• 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
  • >
  • The Fraudster
    Cover art "Macaire as Speculator" by Honoré Daumier

    The Fraudster

    Honoré de Balzac, translated by Laurence Senelick
    Trade Edition$15.95
    ePlay$15.00 + $10.00 per additional user
    Performance Rights

    Play Description

    THE FRAUDSTER follows Auguste Mercadet, a man fighting against his creditors and the ruses he uses to escape them.

    Production Info

    Cast: 15 total (4 female, 11 male)
    Full Length Comedy (about 120 minutes)
    Single Set
    Period Costumes
    Categories: The Plays, Newly Published, Classics Tags: French, 19th Century
    • Reviews
    • About the Author(s)
    • About the Book
    • Special Notes

    Press Quotes

    “The name has remained in the language to designate a glib-tongued promoter of doubtful enterprises. But it is more than a character comedy; it is also one of manners and a satire on an epoch of frenzied speculation, when small business gave way to large combinations and stock-companies, when money, not honor, was the god of France … It is the earliest representative of naturalism on the stage.” —Joseph L Borgerhoff, 1931

    “The great theme of THE FRAUDSTER is the void. This void is incarnate in Godeau, the phantom partner always awaited, never seen, and who eventually creates a fortune from his void alone. Godeau is an invention for producing hallucinations; Godeau is not a creature, he’s an absence, but this absence exists because Godeau is a function … Balzac saw the coming modern age no longer as the world of property and individuals (categories in the Napoleonic code), but as that of functions and values. What exists is no longer what is but what is assumed to be. In THE FRAUDSTER all the characters are voids (except the women), but they exist because their vacuity is contiguous: they assume one another to exist.” —Roland Barthes

    Author(s)

    • Honoré de Balzac

      Honoré de Balzac was born May 20, 1799 in Tours, France and died August 18, 1850 in Paris. He produced a vast number of novels and short stories collectively called La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). He helped to establish the traditional form of the novel and is generally considered to be one of the greatest novelists of all time. He was also the author of seven plays.

    • Laurence Senelick

      Laurence Senelick is the Director of Graduate Studies, Fletcher Professor of Drama and Oratory, at Tufts University. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard. His expertise is in Russian theatre and drama, history of popular entertainment, gender and performance, history of directing, classical theory. Prof. Senelick is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books, the most recent being, Soviet Theatre: A Documentary History; Stanislavsky: A Life in Letters; and The American Stage: Writing on the American Theatre (Library of America) and A Historical Dictionary of Russian Theatre. Others books include: The Chekhov Theatre: A Century of the Plays in Performance and The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre, as well as over a hundred articles in learned journals. He is a former Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin. Prof. Senelick was named Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. Prof. Senelick has been named a Distinguished Scholar by both the American Society of Theatre Research and the Faculty Research Awards Council of Tufts University. He is the recipient of grants and awards from, among others, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has received the Barnard Hewitt Award of the American Society for Theatre Research for The Chekhov Theatre; the George Freedley Award of the Theatre Library Association for The Age and Stage of George L. Fox and The Changing Room; and the George Jean Nathan Award for best dramatic criticism of 2000. He holds the St. George medal of the Russian Ministry of Culture for services to Russian art and scholarship, and is honorary curator of Russian theatre at the Harvard Theatre Collection. He was also awarded a stipend from the TranScript/Mikhail Prokhorov Fund for Translation from the Russian. In 2008 he won the Graduate Teaching award (doctoral level) of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools and in 2012 the Betty Jean Jones Prize of American Theatre and Drama Society for Distinguished Teaching. He is a widely produced translator of plays from such authors as Chekhov and Feydeau, and director at Tufts of his own translations of The Inspector General, The Bakkhai, and Anything to Declare? He has acted and directed with such organizations as the Poets' Theatre, the Loeb Drama Center, the Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Baroque, the Actors Theatre of Louisville, and the revue The Proposition. He recently devised new courses on Cabaret, Theatre and Visual Studies, and Low Comedy and played Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape at the Balch Arena Theatre. His recipes appear in the Bon Appetit cookbooks.

    Book Information

    Publisher BPPI
    Publication Date 10/7/2022
    Pages 136
    ISBN 9780881459371

    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:

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

    The Fraudster is produced
    by special arrangement with Broadway Play Publishing Inc, NYC
    www.broadwayplaypublishing.com

    Related Plays

    $15.00
    The Snow Queen
    Lynne Alvarez
    $15.00

    Play Description

    Set in Denmark in the early 1890s, Nina, the Snow Queen, has migrated south yet once again to find her “boy” for the season. Upon running into Christian, she chooses him and whisks him away up north for the winter. But relationships are never that easy, and even though Nina has all the glitz and glamour on her side, as the winter draws to an end and spring appears, Analiese, the young heroine, journeys north to find her love. Thus a timeless tale wrought with danger, adventure, and love, THE SNOW QUEEN is a fairytale for adults who still believe in magic. Based on the classic Hans Christian Anderson story.

    Production Info

    Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 60 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Period Costumes
    Blasted Event
    Georges Feydeau, translated from the French by Laurence Senelick

    Play Description

    Trapped in a misalliance, a husband is set upon by his wife, his in-laws, and the midwife.

