About the Play:

The Red Coat has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Female/Male Scenes.

A Lonely Impulse of Delight has long been a favourite of acting teachers for Male/Male Scenes.

Welcome to the Moon and Other Plays a collection of six one-act plays by John Patrick Shanley. From the mind of Pulitzer Prize Winning playwright John Patrick Shanley, comes a serious yet devastatingly funny sextet of comedies that examine the full scale of the human condition in often opposing but intriguing directions. While these one-act plays blend together into a cohesive, theatrically vivid whole, they can be presented individually with equal effectiveness.

The Red Coat is a brief but unforgettable teens-in-love romantic comedy that takes the audience to a Brooklyn sidewalk where a young man waits outside a party for a girl he hardly knows. His mission, which he accomplishes with touching if halting effectiveness, is to tell her that he loves her. This ten-minute play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops. (Cast: 1 female, 1 male)

Down and Out places the audience in the middle of a rundown apartment owned by the failing Poet. His Love holds the key to his soul but a maniacal, hooded Figure means to ruin the Poet's life, by taking his library card and then his soul. His Love protects him. (Cast: 1 female, 2 male)

Let Us Go Out into the Starry Night is a 10-minute play that involves a man plagued by ghosts and monsters and a women whose only friend is a dummy. The two lonely misfits meet in a cafe and have an intensely serious conversation which magically transports them into a world of stars and planets. (Cast: 1 female, 1 male)

Out West centers on the old story of the coming of a Cowboy to a stereotypical wild western town. There is a Good Girl, a Bad Girl, a gunfight, and then the need to move on. The entire plot of a classic western is played out at about triple normal speed! (Cast: 2 female, 3 male)

A Lonely Impulse of Delight tells the whimsical tale of a man who wants to fell his best friend that he is in love. This might seem ordinary, if it were not for the fact that the man is in love with a mermaid living in the lake in New York's Central Park. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshop. (Cast: 2 male)

Welcome to the Moon is about Stephen, a guy still madly in love with a girl he hasn't seen in 14 years, He joins his old friend, Ronny, who has been unsuccessfully trying to do away with himself for 14 years, for a drink in a Bronx bar. They decide to commit suicide together by putting plastic bags over their heads – but the two people whom they've always loved arrive in time to stop them. Time then stops for a bittersweet moment, as past and present become one. Has also been performed with female leads Stephanie and Rhonda. (Cast: 1 female, 4 male; or 3 female, 2 male)

First presented by New York's renowned Ensemble Studio Theatre in 1982, these highly imaginative and thematically varied plays marked the debut of one of the theatre's most talented and resourceful playwrights.

What people say:

"The plays in the collection all shift from the cold reality of the real world to the absurd humor of Shanley's imagination, sometimes within a few lines." — Broadway World

"In the bittersweet humour that informs much of his insightful work there is a compelling and brutal undertow, a sense of romantic misadventure that sucks you deeper into the black depths of a manmade vortex. Shanley's characters seek love and affection in an old-fashioned romantic way, but always they are scraped roughly against the edge of today's colder, more cynical world." — The Hamilton Spectator

About the Playwright:

John Patrick Shanley is an American playwright, screenwriter, and director. He has written some two dozen off-Broadway plays since the 1970s, but he is best known for Doubt, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award. He has also written extensively for TV and film, and his credits include the teleplay for Live from Baghdad and screenplays for Five Corners and Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for original screenplay.