imperious; Peg, a ‘stone butch’ lesbian ostracized by her family; and the ‘Snap Queen Team’ of Tano and Mika, throwing shade at passers-by from their perch on a Christopher Street stoop. The play is deeply affecting at times, notably when Carson is bitterly rebuked during a rare foray outside in daylight to pay his respects at the funeral of Judy Garland. Or when Peg’s uptight sister insensitively suggests how much better off she would be if she could just ‘hold it in.’ … [We] feel the unendurable pain of self-denial … What’s perhaps more significant is that Mr Holter is working in a vernacular that speaks sincerely and directly to today’s gay youth. His freewheeling play invites them to honor the earlier generation that broke the chains of marginalization and invisibility.” —David Rooney, The New York Times
Author(s)
Ike HolterIke Holter is a resident playwright at Victory Gardens Theater and has been commissioned by The Kennedy Center, South Coast Rep and The Playwrights' Center. His work has been produced across the country from the Goodman and Steppenwolf in Chicago to the Lily Tomlin Center in LA to Primary Stages Off-Broadway. In 2017 he was awarded the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize for Drama.
Book Information
| Publisher | BPPI |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 7/22/2019 |
| Pages | 80 |
| ISBN | 9780881458459 |
Special Notes
If original stage producers credits appear in bold below, all licensees are required to include them in the following form on the title page in all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play and in all advertising in which the full cast appears in size of type not less than ten percent (10%) of the size of the title of the Play:
The world premiere of HIT THE WALL was presented by The Inconvenience
and performed as part of GARAGE REP:
three productions presented in rotating repertory in The Garage at Steppenwolf, Chicago, IL.
Chris Chmelik, Artistic Director and Missi Davis, Executive Director
Originally produced Off Broadway by the Barrow Street Theatre
In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:
by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
www.broadwayplaypublishing.com
Upcoming and Recent Productions
Professional
Nonprofessional
Related Plays
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
In the Bolivian jungle, Che Guevara is captured and held in a one-room schoolhouse. For two days neither the Bolivian President nor the U.S. State Department is able to decide Che’s fate. The young schoolteacher of the village insists that she be given permission to speak to the famous revolutionary. Her conversations with Che — based on historical fact — are the heart of the play.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Set in 1963, LAST DAYS OF THE HIGH FLIER is the story of a young man waiting for his life to begin, the mysterious ex-pilot who enters his life, and the intricate dance of friendship, betrayal, and forgiveness that takes place between the two men. Historically based, the story revolves around political conspiracies, including the CIA’s secret war in Laos. It also addresses personal struggles that occurred almost a half-century ago but still have relevance in an age in which intelligence failures and civil liberties threats dominate the news.
Production Info
Cast: 10 total (4 female, 6 male)Full Length Drama (about 130 minutes)
Multiple Sets
Contemporary Costumes
$11.95–$15.00
Play Description
Rural Central Texas, 1962. Dave, still lives in the old family home that his father built. The family is still the only Jewish family in this isolated country town. As his son Nathan faces the (to him) bizarre prospect of becoming Bar Mitzvah, his wife Rachel faces an even greater crisis of faith. As Dave encounters the remoteness of his community, and the even further distance from the faith of his father, his entire family faces the legacy left behind by their immigrant forebears: What do the Jews believe? This is a fictionalized account of the next generation of the family introduced in THE IMMIGRANT, and the second play in Mark Harelik’s Texas saga of one Jewish-American family.
Production Info
Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem for the trial of the century.
Production Info
Cast: 2 total (1 female, 1 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
It is Armistice Day, 1962. Three veterans of the World Wars exchange army stories, lament the vagaries of age, and wait for the arrival of Harry, their old army buddy. OLD SOLDIERS is about friendship, loyalty, and the very personal realities of war.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (1 female, 3 male)Short Drama (about 50 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Play Description
Through the use of dialogue, music, chant, dance, pantomime, and image, the play satirizes attitudes toward the Vietnam war. It attempts to present the very complicated, tragic, and helplessly divided atmosphere that prevailed in America, and to look at hapless emotions in a hopelessly complex mythology of war. With the technique of “transformations” the play unfolds. People change from flowers to individuals to machines, from one character to another, from character into actor into bystander and back to character or abstract image or comment; women change to men and back to women again. Americans change into Vietnamese into Viet Cong and back to American soldiers. The line of the play follows several soldiers from birth, to induction, to indoctrination, to overseas, to battle, to fraternization, and to death. Along the way we meet their mothers, their instructors, their superiors, their elected officials, their friends and their enemies, their tormentors and finally their ghosts. A strong ensemble spirit emerges via the actors' technique and interaction with one another and with the audience. The form of the play is constructed so as to manifest the reality of theatre — not as a replica of or comment upon life but as a part of life — and thus restore its urgency and relevance.
Production Info
Cast: 13 total (6 female, 7 male)Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
It’s 1961. Fidel has turned Havana upside down. Veronica’s family has fled the country, leaving her behind to find a new family. Pregnant and ready to participate in whatever Fidel throws her way, she is not fully prepared for everything the revolution has in store. ILLUMINATING VERONICA is a play about betrayal and hope that looks at Castro’s Cuba, not as a demonic state, nor as a perfect paradise, but as a work in progress.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)Full Length Drama (about 115 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
Memory and song converge as Judy Holliday, the “dumb blonde” with a genius IQ, charts her experiences from Greenwich Village to Broadway and beyond with notable show business alums, including Leonard Bernstein and Marilyn Monroe.
Production Info
Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male, doubling)Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Period Costumes
$11.95
Play Description
In 1962, on location in Rome, a fading movie star and his wife are entangled in an unraveling web of secrets, lies, and sexual impropriety that threatens to tear apart their family.
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male)Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
I have always loved the story in Henry James’ novel, Washington Square, and I needed to find something for a young Hispanic actress I wanted to work with, so with Ron Bashford’s help, we adapted the story. As we worked on it, we found that it fit really well in the early Sixties, on the verge of the huge social revolution. This time period also made sense because the female lead was trapped in the fifties by her conservative mother, a successful woman who was ashamed of having a half-Hispanic child. Sometimes, when you’re working on a play, things fall in place — the backstory for our play (I say “our” because Ron Bashford was such a close collaborator) arose effortlessly out of the story we were presenting. As the last scene takes place, the young Hispanic daughter hears the beginning of a Sixties protest and leaves the house to join them.
—Constance Congdon
Production Info
Cast: 6 total (4 female, 2 male)Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Period Costumes
$15.00–$15.95
Play Description
LOOPED depicts an actual 1965 recording session in which an intoxicated Tallulah Bankhead required eight hours to dub a single line from her final movie Die! Die! My Darling! while antagonizing the film editor assigned to the job.
Production Info
Cast: 3 total (1 female, 2 male)Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes