About the Play:

Collected Stories has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues and Female/Female Scenes.

Collected Stories is a full-length drama by Donald Margulies. When you learn something new, does that information now belong to you? When someone tells you their story, is it now yours to tell? These are some of the questions raised by Collected Stories, a highly entertaining and thought-provoking play by Donald Margulies that features two women – one an older, established writer famous for short stories, the other a young, eager writer she's mentoring.

Collected Stories explores the relationship between two female writers at opposite stages of their careers – a celebrated New York author with a dry wit and a long and successful career; and her bright-eyed young protégé. As their relationship evolves and the line between fact and fiction starts to blur, their fascinating story comes to an explosive conclusion. The play that features two of Donald Margulies' most memorable characters, who move from mentor-mentee to friends to rivals tangled in a conflict of intellectual property rights and betrayal. Ensconced in her Greenwich Village apartment, Professor Ruth Steiner, a middle-aged short story writer and professor, agrees to take on a 26-year-old graduate student, Lisa Morrison, as her assistant. Over the course of six years, their student-teacher relationship evolves. When Ruth shares the details of her youthful affair with real-life poet Delmore Schwartz, should Lisa get away with writing on the experiences to catapult her own career? The question of who has control over memories – the one who lives them or the one who writes about them – is the complex dilemma that confronts the young author and her revered mentor, with whom she collides on her race toward fame. The result is a powerful two-woman tour-de-force featuring crackling dialogue and sweeping themes that won Collected Stories the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for Best New Play and made the New York Post claim "This is probably Margulies' best play to date…."

Collected Stories premiered in 1996 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California and won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Original Play. A Finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it has been produced in many places in America and Europe since then, including a production off-Broadway at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, with legendary actress and teacher Uta Hagen taking on the role of the wronged mentor. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female

What people say:

"The conflict between the established artist and the adulatory fan who becomes a protégé, disciple, colleague and friend-and finally threatening rival-is one of those great topics...It resurfaces in Donald Margulies's provocative new play, Collected Stories.... As always, Margulies is literate, intellectually stimulating, and able to create characters of both dramatic and human interest. And he sustains this interest through six scenes covering six years that only briefly leave Ruth's cozily messy, book-infested Greenwich Village apartment. Here two worlds clash in age-old, ecumenical dueling, led up to by great mutual emotional investment and all the more bitter for it." — New York Magazine

"With his fine ear for detail, Margulies creates an authentic, insular world, and he gives equal weight to the opposing viewpoints of two formidable characters." — Los Angeles Times

"Margulies' play is an affecting character study and a well-drawn portrait of the insular world of fiction writers, demonstrating his gift for sharply written and incisive dialogue." — Hollywood Reporter

"As usual, Margulies holds the rich ore of his material up to the light so that it sends beams in every direction…always fluid and lively, the play is thick with ideas, like a stockpot of good stew." — Village Voice

About the Playwright:

Donald Margulies is an American playwright, screenwriter, and a professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale University. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000 for his play, Dinner With Friends. Other plays include Pulitzer Prize finalists Sight Unseen and Collected Stories. He has also developed screenplays for HBO, NBC, Paramount, Propaganda, Touchstone, Warner Bros., TriStar and Universal.