FULL LENGTH PLAYS
THE MADRES
FRIENDS WITH GUNS
THE ABUELAS
It's 1978 in Buenos Aires, Argentina where people are disappearing right off the street but no one is talking about it. Carolina and her mother Josefina are searching for their pregnant daughter/granddaughter, Belén, who has been missing for twelve weeks. When they receive a surprise visit first from a former neighborhood priest who is now stationed at the ESMA (the Navy Mechanics school turned clandestine prison in the middle of the city,) they come up with a plan to try to see Belén one last time. Will it work? Will they be able to save her baby? Will they be able to save themselves?
*Finalist for the 2016 Saroyan/Paul Playwriting Prize for Human Rights
*Winner 2016 Ashland New Plays Festival
*Runner-Up Jane Chambers Playwriting Award
*Finalist for Kitchen Dog Theater's 2016 New Works Festival
*Finalist for the 2016 O'Neill Playwrights Conference
*Winner of Boulder Ensemble Theater Company's Generations Contest
*Finalist for the CTG/Humanitas Playwriting Prize
*Finalist for the 2016 Source Festival
THE ABUELAS
FRIENDS WITH GUNS
THE ABUELAS
Gabriela is an Argentine concert cellist living in Chicago with her American husband and adjusting to life as a new mom. Life is good - normal life worries - but good, until a visit from two strangers upends everything. This play, about the long and devastating repercussions of Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976-1983, asks how one goes on after discovering their life is a lie? Does the restoration of truth bring freedom or suffering? Is it possible to integrate two identities into one life? The Abuelas explores these questions as well as the heart’s capacity for forgiveness even in the face of the harshest betrayal.
Written as a companion play to THE MADRES.
*Winner 2018 Ashland New Plays Festival
*Finalist 2018 NNPN Showcase of New Plays
*Semi-finalist 2017 National Playwrights Conference, Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center
FRIENDS WITH GUNS
FRIENDS WITH GUNS
FRIENDS WITH GUNS
You think you know your friends, your neighbors, your spouse, but what happens when you suddenly find out they have a garage full of guns? This new dark comedy explores the complicated issue of gun proliferation when two young liberal couples are forced to confront their assumptions about who should own a gun and why. The time of easy answers regarding this issue is long gone. In the wake of current events, we are all forced to reexamine our strongly held beliefs about gun ownership. Friends With Guns explores the question of what we can compartmentalize…and what we can’t. It examines what happens when guns enter the conversation. It pulls the curtain back on liberals with guns. It asks what happens when suddenly one person in a marriage does a 180 on the gun issue. And it does all of this through a female lens.
-WINNER of Best Play of the Year, Valley Theatre Awards 2019
-Finalist, National Playwrights Conference, Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center, 2018
" What can I say that hasn't already been said about this amazing play by Stephanie Alison Walker? It has compelling dialogue, it calls for a very long--and difficult--look at the deeply held beliefs and their potential for warping into toxic obsession and masculinity. Both in seeing the play in production and in reading it, I was left wondering about some of my own deeply held beliefs and began analyzing what my positions were and whether I held those beliefs with sincerity or with more sinister purpose. It's a gut-check of a play that will leave you debating long after reading." - Franky D. Gonzalez, Playwright
"FRIENDS WITH GUNS was a finalist for InterAct's inaugural New Play Development Award. Out of a record-breaking 432 submissions, FRIENDS WITH GUNS stood out to us through its specific characters and its clever, surprising, feminist approach to gun ownership." - InterAct Theatre Company
AMERICAN HOME
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING
FRIENDS WITH GUNS
One out of every 54 homes in America received a foreclosure notice in 2008. Award winning playwright and author of "Love in the Time of Foreclosure," Stephanie Alison Walker, takes audiences on a deeply personal journey through recent history as she shines a light on three out of the millions of stories of loss. A young couple faces eviction from the dream house they stretched to buy; an elderly widow falls prey to a reverse mortgage scheme, and a minister of the prosperity gospel must face the flock shes led astray. American Home takes an unflinching look at the impossible choices people make when faced with losing everything, and, ultimately, celebrates the powerful resilience of community and the human spirit.
Winner of the 2011 Blue Ink Award by Chicago's American Blues Theater
Semi-Finalist for the 2010 Princess Grace Award
"Stephanie Alison Walker's American Home is a powerful and very important play about the 2008 housing crisis. Her wonderfully complex characters are challenged in a way that moves you, and, at times, makes you laugh. Just as important, amid all the harsh reality, Walker leaves us with a message of genuine hope while questions the American dream of being a home owner." - Jami Brandli, Playwright
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING
Primus Prize 2016 Finalist
O'Neill Playwrights Conference 2013 Semi-Finalist
Princess Grace Award 2008 Finalist
When Melissa receives a mysterious invitation to brunch from her mother after a two-year estrangement, she returns to a home where nothing is as it seems. Fathers lie, friends leave and she herself is failing in the artist’s world she covets- as her mother practices the art of disappearing before her very eyes. The devastating truth she discovers in her parents’ house threatens to tear all of them apart for good. Will Melissa stay and fight for her family? Or will she disappear too?
