David’s RedHaired Death

Part stand-up comedy, part stand-up tragedy for two. Redhaired mythology glorifies and empowers two women and leads them into a big love, but can’t lead them safely out again. If love can’t overcome every obstacle, is it still love?

Produced by Woolly Mammoth Theatre, DC, Soho Rep, NY, Annex Theatre, Seattle, Bailiwick Theatre, Chicago, Brat Theatre, Philadelphia, Frontera @Hyde Park, Austin, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Scotland, and at over 50 theatres here and abroad.

2F, 2M

“Critics endure a lot of dull nights for the hope of seeing a show like David’s Redhaired Death.  Sherry Kramer’s beautifully told, warmly felt and perfectly played play is a moving 85 minute exploration of the power of grief to choke off love.”  
- Lawrence Bommer, Windy City Times

“In Sherry Kramer's extraordinary David's RedHaired Death, Jean receives the news of her beloved brother's death at virtually the same moment that she consummates her obsessive romance with the enchanting Marilyn...Kramer's play is like a puzzle: after slowly and painstakingly connecting a series of dots, one uncovers an integrated image out of what appeared to be chaos.”
- Mary Shen Barnidge, The Chicago Reader

Awards: Jane Chambers Playwriting Award

Three Quarter Inches of Sky

The doctors said Trula’s 90 year old father’s had two years left before he’d need to go into memory care. So Trula moved him in with her. But year after year, his memory isn’t getting worse. On the one hand, that’s wonderful. And on the other hand? Trula has another problem. And it’s not just that her father will eat only chicken pot pies and they’ve stopped making the one brand he will eat.

Three Quarter Inches of Sky has been workshopped and presented by Rude Mechs Rude Fusion in Austin, TX, the New Harmony Project, as part of the Ruth Easton New Play Series at the Playwrights Center, and at the Dorset Theatre Festival.

2F, 1M

The Bay of Fundy

May eats dinner every night on the most valuable, storied antique table in the world. But her husband wants to sell it. A troubled marriage, a mysterious malaise, and where is all that water coming from? A play about American money and the American dream of a table big enough to feed the world.

The Bay of Fundy has been presented in the Williamstown Theatre Festival Reading Series, the Dorset Theatre Festival Reading Series, the Ruth Easton Series Reading at the Playwrights Center, and as part of the First Light Festival, Theatre of the First Amendment, Fairfax, VA.

In Conversation at The Playwrights Center: Writing a Play about Money

2F, 2M

When Something Wonderful Ends

While packing up her parents’ home following the death of her mother, Sherry uncovers the treasure trove of Barbies from her baby-boom childhood while embarking on the homework of a lifetime: discovering the roots of Islamic hatred of America that was born in our dependence on oil in the Middle East. 

Produced by Actors Theatre of Louisville, Humana Festival of New American Plays in a co-production with Interact Theatre, Dorset Theatre Festival, Dorset, VT, Red Then co-production w/ Rude Mechanicals, Austin, Actors Express, Atlanta, Playhouse West, Walnut Creek, CA, and The Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey.  It was also presented in the Toyko International Arts Festival and workshopped at the Ojai Playwrights Festival.

“… it is, bottom line, a moving and provocative piece.”  -Christine Dolan, Miami Herald

“As timely as it was revealing and as witty as wise.” -Robert Faires, The Austin Chronicle

“In her incisive one-woman, autobiographical play…playwright Sherry Kramer writes with a fluid hand that balances grief, conflict and the innocence of youth.” -Robert Daniels, Variety

1F, 1 Barbie Doll

Awards: Austin Chronicle “Top Ten Theatrical Treasure”

The Wall of Water

The perfect rent controlled NY apartment has one fatal flaw: the roommate from hell.  Classic humor of mistaken identity meets new-age twists. The Wall of Water is farce with all the sharp edges showing. A play about the nature of madness.  

The Wall of Water was produced by Yale Repertory Theatre, Parallax Theatre, Chicago, Mixed Blood, Minneapolis, and theatres across the country.

The Wall of Water quickly bursts through the dam of conventional theater for two hours of the kind of inspired and breathtaking chaos so rare on America’s stages that we may have forgotten the word for it. The word is farce … What distinguishes Kramer’s farce from even her most esteemed European counterparts is four strong female roles at the heart of this eloquent craziness …”-Margaret Spillane, New Haven Independent

“The more I think about The Wall of Water, the more I like it. Playwright Sherry Kramer is obviously a comic talent to watch.  The script is farcical, swift and funny, but it touches on all kinds of major themes...The whole thing is a festering, bubbling, candy-colored stew of passion, confusion and wildly clashing desires.” -Juliet Wittman, Westword

4F, 4M

Awards:  LA Women in Theatre Award

What a Man Weighs

There is a rule in book conservation: You must never do something perfect. Perfection is forgery. Once a page in a book is torn, the tear cannot be erased. Three book conservationists struggle to find the way to mend all the ways love makes us rip each other up.  