    Production Info

    Cast: 6 total (4 female, 2 male)
    Short Comedy (about 50 minutes)
    Single Set
    Period Costumes
    $11.95–$15.00
    Anything to Declare?
    Maurice Hennequin and Pierre Vebér, translated by Laurence Senelick
    $11.95–$15.00

    Play Description

    This classic and hilarious French farce commences when a customs official barges into newlyweds Robert and Paulette's train compartment at a most inopportune moment on their wedding night, rendering the poor fellow impotent. His parents-in-law demand that he consummate the marriage or it will be annulled, and Paulette will marry La Baule instead. Enter Mademoiselle Zeze, a courtesan, and let the games begin.

    Production Info

    Cast: 12 total (5 female, 7 male)
    Full Length Comedy (about 130 minutes)
    Multiple Sets
    Period Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Love Loves a Pornographer
    Jeff Goode
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    Lord Loveworthy has a problem. His only daughter is soon to be married. And the only way to pay for her wedding is to blackmail the vicar who’s seducing his wife. But how does a Victorian pornographer commit extortion, without inordinate discord, at tea?

    Production Info

    Cast: 7 total (3 female, 4 male)
    Full Length Comedy (about 120 minutes)
    Single Set
    Period Costumes
    $11.95–$15.00
    A Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds
    S Anksy, adaptation by Tony Kushner, translated from Yiddish by Joachim Neugroschel
    $11.95–$15.00

    Play Description

    Considered by many to be the greatest Yiddish drama, A DYBBUK recounts the tale of a wealthy man’s daughter possessed by the spirit of her dead beloved.

    Production Info

    Cast: 18 total (5 female, 13 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 160 minutes)
    Multiple Sets
    Period Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Crazy Horse and Three Stars
    David Wiltse
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    Crazy Horse, the Sioux leader, engages General Crook, Indian fighter, in a confrontation that results in the death of Crazy Horse.

    Production Info

    Cast: 6 total (6 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Period Costumes
    $11.95–$15.00
    The Learned Ladies
    Molière, translated from the French into English by A R Waller, adapted by Steven Pimlott and Colin Chambers
    $11.95–$15.00

    Play Description

    Molière's satire of intellectual snobbery focuses on the women folk of Chrysale's household, who look on all but intellectual pursuits as worthless and spurn love in favour of learning. The heroine, Chrysale's daughter Henriette, wants to marry Clitandre, but her mother wishes her to marry the poet Trissotin, who is worming his way into the household in order to marry Henriette for her family's fortune. When his avaricious plot is discovered, he is sent away in disgrace, leaving Henriette to marry Clitandre as she wishes.

    Production Info

    Cast: 13 total (5 female, 8 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
    Multiple Sets
    Period Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    The Daughters of the Moon
    Reginald Edmund
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    THE DAUGHTERS OF THE MOON follows a runaway slave girl and a former plantation mistress wanted for murder as they embark on a perilous journey North towards freedom, guided by an Ancient African Goddess.

    Production Info

    Cast: 7 total (7 female, 6 roles are for black actors)
    Full Length Drama (about 105 minutes)
    Minimal Set Requirements
    Period Costumes
    $15.00–$15.95
    Ghosts
    Henrik Ibsen, translated and adapted by Anthony Clarvoe
    $15.00–$15.95

    Play Description

    Ibsen’s 1881 masterpiece finds a fresh interpretation in Anthony Clarvoe’s taut adaptation in which a woman has to face her legacy of religious and sexual repression when her grown son comes home to tell her that he has an incurable sexually transmitted disease and asks her to help him die with dignity.

    Production Info

    Cast: 5 total (2 female, 3 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
    Single Set
    Period Costumes
    $11.95–$15.00
    The Father
    August Strindberg, adapted by Richard Nelson
    $11.95–$15.00

    Play Description

    Richard Nelson’s critically lauded adaptation of Strindberg’s classic, in which a power struggle between husband and wife leads to devastating consequences.

    Production Info

    Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 95 minutes)
    Multiple Sets
    Period Costumes
    $11.95–$15.00
    The Marriage of Figaro
    Pierre Beaumarchais, adapted by Richard Nelson
    $11.95–$15.00

    Play Description

    A Count's valet prepares to marry the Countess' chambermaid — until it becomes clear the Count wishes to revive an old law that will allow him to take advantage of the bride before the wedding. The valet's schemes to thwart the Count show the growing French endorsement of an aristocracy of merit and wits rather than birth, in Pierre Beaumarchais' 1784 play.

    Production Info

    Cast: 11 total (4 female, 7 male)
    Full Length Comedy (about 110 minutes)
    Multiple Sets
    Period Costumes
    $11.95
    Two Shakespearean Actors
    Richard Nelson
    $11.95

    Play Description

    Based on a true story. The year is 1849, the place New York City. Two arch rivals — the English star William Macready and the American matinee idol Edwin Forrest — tempt fate when both perform the Scottish Play on the same night in neighboring downtown theaters. Their feud helps incite the already-inflamed rage of anti-British theatergoers, who riot right outside Macready’s theater. Thirty-four people die in the fray.

    Production Info

    Cast: 24 total (7 female, 17 male)
    Full Length Drama (about 120 minutes)
    Multiple Sets
    Period 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.

    ‹ › ×