As the year closes, four publications from the fall and winter of 2025 offer exciting reading for lovers of entertaining and significant theater. They include the books of two recent productions that garnered both critical acclaim and awards, a trilogy of works presenting the culture, history, and perspectives of Indigenous people – all published by Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the largest independent publisher of dramatic literature in North America – and a research volume of the bloodiest shows from the early history of Broadway.
Yellow Face – The latest 2024 Broadway production from Tony winner, Pulitzer Prize finalist, Grammy recipient, and the most produced living American opera librettist David Henry Hwang, which debuted Off-Broadway in 2007, takes a hilarious, quasi-autobiographical, self-deprecating look at the debacle that ensued when the thinly fictionalized character DHH inadvertently cast a white actor in the lead Asian role in his 1993 play Face Value, a send-up of anti-Asian stereotypes inspired by his public protest of the controversial “yellowface” casting in the 1991 Broadway transfer of the London production of Miss Saigon.
Instead of admitting to the mistake, the miscast actor in question embraces his false identity of being at least part Asian and, as a result, enjoys a burgeoning career and the undying attention of the press. And a simultaneous subplot involves the actual Senate investigation of DHH’s father HYH, a Chinese immigrant who was the first Asian American owner of a federally chartered bank in the US, unjustly suspected of peddling influence.
In addition to bringing the non-stop laughs, the equally funny and thought-provoking play addresses the serious issues of representation and inclusion, racial identity and artistic freedom, political bias and media frenzy, while asking the looming question if America will ever be a “post-racial” society and giving a long-marginalized community a place in Broadway history, as expressed in a revealing preface by the ever-engaging and sharp-witted Hwang.
David Henry Hwang, Yellow Face (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2025), 112 pages, ISBN 9781636702506, paperback, $16.95.
Teeth – Adapted for the stage from the cult-classic film of the same name, the new musical, by Pulitzer Prize and Tony winner Michael R. Jackson (book and lyrics) and composer, lyricist, and librettist Anna K. Jacobs (book and music), which ran Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizon and New World Stages in 2024, is now available in paperback from TCG, following last year’s release of the original cast album on Yellow Sound Label.
Filled with irreverent humor, no-holds-barred language, and bloody sex acts, the riotously camp horror satire follows the story of the Evangelical teen Dawn O’Keefe, leader of the Promise Keeper Girls and sworn to preserve her chastity against the advances of the less than upright Christian men around her, aided by two rows of the titular chompers in her vagina dentata.
A wild parody of our sexually repressed and sexually obsessed society, and the imagined rise and dominance of the “feminocracy” over a patriarchy that feels the women’s biting rage, the book begins with a foreword by Mitchell Lichtenstein, scriptwriter of the original movie, inspired by the ancient myth of female genitalia with “penectomizing teeth,” and an authors’ note explaining the intent of their musical adaptation in exposing misogyny and violence, and the ideological belief in its necessity.
Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs, Teeth (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2025), 134 pages, ISBN 9781636702452, paperback, $17.95.
Native Nation Project – From award-winning playwright Larissa FastHorse (creator of The Thanksgiving Play, one of the most produced works in the US and the first Broadway production by an Indigenous woman), in collaboration with director, playwright, and longtime Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company Michael John Garcés, along with members and culture-bearers of Native communities, comes a landmark trilogy of three plays celebrating vital and vibrant Indigenous voices and recounting the complex issues of Native experiences.
Preceded by an introduction from Cornerstone Co-Founder Peter Howard, who appeared in the three productions included in the book, and a note from FastHorse and Garcés, acknowledging that, although she was credited as playwright and he as director, the works were based in their highly collaborative and creative partnership, the volume contains the backgrounds and bibliographies related to the shows, their production history, format, cast, and characters, and the full scripts and stage directions of each.
Combining fact and fiction, the immersive Urban Rez presents Twelve Rounds of interconnected stories and scenes depicting members of a Native tribe in Los Angeles weighing the pros and cons of federal recognition, while employing audience participation in unscripted conversations and interactions. The second play, Native Nation, is another immersive experience subject to community input, developed through talking circles with Indigenous people of Arizona, and subdivided into Rounds, Events, and Transitions that tell the story of the land on which it takes place through the eyes of its original inhabitants, to stop their erasure from the broader American culture. And Wicoun, created with members of the Lakota and Dakota tribal nations, centers on high-school siblings Áya and Khoskalaka summoning a Native superhero for help against the zombies that have arrived, as they set off on a journey across the lands of the Oceti Sakowin. Together the three works explore such urgent issues as tribal sovereignty, violation of sacred lands, genocide, and assimilation, that continue to affect Indigenous communities today.
Larissa FastHorse and Michael John Garcés, Native Nation Project: A Trilogy (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2025), 248 pages, ISBN 9781636702476, paperback, $22.95.
Bloody Broadway – In the first volume of his survey of Broadway plays focused on themes of “menace, murder, and mystery,” writer, director, and now retired theater professor Amnon Kabatchnik examines 79 works encompassing the years 1900-30. Arranged chronologically, the entries, prefaced by an introduction from the author, contain a plot synopsis, information about the premiere productions and publications, biographical sketches of the playwrights, key actors, and directors, awards and honors received, and quotes from reviewers. He also notes that, in keeping with historical authenticity and perspective, he retained rather than edited offensive elements of racial prejudice, sexism, and anti-Semitic slurs that impart the social context and attitudes of the period.
The follow-up to his previous reference books Horror on the Stage, Murder in the East End, and the seven-volume series Blood on the Stage considers such prolific creators of melodramas of crime and punishment at the turn of the 20th century as Hal Reid, Ernest William Hornung (brother-in-law to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), Clyde Fitch, and George M. Cohan. They were followed over the next two decades by the more subtle writings and psychological insights of international masters like August Strindberg, Maxim Gorky, and Bertolt Brecht, and plays of betrayal, violence, and detection by legendary playwrights W. Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, and Federico Garcia Lorca, in addition to those by American novelists Damon Runyon, James Baldwin, Arthur Miller, and William Faulkner, and Nobel Prize winners Eugene O’Neil, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway, to name but a few of the dozens of writers whose works are catalogued in this exhaustively researched compendium.
Amnon Kabatchnik, Bloody Broadway: Plays of Menace, Murder, and Mystery, Volume I, 1900-1930 (Orlando, FL: BearManor Media, 2025), 446 pages, ISBN 9798887718132, hardback, $45, ISBN 9798887718125, paperback, $35.
