• My Account
  • Quick Order
  • Cart
  • Checkout
 
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Clients

 
  • Home
  • The Plays
    • The Plays
    • Not Yet Published
    • Newly Published
    • Bestsellers
    • Classics
    • Collections
    • Bundles
    • Catalog
  • Performance Rights
    • Restrictions
    • Payments
    • Performance Rights
    • Upcoming Productions
  • Authors
  • FAQs
    • FAQs
    • Shipping Info
    • Refund Policy
    • Privacy Policy
    • Submissions
    • Wholesale Customers
    • Desk Copies
  • Blog
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
Menu
  • Home
  • The Plays
    • The Plays
    • Not Yet Published
    • Newly Published
    • Bestsellers
    • Classics
    • Collections
    • Bundles
    • Catalog
  • Performance Rights
    • Restrictions
    • Payments
    • Performance Rights
    • Upcoming Productions
  • Authors
  • FAQs
    • FAQs
    • Shipping Info
    • Refund Policy
    • Privacy Policy
    • Submissions
    • Wholesale Customers
    • Desk Copies
  • Blog
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
 

  • Home
  • The Plays
    • The Plays
    • Not Yet Published
    • Newly Published
    • Bestsellers
    • Classics
    • Collections
    • Bundles
    • Catalog
  • Performance Rights
    • Restrictions
    • Payments
    • Performance Rights
    • Upcoming Productions
  • Authors
  • FAQs
    • FAQs
    • Shipping Info
    • Refund Policy
    • Privacy Policy
    • Submissions
    • Wholesale Customers
    • Desk Copies
  • Blog
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
 
  • Home
  • >
  • The Plays
  • >
  • Poor Folk’s Pleasure
    Cover art by Art Rosenbaum

    Poor Folk’s Pleasure

    Len Jenkin
    Trade Edition$15.95
    ePlay$15.00 + $10.00 per additional user
    Performance Rights

    Play Description

    A roller-coaster ride through the American scene, from the Fascination Parlor to Leroy Smiles the Crab-boy, and from the movie set to the tattoo parlor to Frankie the Finn. A concert for actors.

    Production Info

    Cast: 5 total (1 female, 4 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes
    Categories: The Plays Tags: Sui Generis
    • Reviews
    • About the Author(s)
    • About the Book
    • Special Notes

    Press Quotes

    “Len Jenkin not only has a vivid imagination, but he also has an artist’s command of his craft.” —New York Times

    “Len Jenkin has an unusual talent for reaching into shadowy places in the human psyche and coming up with evocative images.” —Journal American (Seattle)

    “Jenkin’s plays have plenty of plot and delicious language, but the transience of experience is the main theme that runs through Jenkin’s work. He manipulates theatrical illusions with a playful manner that recalls Jorge Luis Borges, to disguise meditations on mortality.” —Village Voice (New York)

    “Jenkin explores many of the raw nerve ends in our society; the deep need to believe an absolute, while at the same time reveling in the gratification of the present; the difference between titillation and satisfaction; the bizarre nature of reality; and the real nature of the bizarre.” —Times, Seattle

    Author(s)

    • Len Jenkin

      Len Jenkin is a novelist, playwright, director, and screenwriter. His novels include N Judah, New Jerusalem, and The Secret Life of Billy's Uncle Myron (with Emily Jenkins). Plays include DARK RIDE, PILGRIMS OF THE NIGHT, CARELESS LOVE, MY UNCLE SAM, LIMBO TALES, THE DREAM EXPRESS, and LIKE I SAY. His works for the stage have been produced throughout the United States, as well as in England, Germany, France, Denmark, and Japan. His films include Blame It on the Night, Welcome to Oblivion, and American Notes. He has received many honors and awards, including three Obie awards for directing and playwriting, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation Award, a nomination for an Emmy Award, and four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Mr. Jenkin holds a Ph.D. in American Literature from Columbia University. He's a Professor in the Dramatic Writing Department, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and lives in New York City.