"Wow, wow, wow. Not sure why this isn't one of the most read and rec'd plays on NPX. This is an absolutely magnificent play. It takes an often wrote about subject and tackles it in a way that seems familiar, but at the same time blisteringly new. These are real people that we encounter--broken, beautiful, irredeemable people doing things that are wonderful, things that are awful. They are living and failing and winning in equal measures. Walker is one of my favorite playwrights, and soon, she will be one of yours too. Produce this play. Now."
- Emily Hageman, Playwright
THE SISTER HOUSE
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING
THE ART OF DISAPPEARING
A vampire comedy about grief.
When Ramona decides to rent out her deceased husband's office to a mysterious stranger, her daughter Ryan rebels. Three women and one imaginary vampire collide in a historic Victorian home with a past of its own, in this play about immortal love, mothers and daughters, and new beginnings.
*This play began as a Heideman Award finalist ten-minute play titled, "Edward Cullen Ruined My Mother's Love Life."
Winner -Max K. Lerner Playwriting Fellowship
The Inkwell Theater, 2019
"Grief. It takes as many forms as there are humans: a father’s shirt, wallpaper scrapings, vampire (yes, a vampire), compulsive shopping, a claw-foot tub. Walker finds these small remembrances and combines them to show us it is the small things in relationships that build to love. With a crackling mother-daughter relationship, a fantasy life, and a new friendship, we are treated to how we cope. New beginnings are as tough as endings. But there is beauty in the trying. Walker gives us the beauty." - Claudia Haas
THE ORDEAL OF WATER
SOPHIA HAYDEN DESERVES BETTER
SOPHIA HAYDEN DESERVES BETTER
1978. The first two female longshoremen at the Port of Los Angeles are trapped by their male co-workers in the cargo hold of a container ship just as it is heading to Shanghai. As they struggle to survive,
they are visited by witches, who both help them and test them.
This play is inspired by the first women to work at the Port of Los Angeles as Longshoremen. The play is a work of fiction. The characters and story are a product of the playwright's imagination.
*This is a new play.
*Finalist for the 2020 Bay Area Playwrights Festival
*Finalist for Local Theatre Company's New Play Lab 2020
" This is a beautiful, lyrical play that slams the past right up against the present with rewarding results. Its jumping-off point is high stakes and the tension doesn't ever let up. Full of vibrant characters and terrific life-or-death conflict, it packs in a bit of mayhem, a bit of magic, and whole lot of insight into issues women have had to face down through the ages. It's this kind of richness that makes Stephanie Alison Walker a playwright whose work I always follow. "
-Lisa Dillman, Playwright
"Playwrights Foundation congratulates THE ORDEAL OF WATER as a Finalist for BAPF 2020. This play rose to the top 35 out of 735 plays submitted, and was discussed at length by our Bay Area Literary Council for consideration in our season. We loved how this play uses the language of theater to illuminate challenging perspectives and compelling intersectional questions. This play ultimately moved & inspired us and spoke to the core mission of PF. We hope that once we’re allowed to return to our theaters again, it will be considered for production to reach new audiences. " - Playwrights Foundation
SOPHIA HAYDEN DESERVES BETTER
SOPHIA HAYDEN DESERVES BETTER
SOPHIA HAYDEN DESERVES BETTER
In 1891 a brilliant 23-year-old woman won an architecture contest to design the Woman’s Building for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. What should have been the start to a flourishing career in architecture became career-ending. Throughout the two-year process of building The Woman’s Building, the architect quietly endured bullying, micromanaging and undermining until she finally spoke up. In a time when women were defined as physically and intellectually weaker than men, her concerns were not only not heard, but she was sent to a sanitarium. Diagnosed with melancholia due to overexertion. Silenced. After the fair, her building was destroyed and she never built another building again. Her name was Sophia Hayden and she deserves better.
*This is a new play
*Written in Feb 2021 as part of the Playwrights Union's February Challenge
"A brutal and beautiful play that told with so much heart and humor that you will find yourself captivated, enraged, and activated. These roles are actor's dreams. Every actor in this piece has a standout moment all while in total service to the story. What starts out as historical drama reveals itself to be a cautionary tale about the destruction and damage done by chronic invalidation. Sophia Hayden may deserve better, but I honestly can't picture it getting any better than this." - Michael Shutt, Playwright/Actor
three fittings
New Play Exchange
New Play Exchange
Three brides-to-be, one bridal salon, and a million perfect dresses. One bride may have said yes too soon, terrified she's purchased a gown (and perhaps more) that she might, in the end, despise. Another bride believes matching bridesmaid dresses are fascist and would rather end world hunger than register at Tiffany's. And yet another bride reminds us that it is truly not about the dress. Along with the wedding gowns…love, heartbreak, longing, and delusion are on display at a bridal boutique.
*Three Fittings was produced in 2003 at the Elephant Lab Theatre in Hollywood.