After grad school, Catherine and Gwen chose polar opposite paths. Catherine built a career as a rockstar academic, while Gwen built a home with her husband and children. Decades later, unfulfilled in polar opposite ways, each woman covets the other's life, commencing a dangerous game of musical chairs—the prize being Gwen's husband. With searing insight and trademark wit, this comedy is an unflinching look at gender politics in the wake of 20th-century feminist ideals.

In the fall of 2011, The Long Story Shorts One Act Festival was launched, featuring performances of short plays written by undergraduate students in the Writing for the Screen and Stage minor, an interdisciplinary, dramatic writing program housed in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Marking the first five years of the festival, this anthology showcases works written to be performed in ten minutes with a small production budget. The festival gives students a unique opportunity to participate in a collaborative, developmental environment led by experienced faculty and professional actors and directors, and the plays included here rise to the occasion. Whether they are humorous, poignant, powerful, or provocative, they demonstrate why the short play form has become so popular; why this event has become one of the highlights of the university's cultural scene; and why the Writing for the Screen and Stage program has thrived.

A romantic comedy on midlife relationships and a pet dog.

Unto These Hills: A Drama of the Cherokee

Between 1935 and 1939, the United States government paid out-of-work artists to write, act, and stage theatre as part of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), a New Deal job relief program. In segregated "Negro Units" set up under the FTP, African American artists took on theatre work usually reserved for whites, staged black versions of "white" classics, and developed radical new dramas. In this fresh history of the FTP Negro Units, Kate Dossett examines what she calls the black performance community—a broad network of actors, dramatists, audiences, critics, and community activists—who made and remade black theatre manuscripts for the Negro Units and other theatre companies from New York to Seattle. Tracing how African American playwrights and troupes developed these manuscripts and how they were then contested, revised, and reinterpreted, Dossett argues that these texts constitute an archive of black agency, and understanding their history allows us to consider black dramas on their own terms. The cultural and intellectual labor of black theatre artists was at the heart of radical politics in 1930s America, and their work became an important battleground in a turbulent decade.

Tonight, Walt is going to read you a screenplay he wrote. It's about his last days on earth. It's about a city he's going to build that's going to change the world. And it's about his brother. It's about everyone who loves him so much, and it's about how sad they're going to be when he's gone. Right? I mean, how can they live without him? How can anyone live without him?

NOW A BROADWAY PLAY STARRING DANIEL RADCLIFFE 'Provocative, maddening and compulsively readable' Maggie Nelson In 2003, American essayist John D'Agata wrote a piece for Harper's about Las Vegas's alarmingly high suicide rate, after a sixteen-year-old boy had thrown himself from the top of the Stratosphere Tower. The article he delivered, 'What Happens There', was rejected by the magazine for inaccuracies. But it was soon picked up by another, who assigned it a fact checker: their fresh-faced intern, and recent Harvard graduate, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment, and beyond the essay's eventual publication in the magazine, was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D'Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction. This book includes an early draft of D'Agata's essay, along with D'Agata and Fingal's extensive discussion around the text. The Lifespan of a Fact is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between 'truth' and 'accuracy', and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other. 'A fascinating and dramatic power struggle over the intriguing question of what nonfiction should, or can, be' Lydia Davis