"Timberlake Wertenbaker's brain-teasing new play addresses the ruling metaphor of our times: the survival of the fittest. She does it in the most direct way possible, by dramatizing the development of Darwin's ideas on the origins and survival of species during his voyage on the Beagle in the 1830s and the conflict between him and Fitzroy, his captain and a literalist believer in the Bible. But the metaphor is underlined by casting this as a play within a play, where the actor playing Darwin has no interest beyond personal survival and the actor playing Fitzroy is weakened by principle. Their rehearsals are directed by an east European refugee who knows more about survival than they ever will." —Sunday Times

In The Break of Day Timberlake Wertenbaker turns a sharp and beady eye on three women and their partners. The century is coming to an end and a feeling of dissatisfaction and unease seizes the group. Is it too late to have children? Were they wrong to focus so much on work? These questions force each of them to recast their future.

Mary Traverse, the pretty, carefully schooled daughter of a wealthy London merchant, chafes at her pampered existence, and hungers for knowledge and experience of the outside world. Leaving her father's protection, she is, at first, shocked by the unbridled, dissolute life she encounters in the teeming streets of eighteenth-century London, but under the corrupt tutelage of an embittered servant, Mrs. Temptwell, Mary is soon drawn into this new and fearsome world, first losing her virginity and then, in time, becoming a prostitute herself. Along the way she invades such staunchly male preserves as gambling dens, taverns and cockfights, and encounters a wide array of bizarre characters, culminating in a sexual episode with her own father—who, because Mary is by now so changed, does not recognize his own daughter.

Fast paced, and comprised of a series of heightened scenes, the play alternates earthy humor with moments of great poignancy but, in the end, yields both a sense of optimism and a parallel for our own time as Mary comes to realize that only through wisdom and self-knowledge can she, as a woman, transcend the unhappiness and despair that worldly experience has brought her and progress (or traverse) toward the true freedom and sense of purpose she so desperately seeks.

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.

In this moving and delightful exploration of motherhood, love and letting go, an American mother learns that her young son is believed to be the reincarnation of a high Buddhist Lama. When Tibetan monks arrive unexpectedly, asking to take her child away for a life of spiritual training in India, she and her Tibetan husband must make a life-altering choice that will test their faith . . . and their hearts. The Oldest Boy is Sarah Ruhl at her imaginative best—a richly emotional journey filled with music, dance, puppetry, laughter, intimate moments and infinite meanings.

Award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl brings her unique mix of lyricism, sparkling humor, and fierce intelligence to her new romantic comedy, Stage Kiss. When estranged lovers He and She are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, the line between off-stage and on-stage begins to blur. A "knockabout farce that channels Noe‘l Coward and Michael Frayn" (Chicago Tribune), Stage Kiss is a thoughtful and clever examination of the difference between youthful lust and respectful love. Ruhl, one of America's most frequently produced playwrights, proves that a kiss is not just a kiss in this whirlwind romantic comedy, fresh off its acclaimed New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in winter 2014.

From 1947 to 1977, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop exchanged more than four hundred letters. Describing the writing of their poems, their travel and daily illnesses, the pyrotechnics of their romantic relationships, and the profound affection they had for each other, these missives are the most intimate record available of both poets and one of the greatest correspondences in American literature. The playwright Sarah Ruhl fell in love with these letters and set herself an unusual challenge: to turn this thirty-year exchange into a stage play, and to bring to life the friendship of two writers who were rarely even in the same country. As innovative as it is moving, Dear Elizabeth gives voice to a conversation that lived mostly in writing, illuminating some of the finest poems of the twentieth century and the minds that produced them.

Hailed by the New Yorker's John Lahr as "extraordinary", "bold", and "inventive", Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play takes us behind the scenes of three communities attempting to stage the death and resurrection of Christ. From Queen Elizabeth's England to Hitler's Germany to Reagan's America, Ruhl's exploration of devotion takes us on a humorous yet unsettling journey filled with lust, whimsy, and a lot of fish. This intimate epic occurs at the timely intersection of politics and religion. Ruhl dramatizes a community of players rehearsing their annual staging of the Easter Passion in three different eras: 1575 northern England, just before Queen Elizabeth outlaws the ritual; 1934 Oberammergua, Bavaria, as Hitler is rising to power; and Spearfish, South Dakota, from the time of Vietnam through Reagan's presidency. In each period, the players grapple in different ways with the transformative nature of art, and politics are never far in the background, as Queen Elizabeth, Hitler, and Reagan each appear, played by a single commanding actor.

How much could someone learn about you if they found your cell phone and started answering your calls? From the lyrical author of The Clean House comes this oddly mythic love story in which a lonely woman, Jean, answers the cell phone of a stranger, Gordon, and finds herself the unwitting guardian of his memory. Traveling literally to hell and back, Ruhl's quirky comedy is set amidst a world where technology is swallowing our souls, grieving is more complicated than we think, and everyone is desperate to make connections.

This play is for all the lady cowboys of heart and mind who ride outside the city limits of convention. Mary, always late and always married, meets a lady cowboy outside the city limits of Pittsburgh who teaches her how to ride a horse. Mary's husband, Crick, buys a painting with the last of their savings. Mary and Crick have a baby, but they can't decide on the baby's name, or the baby's gender. A story of one woman's education and her search to find true love outside the box.