Kelly Stuart Selected Works

Mayhem is a domestic political comedy with many twists and turns. It's August 2000. The Taliban still dominates Afghanistan. Civil War still rages in Sudan. And the Los Angeles Democratic National Convention is meeting amid protests and riots. But just down the street, in a Chinatown apartment, a woman has her own problems to deal with. How do you engage in political activity when your husband won't watch the baby? Stuart's timely comedy provides a sharp portrait of the pre-9/11 American psyche, captured on the threshold of its transformation, slouching toward consciousness.

An uproarious political farce about the 2000 presidential election.

Stuart's feminist re-imagining of Greek tragedy.

The story of a man in Belle ăpoque Paris who weaves the finest and most sought after silk, obtained from spiders. In order to woo the object of his desire, he makes a Faustian contract to coax more silk from the spiders, to weave fabric into the most beautiful clothing to present to his mistress.

Los Angeles playwright Kelly Stuart's hilarious satire of the male-dominated workplace is set in a baby formula company, where the men even determine the feeding and care of infants. But when Gina, a mother who breast-feeds, joins the staff, things begin to change, culminating in both fantastic and realistic events which jar the reader into reevaluating the gender-based power structure and the illusions which support it. First presented at the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, this play was later performed at Playwrights Horizons in New York and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. In 1996, it was awarded the America Award for Drama as the best play of the year.

An American woman who has never left Nashville searches Turkey for a deported Kurdish man who has disappeared. This is a darkly comic journey through a land where a language is illegal and illusions have to die if you want to survive.

A comedy of menace set in a diner.

This play about the troubles of a children's day-care director is published in the Best of the West anthology.