    Book Information

    Publisher BPPI
    Publication Date 12/1/2005
    Pages 72
    ISBN 9780881452990

    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:

    Originally produced by River Arts Repertory, Woodstock NY

    In addition, the following must appear within all programs distributed in connection with performances of the Play:

    Poor Folk’s Pleasure is produced
    by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
    www.broadwayplaypublishing.com

    Related Plays

    $15.00–$15.95
    My Uncle Sam
    Len Jenkin
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    Uncle Sam was a novelties salesman who died one night, alone and broke, in a Pittsburgh hotel. But he was also a larger-than-life figure, a mythic hero, to his nephew — who now seeks to discover his uncle's true story. His quest is a quixotic and picaresque one, involving a seductive nightclub singer who promises to marry Sam if he can locate his ne'er-do-well brother (who absconded with the proceeds from a robbery), and developing into a series of sometimes funny, sometimes hair-raising episodes as the nephew “becomes” his uncle in his youth and journeys to a remote lighthouse, a rather sinister university laboratory, an opium den, the clinic of a Mexican quack, and a very odd miniature golf course — all intriguingly distorted, as though viewed through a funhouse mirror. In the end it is really the landscape of the mind that is explored and illuminated, as the trail leads back to Old Sam and the disquieting knowledge that dreams and reality are, in the final essence, often one and the same, with the “truth” still remaining tantalizingly out of reach.

    Production Info

    Cast: 11 total (5 female, 6 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Dark Ride
    Len Jenkin
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    A brilliantly conceived and highly theatrical experience in absurdist drama, in which the audience is taken on a wild and funny metaphysical journey into the fertile imaginations of the diverse characters whose bizarre stories are deftly interwoven into the fabric of the play. DARK RIDE is comprised of a series of vignettes involving characters who, at first, appear to bear no relation to each other. A mysterious figure gives a scholar an ancient manuscript to translate; a thief steals an enormous jewel; a woman assures us that life is all coincidence; a dream-like waitress serves her customers all manner of thoughts and suggestions but no food. The images are bizarrely funny and provocative and, in time, coalesce into a pattern of driving concerns and obsessions that come into focus when the various characters finally meet at an oculists convention in Mexico City. Phantasmagoric, the play takes us on a journey that, in the final essence, transcends the physical world to explore the inner recesses of the mind.

    Production Info

    Cast: 10 total (4 female, 6 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Harm’s Way
    Mac Wellman
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    In Mac Wellman’s black comedy, a very angry person attempts to make sense of his understanding of law and order in a world of other angry persons.

    Production Info

    Cast: 10 total (5 female, 5 male)
    Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
    Multiple Sets
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Enterprise
    Brian Parks
    $15.00–$15.95
    Winner of the Fringe First Award at the 2017 Edinburgh Festival Fringe

    Play Description

    Four businesspeople — Landry, Owens, Sanders, and Weaver — arrive in the morning at their skyscraper office and soon learn that their company is on the brink of collapse. At first upset and panicked at the news, they decide that this can instead be a chance to finally prove themselves — they'll come up with a proposal, a new business plan that will impress the company chairman and save both the business and their careers. What follows is an antic all-day, all-night effort, as the four race to complete the proposal by the next morning. At first they all work together. But after that effort collapses amid acrimony and finger-pointing, they break into two competing teams, each trying to outdo the other and win the chairman's final approval as they work feverishly all through the night. ENTERPRISE is fast-paced, edgy, semi-surreal comedy about business, ambition, skyscrapers, and office bathrooms.

    Production Info

    Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male, flexible casting, up to 4 females or 4 males)
    Full Length Comedy (about 65 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00
    A 3D Adventure
    Matt Lyle
    $15.00

    Play Description

    A small theater company's next ill-advised production, a modern vaudeville, goes off the rails the night before opening. The cast rebels against Doc, the writer/director/star/producer, and chooses a midnight showing of the newest Star Wars movie over ironing out the show's kinks. Then, of course, they're sucked into a vortex and spit out into a world that resembles some of our most beloved films. It's up to Doc and his trusty sidekick, Boof, to go on a 3D adventure to rescue the cast and the show, and the entire theatrical art form. Part vaudeville, part Hope/Crosby Road Show, A 3D ADVENTURE is an inventive love letter to both the theater and the movies.

    Production Info

    Cast: 6 total (3 female, 3 male, doubling, flexible casting, up to 15 actors)
    Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Duke Kahanamoku vs The Surfnappers
    Eric Overmyer
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    A play for children. When a statue of the legendary Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku comes to life, he relates his story to the Hawaiian children.

    Production Info

    Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)
    Full Length Comedy (about 80 minutes)
    Single Set
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Jonah
    Len Jenkin
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    JONAH is a rumination on the story of the man and the sea. Jonah's a man on the run. He hops a Greyhound to Joppa and then grabs a cabin on the ocean-bound Carnival Princess. Drinking away his sorrows at the ship's Grass Skirt Grill, the lounge band Sheila and the Lovetones plays him into a stupor before he tumbles into the waves. Len Jenkin's JONAH is a contemporary retelling of the unfaithful servant; some love stories about the evil city of Ninevah, a Dairy Queen, and of course, the whale.

