Shaped by the author from conversations with the people whose experience she sets forth, the play explores the way that Vietnam has affected three lives: a Marine veteran, his estranged wife and his mistress. Seated at a table, with slides used occasionally to amplify and illustrate their comments, the three tell their various stories. The man confesses that he killed a Vietnamese family in cold blood and, carrying the seeds of violence with him, returned home to brutalize his pregnant wife. The wife, disillusioned and unhappy, wants to ignore the terrors that haunt her husband, believing that in time the awful memories will fade, while the mistress, an angry feminist, blames the man's destructiveness on the forces that conditioned him before he went to Vietnam. In the end, these three become a metaphor for the nation as a whole-still trying to understand, and overcome, the lingering trauma that is the bitter legacy of the Vietnam experience.

Still Life.

Literature & Fiction

Emily Mann

Mann, Emily

Dramas & Plays

Dramatist's Play Service

Book by Emily Mann, Sarah L. Delany, A. Elizabeth Delany, Amy Hill Hearth

Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years - A Play

Hearth, Amy Hill

Delany, Sarah Louise

Delany, Annie Elizabeth

Winner of the 2007 Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award. Illinois, 1861: Without proof of insanity, Elizabeth Packard is committed by her husband to an asylum. Based on historical events, Emily Mann's play tells of one woman's struggle to right a system gone wrong. "Emily Mann is one of our most urgently engaging, provocative and significant American playwrights." —Joyce Carol Oates "Elizabeth Packard emerges as a vibrant, passionate force of nature." —New York Times

Mrs Packard

Broadway Play Publishing, Incorporated

Emily Mann brings Chekhov's masterpiece into the 21st century with bright contemporary language and a modern Hamptons' setting. In a world of appearance, money, business, and celebrity culture, the heart of the play is a story about the heartbreaking betrayal of children by their parents. With relevance, humor, and flowing, natural language, Mann's adaptation of challenges us to think about where America's culture is going. "Emily Mann is one of our most urgently engaging, provocative and significant American playwrights." -Joyce Carol Oates "A SEAGULL IN THE HAMPTONS … has much wit and style … [it] retains virtually every bitter laugh." -Peter Filichia, New Jersey Star Ledger "Emily Mann creates an original work that combines elements of melodrama and symbolism into a new play that's both riveting and provocative." -J Cooper Robb, Philadelphia Weekly "… masterly, beautifully informed adaptation of Chekhov's 1895 drama." -Anita Gates, New York Times

A Seagull in the Hamptons

Warning: The plays of Political Stages do not make for a quiet evening of theatre. These are the plays which got audiences out of their seats, and sometimes out into the streets. Their words and ideas rumbled ominously down the marble hallways of legislatures and challenged, even threatened, and often changed, the thinking of millions. These are the plays which either lit or reflected the fires of those political controversies which blazed across the American Twentieth Century. Individually, each is a molotov cocktail tossed onto the stage, each a political movement encapsulated in dramatic form. Combined, they constitute both a conflagration and a record of American political and theatrical ideology. Never before, however, have they been collected in one explosive volume. In Political Stages, they have at last been preserved, ever ready to serve at the barricades of subsequent eras. Includes works by Tennessee Williams, Emily Mann, Clifford Odets, Langston Hughes, and others.

Political Stages: Plays That Shaped a Century (Applause Books)

Applause

The first major collection by playwright Emily Mann contains four powerful docudramas. Based on extensive interviews of real people’s experiences, these plays explore various moral issues and questions that still resonate in America today. Annulla: An Autobiography is a solo piece featuring the reflections of an elderly Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by pretending to by Aryan. Jerry Talmer of the New York Post calls Annulla one bangup 90 minutes of theatreI don’t know when I’ve been stimulated as much by anything on the living stage.” Still Life is composed of interviews with a Vietnam War veteran with PTSD, the pregnant wife he physically and emotionally abuses, and the mistress who finds herself entranced by his passion and violence. This Obie Award-winning play is a powerful affair, full of passion and viabilityMann offers no easy answers or pat solutions, she simply invites us into these three characters' lives” (Los Angeles Times). Execution of Justice follows the trial of the former policeman who shot San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and openly gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk in 1979. Called thought-provokinga taut courtroom drama” (New York Times), Execution of Justice is theatre reasserting its claim on the country’s moral conscience” (Washington Post). Greensboro: A Requiem is a particularly all-American tragedy” (New York Times) as Mann interviews those involved in the largely unreported 1979 massacre of unarmed demonstrators by members of the Ku Klux Klan, Greensboro police force, and FBI. Forbes calls Greensboro a provocation, a potent exposé of the less-than-human thing’ which fuels the politics of hate and injustice in America.”

Testimonies: Four Plays

Theatre Communications Group

Emily Mann is one of our most urgently engaging, provocative and significant American playwrights.”Joyce Carol Oates Both as a socially conscious melodrama which arouses strong outrage in the viewer and as a valuable history lesson with contemporary relevance,
Mrs. Packard is informative, lively and engrossing.” Talkin’ Broadway Elizabeth Packard emerges as a vibrant, passionate force of nature.”The New York Times Illinois, 1861: Without proof of insanity, Elizabeth Packard is committed by her husband to an asylum. Based on historical events, Emily Mann’s play tells of one woman’s struggle to right a system gone wrong in this winner of the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award. Emily Mann is a playwright and director. Her plays include Execution of Justice, Still Life and Having Our Say, among others. She is currently Artistic Director of Princeton, New Jersey’s McCarter Theatrerecipient of the 1994 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre. Her numerous awards for artistic excellence include a Guggenheim, a Playwrights Fellowship and Artistic Associate Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a McKnight Fellowship and a Rosamund Gilder Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in the Theatre. In recognition of her achievements illuminating the possibilities for social, cultural and political change, Ms. Mann was awarded the Lee Reynolds Award from the League of Professional Theatre Women/NY.

Mrs. Packard

“Gloria: A Life is a unique, deeply moving performance created in the hopeful, conversational spirit of its extraordinary subject.” —Sara Holdren, New York Magazine’s Vulture “One part theater, one part consciousness-raising group therapy session, Gloria: A Life offers an experience that promises to be a more intimate recollection of Steinem’s journey, not only because it’s been singularly shaped by the hands of women.” —Noor Brara, Vogue Five decades after Gloria Steinem began raising her voice for equality and championing the voices of others, she remains a leader of the American feminist movement. Emily Mann’s new play traces the progress of Steinem’s extraordinary life, from her undercover Playboy Bunny exposé in the 1960s, through her founding of Ms. Magazine in the 1970s, to her activism in today’s women’s movement.

Gloria: A Life (TCG Edition)

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Books by Mann, Emily