About the Play:

Time Stands Still has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Female/Female Scenes, and Female/Male Scenes.

Time Stands Still is a full-length drama by Donald Margulies. Called "Margulies's finest play since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dinner With Friends" by The New York Times, Time Stands Still is about two battle-scarred journalists trying to find happiness in a world that seems to have gone crazy. Theirs is a partnership based on telling the toughest stories, and together, making a difference. But when their own story takes a sudden turn, the adventurous couple confronts the prospect of a more conventional life.

Time Stands Still explores the arc of a relationship stressed by diverging ambitions, the horrors of war, and the uneasy tension between journalistic objectivity and human compassion. Sarah is a photojournalist for a magazine. When she snaps the shutter of her camera, Time Stands Still. James, her boyfriend, is a freelance foreign correspondent. Both have returned home to their apartment in Brooklyn, after suffering traumas during a stint on assignment in the Middle East. James' wounds are largely emotional. Sarah, however, took a shrapnel hit to the face. Her mobility was also impaired when the vehicle in which she was riding was blown up. Her local guide was killed. When they receive a visit from their boss Richard (who is also Sarah's long-ago lover), who introduces them to his new and much younger girlfriend Mandy, it forces Sarah and James to re-examine their relationship, and address the ethics of journalism in a world torn by conflict and suffering. Sarah loves photography. It enables her an element of control in a world spinning madly. James is fine with building a "normal" life in New York. Sarah clearly relishes the challenge of finding the perfect image, the powerful rush that comes with taking the photo and making "time stand still" in a dangerous world. Can the adventurous couple find peace with a more "conventional" life when they thrive on the adrenaline rush of war? Time Stands Still is a witty, intelligent and powerful look at how a change in perspective can alter the entire picture.

Time Stands Still premiered in 2009 at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles and was then produced on Broadway in 2010 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. After a hiatus, the play resumed at the Cort Theatre and was nominated for two Tony Awards, including Best Play. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and has been performed in regional, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

What people say:

"Mr. Margulies is gifted at creating complex characters through wholly natural interaction, allowing the emotional layers, the long histories, the hidden kernels of conflict to emerge organically. Throughout, his dialogue crackles with bright wit and intelligence. Although Time Stands Still is deceptively modest, consisting of a handful of conversations among just four characters, the range of feeling it explores is wide and deep." — New York Times

"Can you be a dispassionate, uninvolved observer of horrific events, recording them for posterity and still keep a sense of right and wrong, not to mention your sanity? It's one of several questions getting a workout in Time Stands Still … Insightful writing, the work is smart, stylish, timely and layered with an intriguing seriousness that inspires discussion after the curtain comes down – a rarity these days." — Associated Press

"Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still compellingly demonstrates what a master playwright can do with great economy and efficiency…A rare play that encompasses universal issues and personal problems with equal compassionate insight. A splendid theatrical experience culminates in the author's taking no sides and providing no easy answers. What we get is the assiduously impartial, clarifying confrontation of the existential dilemmas that confront all of us." — Bloomberg News

"A solid play – taut and well-constructed, with hardly a single detail extraneous." — Time Out NY

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.