    Production Info

    Cast: 9 total (4 female, 5 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Five of Us
    Len Jenkin
    $15.00–$15.95
    Winner of a 1984 Obie Award

    Play Description

    FIVE OF US deals with the parallel lives of New York tenement dwellers, who live next door to each other but whose paths do not cross until one fateful moment, which spells disaster for them all. One apartment is occupied by Mark, a young writer who churns out pornography while planning the “big novel” he will someday write, and his live-in girlfriend, Lee, an anthropology grad who works as a waitress. Their next-door neighbor is Herman, a mentally deficient messenger who speaks in a language all his own and amuses himself by calling 800 numbers to make hotel reservations he has no intention of keeping. When Lee is offered a chance to join an anthropological expedition to Sri Lanka, Mark is faced with a crisis — the loss of both her companionship and her income. With the connivance of his ex-con buddy, Eddie, a street-smart would-be mercenary, Mark decides to prop up his finances by robbing Herman's apartment, in the misguided belief that the poor eccentric has been hoarding money. But, instead, what they find is the bizarre detritus of a stunted life — a life which is abruptly ended when Herman, coming upon them, is startled into a fatal epileptic fit. Fearful and guilt-ridden, Mark and Eddie try to cover their tracks — but as the play ends it is also clear that no matter how far or fast they flee they will never escape the spectre of the lonely misfit whose pathetic world they have so thoughtlessly and fatally shattered.

    Production Info

    Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    The Found Dog Ribbon Dance
    Dominic Finocchiaro
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    In the Pacific Northwest live Norma, a professional cuddler and reluctant dog-rescuer, and Norm, an amateur ribbon-dancer and attentive barista. Together they navigate loneliness, vulnerability, a collection of eccentric characters, and the healing power of human connection.

    Production Info

    Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)
    Full Length Comedy (about 90 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    The Wooden Breeks
    Glen Berger
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    Set in the fantastical, miserable village of Brood, Glen Berger's ingenious play conjures up a marvelously imaginative world peopled by a large cast of dreamers, schemers and would-be lovers. Tormented by the memory of a beautiful young girl he adored and lost, and saddled with the child she left behind as a painful reminder of their doomed romance, a village tinker turned poet tries to ease his pain by conjuring up a hilarious and extremely moving tale, a story made up for the young boy as they sit in front of the dying embers of their hearth. When the last spark is extinguished, we have gone along with them on a magical journey filled with music, shadow, and light, meeting along the way a town full of comically misguided characters and an enchanting young saleswoman of casket bell devices for the prematurely buried. A rich and delightful fairy tale for everyone who remembers what a great story sounds like.

    Production Info

    Cast: 9 total (3 female, 6 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 140 minutes)
    Single Set
    Contemporary Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Great Men of Science, Nos. 21 & 22
    Glen Berger
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    Battling obstacles both grand and trivial in eighteenth-century France, two little-known scientists strive mightily to advance humanity’s understanding of life and the universe at the heady height of the Age of Enlightenment.

    Production Info

    Cast: 7 total (2 female, 5 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Period Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Lost in Time
    Tony Pasqualini
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    Danny Petrelli, a 60-year-old man, wakes up one morning as his 23-year-old self. When he attempts to reconnect with his future wife and rectify mistakes he has made, he inadvertently changes (and possibly destroys) everything he values. LOST IN TIME is about the destructive power of manipulating your life. And the losses you will suffer if you don't embrace what's in front of you, in the here and now.

    Production Info

    Cast: 4 total (2 female, 2 male)
    Full Length Comedy (about 100 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Contemporary Costumes

    Contact Info

    BROADWAY PLAY PUBLISHING INC
    148 W 80th St, NY, NY 10024
    Open: Mon – Fri, 8am – 6pm EST
    Tel: 212-772-8334
    info@broadwayplaypublishing.com
    www.broadwayplaypublishing.com

    Company Info

    • About Us
    • Shipping Info
    • Refund Policy
    • Privacy Policy
    • Submissions
    • Contact Us

    Pages

    • Home
    • The Plays
    • Performance Rights
    • Authors
    • FAQs
    • Blog

    Newsletter Sign Up

    • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
    © Broadway Play Publishing Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

    ‹ › ×