Pub Date: Jan. 25th, 2019
Format: Paperback
Pages: 690
Trim Size: 6″ x 9″
ISBN: 978–0–983547–86–0
Price: $30

After 10 years and 25 productions, the Minneapolis-based Workhaus Collective ended its run in 2016. This 12-play anthology contains a sampling of the group’s finest work, along with essays from each playwright with advice and ideas about writer-driven collective theater. The plays cover an incredible array of topics and styles, from globalization to punk rock to power, from science fiction to steampunk to labor unions. Many feature strong, complex female lead characters; there are plays that reference classics of theater and literature and plays that seem to be inventing their form as they go. Whatever their differences, they are unified by the fact that the writer urgently needed to bring that story to the stage at that precise moment in time. And every member of Workhaus continues to be a working writer, a success in and of itself.

From the Introduction:

One question puts us into existence–what if playwrights were the artistic force behind the production of their own work? Our answer was a decade of plays that challenged the institutional structures of how new plays are written and how they make their way onto a stage and in front of an audience. The plays in this anthology represent the depth and breadth of what can be created, realized, and experienced in front of an audience when playwrights are trusted to know what it is they want to say, how to say it, and who should be in the room when it is done.

Playwrights include Trista Baldwin, Alan Berks, Jeannine Coulombe, Christina Ham, Cory Hinkle, Carson Kreitzer, Sarah Myers, Dominic Orlando, Deborah Stein, Victoria Stewart, Joe Waechter, and Stanton Wood, with an Afterword by Jeremy Cohen, Producing Artistic Director of the Playwright’s Center.

PURCHASE: