No Script: The Podcast

Steven Dietz is one of America's most prolific playwrights. This week on No Script, Jackson and Jacob discuss one of his only plays to make it to New York - "Lonely Planet." The play tells the story of two men during the height of the AIDS epidemic. Listen in as J&J examine the play's strange new context.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/mo...

Pulling again from the robust library of Pulitzer Prize-winning scripts, Jackson and Jacob return for the second episode of Season 6! "Anna in the Tropics" by Nilo Cruz is a delightful, poetic, and highly engaging play about a time when cigars were hand rolled and lectors still read aloud from great novels. When a new lector arrives at a family cigar factor in Tampa, he brings along Tolstoy's grea...

Season Six begins with another Pulitzer Prize winning play! "Cost of Living" by Martyna Majok is a sharp play full of heart. It follows two caretaking relationships with wildly different contexts. This week on No Script, Jackson and Jacob break down how these journeys mirror and oppose each other.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you...

In this final episode of Season Five, Jackson and Jacob return to the list of Pulitzer Prize winning plays and discuss Quiara Alegría Hudes' surprising, inventive script "Water by the Spoonful." The play dramatizes robust online communication while also using powerful visual imagery. It is the second play in Hudes' "The Elliot Trilogy."    This is the last episode of Season Five. The boys of No Sc...

This week on No Script, Jackson is joined by special guest Maria Booth to discuss the musical "Once," which tells the story of singer-songwriters in Ireland. Maria, a singer-songwriter in Ireland herself, brings a unique perspective on the script. If you've never listened to the "Once" soundtrack... do yourself a favor and look it up!   You can also look up Maria and her music here: https://marian...

It's the second week of a two part series on No Script. Last week Jackson and Jacob looked at Ibsen's famous "A Doll's House." This week, the boys discuss a new play that's sweeping the nation (or was, before COVID): "A Doll's House, Part 2" by Lucas Hnath.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you can help to ensure the No Script Podcast...

In part one of a two part series, Jackson and Jacob explore Henrik Ibsen's famous drama "A Doll's House." When the play was released, it was so controversial that many theatres refused to perform it. Next week, J&J will discuss "A Doll's House, Part 2" by Lucas Hnath.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you can help to ensure the No Scr...

In their first episode back after Monologue Month, Jackson and Jacob discuss a play that's sweeping the regional professional theatre scene. The Goodman Theatre's production of the show was postponed by the pandemic, but a recording of their production was briefly available online. The script, of course, is "School Girls: Or, the African Mean Girls Play" by Jocelyn Bioh. Listen in! ---------------...

It's the final episode of Monologue Month! The concluding episode of this season's themed month is a discussion of perhaps the most famous and celebrated one person show of all time, written by one of the most famous and celebrated playwrights of all time: "Krapp's Last Tape" by Samuel Beckett! Listen in! ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/mon...

In Episode 3 of Monologue Month, Jackson and Jacob visit one of the titans of the form: Anna Deavere Smith. Smith is well known and well lauded for one person shows like "Twilight: Los Angeles" and "Fires in the Mirror." This week, the boys discuss her sweep through American history: "House Arrest."  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, y...

It's the second week of Monologue Month, which means Jackson and Jacob are continuing their weekly examinations of one person shows. This week? The Pulitzer Prize-winning play "I Am My Own Wife." Doug Wright's loving portrait of a complicated human being is the stuff of dramatic masterpiece.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you can h...

It's the first episode of Season 5's Themed Month: Monologue Month. During October, Jackson and Jacob will discuss four one-person shows. This week? That famous ode to the Women's Rights Movement: The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe by Jane Wagner.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you can help to ensure the No Sc...

Charles Fuller's script for "A Soldier's Play" was awarded the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama - just the second play by a black playwright to win the award. The story is specific, engrossing, and brilliantly told using devices that play with time and space. Listen in this week as Jackson and Jacob discuss this American masterpiece.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Pa...

Two high school students (strangers to each other), a last-minute group project on Walt Whitman, and a mysterious lack of internet access - thus begins Lauren Gunderson's play "I and You." Her knack for compelling, humorous, and personality-driven dialogue fills out the pages of this tight and moving script. Listen in as Jackson and Jacob explore Gunderson's popular two-hander.  ------------------...

Lauren Yee's play "The Great Leap" is a tribute to her father, known in the neighborhood she grew up in for his basketball skills. Sharply written and highly theatrical, "The Great Leap" delights and surprises Jackson and Jacob this week on No Script. Listen in! ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you can help to ensure the No Script Pod...

This week on No Script, Jackson and Jacob discuss another play by the American master August Wilson. Wilson's second Pulitzer Prize winner, The Piano Lesson tells the story of how one piano represents a complicated web of family legacy and slavery. Listen in!  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you can help to ensure the No Script Podca...

A weekend at the family vacation home in Martha's Vineyard... Sounds relaxing, right? But Lydia R. Diamond's play "Stick Fly" imagines the LeVay family (and a few guests) trying to enjoy their weekend at the Vineyard, but finding out that secrets, lies, and high expectations can tend to ruin the relaxation. Listen in this week as Jackson and Jacob discuss Diamond's "well-made play."  -------------...

Based loosely on true events, David Henry Hwang's play "Yellow Face" is a comic examination of theatre and identity. This week on No Script, Jackson and Jacob discuss Hwang's use of himself as the play's protagonist, as well as the play's documentary style.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you can help to ensure the No Script Podcast...

This week on No Script, Jackson and Jacob discuss the delightful, evocative "Letters from Cuba" by Maria Irene Fornes. Fornes is a heavily-lauded playwright and director, known for the huge variety of styles and subjects in her work. "Letters from Cuba" is based on letters Fornes received from her own brother. Listen in!  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For...

Lyrical and poignant, Suzan-Lori Parks' play Father Comes Home From the Wars is a loosely adapted telling of The Odyssey set during the American Civil War. She imagines Hero, an enslaved man who is asked to follow his white captor into battle - fighting on the side of the rebel South. If he chooses to go, Hero will have to leave behind his beloved adoptive father and his long term romantic partner...

Nowadays, if you say "Lin-Manuel Miranda" in any public space, people will start gushing about the hit musical Hamilton. But before Hamilton was the culturally ubiquitous icon that it is, Miranda was well known for another genre-busting musical called In the Heights. Soon to be a major motion picture, In the Heights is an incredible portrait of the Washington Heights neighborhood. This week on No...

The collapse of Detroit is a narrative that is still embedded in the American psyche. Playwright Dominique Morisseau, a Dertroit native, has written a three play cycle called The Detroit Projects which chronicles three different Detroits across time. Listen in to this week's episode of No Script to hear Jackson and Jacob discuss the third play in this cycle, Skeleton Crew. In Skeleton Crew Morisse...

When the Blake family decides to hold their Thanksgiving in a mostly empty, slightly spooky two-floor apartment in Manhattan, deeply held secrets and insecurities boil to the surface. Stephen Karam's "The Humans" is an empathetic look at this family and their individual and corporate joy and pain. Listen in this week as Jackson and Jacob discuss how Karam plays on standard psychological realism tr...

A classic comedy if there ever was one, Noel Coward's "Private Lives" has been a staple of the stage for years and years and years. This week on No Script, Jackson and Jacob wrestle with the play's complexities and its future.  ------------------------------ Please consider supporting us on Patreon. For as low as $1/month, you can help to ensure the No Script Podcast can continue.  https://www.pat...

For a long time, Jackson and Jacob have been planning to talk about Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury as the first episode of Season Five. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, America is finally facing a racial reckoning which makes the discussion of plays like Fairview all the more important.    ... But, it is not lost on the boys of No Script that their perspective as two white men is a li...