What a Man Weighs was produced by Second Stage Theatre, NY, Fells Point Corner Theatre, Baltimore, and Sierra Repertory Theatre, Sonora, CA.

“How can an intelligent heterosexual woman justify her desire for a man to complete her life when she suspects that no man can do that? This question is at the heart of Sherry Kramer's punishing yet engaging play What a Man Weighs.” - Anna Ditkoff, Baltimore City Paper

“Sherry Kramer’s astringent Off-Broadway play starts out as blunt, confrontational feminism, but its view of sexual politics becomes more and more complex, funny, and biting.” -Time Magazine

3F, 1M

Awards: The Weissberger Award, The Marvin Taylor Playwriting Award, Time Magazine Best Bet

Cake

Two Chihuahuas contemplate the power and persistence of the smell of their urine in an oriental rug. A husband and wife contemplate it too. Is their love for their pets stronger? What lasts longer, the smell of pee or the smell of love?

Produced by the Source Theatre Festival, Washington, D.C, and the Boston Theatre Marathon

“Heading the pack is Cake, Sherry Kramer’s lovely, heartbreaking story about love in a time of doom. Lily loves Scott, but it is hard work. He is sharp-tongued and ill-tempered, and also he is dying…We also have Paco and Samsera, a Chihuahua-Greyhound mix… Paco, too, is a little hard to love, since he pees – frequently and enthusiastically – on Scott’s Oriental rug. But both dogs, who have the ability to smell love, know that unchecked love flows with the force of the Niagara, and wipes out pee and misery with equal ferocity.”-Tim Treanor, DC Theatre Scene

2F, 2M

A short play

Partial Objects

The Faust story is one of our eternal myths–-a story about striving to know more, feel more, to be more like God. In Partial Objects, when the devil offers two people a moment of perfect love, they eagerly agree to give their souls for it. But perfect love is harder to come by then they’d bargained for. A fairy tale about what happens in the night.

Produced by Mill Mountain Theatre, Roanoke, VA, and Parallax Theatre, Chicago.

1F, 2M, 1 child

Awards: The Pilgrim Project Award

Ivanhoe, MO

Scott’s novel Ivanhoe is famous as a jousting epic, but he wrote it to combat the anti-Semitism that was being spread by the work of his time, and as a corrective for the corrupting influence of the Merchant of Venice.  12 towns are named Ivanhoe in America; this play imagines one in the Ozarks, where the great fear monger Gerald LK Smith rose to power and glory and produced the Passion Play, a work of anti-Semitism that has helped keep the poison alive through the centuries.

Ivanhoe, MO, has been developed at New Harmony Project, New Harmony, Indiana and at The Staged Theatre Squared Festival, Fayetteville, Arkansas

5F, 8M

an adaptation of the novel by Sir Walter Scott set in the Ozark Hills in 1966

Nano and Nicki in Boca Raton

Nicki drives her 84-year-old grandmother down to Florida every year. But this year will be the last trip they take. Nano longs for the world she used to know, and Nicki is hell bent on dragging her into the present. It’s a play about the genteel anti-semitism of the South and the special way that grandmothers and granddaughters fight and forgive each other.

Produced by Theatre J, Washington, DC  

3F

The Law Makes Evening Fall

Alan works at the Atkinson Center, a place where children with auditory processing problems go.  All seems pretty standard for Alan, until he meets Ava, a woman who makes him hear a language he cannot ever truly comprehend--passion.  We follow Alan’s descent into madness as his feelings for Ava make him doubt that he has ever understood a single word he has ever heard.  

Developed at Sundance, Utah, EST LA Project First Look Festival, New York Stage and Film, Poughkeepsie, NY, Rattlestick Theatre, New York, Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia, and the Playwrights Center, Minneapolis.

 4F, 1M

Read a Sample

The Ruling Passion

David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and James Boswell in a play about the moment when the modern age was born and Fundamentalism first rose to crush it down. Also, a little love story. 1776. David Hume, the mind at the center of the Scottish Enlightenment, is dying without fear of hell or hope of heaven. Samuel Johnson has completed his dictionary and reigns supreme as the authority of all things written in the English language. Both have the same disciple: James Boswell, an alcoholic, diseased, sex obsessed man who is driven by his fear of death to record every moment of his life in his journal. In a lifelong search for a father figure, he is torn between the Royalist, conservative Samuel Johnson and the Deist, progressive David Hume—men whose philosophies and religious beliefs are diametrically opposed and who are bitter enemies. At stake is the future biography Boswell will write, and the literary and cultural immortality it will grant. David Hume’s peaceful acceptance of approaching death pushes Boswell to the very brink of madness, and proves to be the moment that determines Boswell’s choice.

