Acclaimed playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me is one of the most highly praised independent films of recent years, earning many of the major screenplay awards. This is the lovingly drawn story of a sister and brother’s complicated, fragile, but somehow enduring bond. Sammy and Terry Prescott were orphaned as children. Sammy, now the single mother of a young son, has stayed in their hometown and is an officer at the local bank. Terry has become something of a drifter, surfacing only when he needs money. Sammy’s own life has its complications: she puts off an old boyfriend’s proposal and begins an affair with her new boss. Together in their family home, Terry’s charming irresponsibility collides with Sammy’s confusion over her own actions. What remains unspoken is what they’ve known since they were left with only each other sixteen years before.

You Can Count on Me: A Screenplay

Literature & Fiction

Lonergan, Kenneth

Dramas & Plays

Vintage

Gladys, the elderly matriarch of the Green family, has run an art gallery in a small Greenwich Village hotel for many years. The management wants to replace her less-than-thriving gallery with a coffee shop. Always irascible but now increasingly erratic, Gladys is a cause of concern to her daughter, her son-in-law, and her grandson, from whose point of view this poignant memory play is told. A wacky and heartrending look at the effect of senility on a family, The Waverly Gallery was a success at

The Waverly Gallery

Concord Theatricals

"A triumph . . . the sort of ambitious American storytelling you find too rarely at the movies."-Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune Academy Award® nominated writer and director Kenneth Lonergan has written a stirring drama that was called "extraordinarily ambitious" by Time and "a film of rare beauty and shocking gravity" by Rolling Stone. Delayed for 4 years in post-production, the film was finally released in 2011, with a director's cut following on DVD in 2012. Our edition will include the scripts of the full director's cut, along with an introduction and key tie-in art. Margaret is the story of a Manhattan teenager whose life is profoundly altered after witnessing a terrible accident. It is the extraordinary journey of an emotional teen who abides by her moral code and wants to set things right, but whose innocent ideals come crashing against the harsh realities of the adult world. It is a story of youth, love, the consequences of mistakes, and the fundamental questions of morality as faced by a teenager in an extraordinary situation.

Margaret

GROVE PRESS

Kenneth Lonergan is known for his trademark humor and genius for capturing the real heart and soul of human interactions. Time magazine raved that he is "among our most gifted, unflinching and unpretentious new playwrights," and called his first play, This Is Our Youth, one of the ten best plays of 1998. With The Waverly Gallery, Lonergan has once again shown himself to have "one of the keenest ears of any working playwright" (Ben Brantley, The New York Times). A powerfully poignant and often hilarious play, The Waverly Gallery is about the final years of a generous, chatty, and feisty grandmother's final battle against Alzheimer's disease. Gladys is an old school lefty and social activist and longtime owner of a small art gallery in Greenwich Village. The play explores her fight to retain her independence and the subsequent effect of her decline on her family, especially her grandson. More than a memory play, The Waverly Gallery captures the humor and strength of a family in the face of crisis. "You will be awed by Lonergan's writing." -- Christopher Isherwood, Variety; "[Lonergan] has written a loving but brutal, commercial yet unflinching American family drama that knows about the simultaneous human systems of entertainment and agony. As anyone who cares about aging loved ones already knows, life on that particular edge is often so real you have to laugh. . . he is dead-on about family in all its simultaneous affection and irritation." -- Linda Winer, Newsday; "A stirring and soulful, comic drama ... classically so, a la Glass Menagerie ... Waverly is often deeply funny. It is both painful and hilarious." -- Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Waverly Gallery

Parenting & Relationships

Nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play, Lobby Hero tells the story of Jeff, a luckless young security guard trying to get his life together after being thrown out of the navy. But the lobby proves to be no sanctuary from the world, as Jeff is drawn into a local murder investigation involving his supervisor, a tightly wound young man called upon to bear witness against his troubled brother, and a rookie policewoman who is in over her head with her seasoned but unscrupulous hero-cop partner. As Ben Brantley writes in the New York Times, “Motives come in every shade but black and white,” creating “a combustible brew of impulses.”

Lobby Hero

Mark Ruffalo revisits his breakthrough role in an exclusive L.A. Theatre Works performance of This is our Youth by Kenneth Lonergan, along with original cast members Josh Hamilton and Missy Yager. 
 In 1982, on Manhattan's Upper West Side, three pot-smoking teenagers are resoundingly rejecting the 1960 s ideals of their affluent parents. In hilarious and bittersweet detail, Youth follows forty-eight turbulent hours in the lives of three very lost souls at the dawn of the Reagan Era. 
 A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: Mark Ruffalo, Josh Hamilton and Missy Yager.

This Is Our Youth (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

Dramatist's Play Service

With his acclaimed plays This Is Our Youth and The Waverly Gallery and his Oscar-nominated film You Can Count on Me, Kenneth Lonergan has been called "the new golden boy of stage and screen" by The New York Times. Now he returns to the stage with Lobby Hero, which has been praised as "smart, funny ... [a] drama that derives its strength from Lonergan's keen ear for dialogue. One powerful tale" (New York Daily News). Lobby Hero, nominated for the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play, tells the story of Jeff, a luckless young security guard trying to get his life together after being thrown out of the navy. But the lobby proves to be no sanctuary from the world, as Jeff is drawn into a local murder investigation involving his supervisor, a tightly wound young man called upon to bear witness against his troubled brother, and an overzealous rookie policewoman who is in over her head with her unscrupulous hero-cop partner. As Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote, "motives come in every shade but black and white" in Lobby Hero, creating a "combustible brew of impulses."

History & Criticism

Dennis―with a famous painter father and social activist mother―is a small-time drug dealer and total mess. His hero-worshipping friend Warren has just impulsively stolen $15,000 from his father, an abusive lingerie tycoon. When Jessica, a mixed-up prep school girl, shows up for a date, Warren pulls out a wad of bills and takes her off, awkwardly, for a night of seduction. A wildly funny, bittersweet, and moving story, This Is Our Youth is as trenchant as it was upon its acclaimed premiere in 1996.

This Is Our Youth: Broadway Edition

Harry N. Abrams

The BAFTA and Academy Award-winning screenplay, “a drama of surpassing beauty” (Wall Street Journal)
Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar-winning screenplay for the critically-acclaimed film Manchester by the Sea is a staggering achievement and an emotionally devastating meditation on grief. Lee Chandler is a brooding, irritable loner who works as a handyman in Boston. One damp winter day he gets a call summoning him to his hometown, Manchester-by-the-Sea, the fishing village where his working-class family has lived for generations. His brother's heart has given out suddenly, and he's been named guardian to his riotous sixteen-year-old nephew. As if losing his only sibling and doubts about raising a teenager weren't enough, his return to the past re-opens an unspeakable tragedy, as he is forced to confront a past that separated him from his wife, Randi, and the community where he was born and raised.
A sweeping story of loss and new beginnings, Manchester by the Sea “illuminates with quiet, unyielding grace how you and I and our neighbors get by, and sometimes how we don’t” (Boston Globe).

Manchester by the Sea: A Screenplay

Humor & Entertainment

Movies

This is Our Youth

Abrams Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lonergan, Kenneth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lonergan, Kenneth

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lonergan, Kenneth. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

You Can Count on Me: A Screenplay

The Waverly Gallery

Margaret

Waverly Gallery

Lobby Hero

This Is Our Youth (Acting Edition for Theater Productions)

Lobby Hero

This Is Our Youth: Broadway Edition

Manchester by the Sea: A Screenplay

This is Our Youth