Developed at New Harmony Institute, State Theatre New Play Festival, Playlabs, The Playwrights Center

7m, 4f

Things That Break

When you make glass for a living, your body breaks. Victor, the last in a long line of glassmakers, lies under the knife on the operating table for heart and lung surgery, while his family waits to know if he will live or die. An inside-out surrealist ride on the wishes and fears of a family as they wait in a hospital waiting room, where every thought and terror becomes manifest. It is a play about the end of the American manufacturing era, a postmodern history of glass making, and a tale about the need we have to turn the story of our breakable lives into an unbreakable story. 

Produced by Theatre of the First Amendment, Fairfax, VA

“Sherry Kramer’s THINGS THAT BREAK is a terribly difficult, painfully beautiful play in which everything is broken… This is a wildly imaginative piece of work… …listening to Miss Kramer’s kaleidoscopic language…is like being under some hallucinogenic anesthetic…” -Nelson Pressley, The Washington Times”

“You may have heard that playwright Sherry Kramer is biting off more than she can chew in THINGS THAT BREAK, her free-form comedy about sibling rivalry, heart surgery, and the American dream. Don’t believe it. The lady chews like a champion. Chomps, actually, greedily bobbling up insights that would surely escape lesser writers…”-Bob Mondello, CityPaper

3F, 2M  Ensemble 2F, 3M

Awards: Helen Hayes Award Nomination:  Best New Play

The Release of a Live Performance

Nell has fallen so deeply in love with Brent that every man she sees reminds her of him. Sleeping with every man who reminds her of him — which is every man — is an act of love for her. But that’s not the way the world sees it. Her sister, Coco, comes back to their childhood home in Texas to rescue her, but Nell doesn’t want rescuing. She wants to feel alive. She wants to be so deeply in love that she can’t find her way back.  

Produced by Brass Tacks Theatre, Minneapolis 

2F, 2M

How Water Behaves

How Water Behaves is a comedy about what happens when the dream of saving the world meets the reality of your empty bank account.  Nan and Steve fight all the odds to change the world and still have enough money to start a family.  

Produced by Theatre [502], Louisville, KY

“Sherry Kramer’s How Water Behaves is kind of a crazy play. Warm, funny, engaging, illogical, improbable, and slightly surreal - it is maddening in how it pulls these disparate qualities together for a conclusion that explodes expectations of narrative logic while somehow staying true to its own, unique sensibility.” -Keith Waits, BroadwayWorld

4F, 3M

About Spontaneous Combustion

Amalia and Rob are crazy about each other.  But when they begin to make love for the first time, they are inconveniently at her childhood home.  And very inconveniently, Amalia’s aged Aunt Emily wanders in and dies of the shock of seeing her unmarried niece having sex.  Amalia will spend the second act in the bathtub, frighted of the heat that clearly killed dear Aunt Emily.  Meanwhile, her father golfs in the house because he’s frighted of a lightning strike on the golf course while her mother cooks compulsively. A gentle comedy about love and fear.

Produced by Brass Tacks Theatre, Minneapolis 

3F, 2M

The Dream House

One day, after years of longing and doing without, Mandy buys the house in the woods she had always dreamed of. The problem is, it comes with three cranky animal spirit guides and a brain tumor. The brain tumor is friendlier than her animal spirit guides are.

Produced as part of BOOKWINGS: Moscow Arts Theatre, Moscow & The International Writing Program, University of Iowa.

2F, 4M

Commissioned by the Moscow Art Theatre & University of Iowa International Writing Program
A one act play

Napolean’s China

Claire is a mosaist who is breaking and using antique china. She is contemplating breaking the china Napoleon took to Elba, which belonged to her great, great, great, great, great, great, grandmother Josephine. Naturally, the proposed destruction of this historically significant dinnerware horrifies Shepard, the historian who lives across the hall. Will Claire break the china? Will Shep break Claire’s heart?

Produced by Salt Lake City Acting Company 

“There is a breeziness to this new comedy that whisks the viewer into the heart of engaging characters...Succinctly stated, Napoleon's China is for anyone who has ever fallen in love. Period.”-Nancy Melich, The Salt Lake Tribune

1F, 1M, 1Canteuse

A Play With Songs written with Ann Haskell and Rebecca Newton

The Master and Margarita 

Developed by the Hal Prince Music Theatre Project/Directors Company, NY and the O'Neill Center National Music Theatre Conference.

2F, 4M

Singing Theatre Adaptation  Composer-Margaret Pine
From the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov
 

The Long Arms of Jupiter

Enjoyed by all at the 7 Devils Playwriting Conference, McCall, Idaho  A sequenced, ritualized script to accompany a game of croquet.

2F, 4M

A Croquet Performance Piece

Small Acts of Kindness

This collection includes f ive short plays: CAKE, HOLD FOR THREE, THE DREAM HOUSE, THE WORLD AT ABSOLUTE ZERO, and A THING OF BEAUTY CAN BE COPIED FOREVER.

Collection of Short Plays