Plays Without the Seating Chart

Two teenagers meet at a party, marry by dawn, and die by Thursday.

A mourning prince meets his father's ghost, feigns madness, and delays a murder until almost everyone is dead.

A general hears he will be king. His wife suggests he skip the waiting.

A wife realizes her husband loves her position in his life more than her.

Four runaways, a weaver with donkey ears, and the most chaotic gardening accident in history.

A girl runs away in man's clothes. Her father is currently living in a tree.

The King of Navarre vows to study for three years, then promptly falls in love.

A scholar trades his soul for unlimited knowledge, and the devil starts micromanaging his dating life.

A sorcerer maroons his enemies on an island. Then things get complicated.

A scholar trades his eternal soul for twenty-four years of magic, petty pranks, and a very stressed demon servant.

Two couples are tricked into love while a villain ruins a wedding with a lie.

A king divides his land by how much his daughters praise him. It goes badly.

The men won't stop fighting, so the women stop everything else. War loses its supply line.

A general marries for love, but his own lieutenant decides to ruin everything for sport.

A lender demands a pound of flesh. The debtor finds a very messy loophole.

Danish princes, Venetian creditors, and shipwrecked sorcerers inhabit this definitive collection of early modern drama and verse.

Thebes is dying of plague, and King Oedipus hunts the murderer to end it.

Senators fret over a crown, commit a public stabbing, and discover that killing a man is easier than killing his ghost.

A woman disguises herself as a man, and then everyone falls in love with the wrong person.

A young philosopher argues the Greeks were only beautiful because they were profoundly miserable.

A Duke goes undercover to watch his replacement enforce a sex ban, only for the new guy to demand a bribe.

A young king leaves his wild past behind to invade France, manage a siege, and woo a princess.

A general chooses the Queen of Egypt over the Roman Empire. Rome disagrees.

An aging, broke knight hits on two married women, who decide to handle him together.

Two pairs of identical twins arrive in the same city, causing immediate legal, marital, and metaphysical chaos for everyone involved.

Two best friends move to Milan, where one immediately decides to steal the other's girlfriend.

A King believes he is God's deputy until his cousin brings a real army.

One ambitious Duke calculates the math of murder to clear his path to the throne.

A man takes in a holy beggar. The beggar immediately starts asking for his wife.

A father mandates his younger daughter stays single until her older sister finds a husband.

A king suspects his queen of cheating. He gets it spectacularly, disastrously, and aggressively wrong.

Helena cures the King, marries the Count, and then has to deal with his fleeing.

An oracle delivers a horrific prophecy, a king tries to outrun it, and his children inherit the resulting rubble.

A general sacrifices a prisoner's son. The queen decides this requires several dozen sequels.

A princess survives a murder plot, a trunk-based home invasion, and twenty years of family kidnapping in ancient Britain.

A general insults the public, gets fired, and decides to burn his hometown to the ground.

A king wants a new wife, a cardinal wants more power, and history keeps score.

An Athenian nobleman bankrupted by bad hospitality decides humanity is the problem.

A king wants to keep his throne, his nephew wants it back, and everyone is lying.

Jason leaves his wife for a princess, failing to anticipate her rather extreme plan for alimony.

A kitchen, a tower, and a prairie: the ordinary places where everything suddenly changes.

Troy has fallen, its king is dead, and the survivors are being sorted like inventory.

A prince raised in a cell is released to rule, just to see if he's actually sane.

A king returns from ten years of war to find his welcome mat is a death trap.

A Trojan prince falls for a traitor’s daughter while legendary heroes bicker in the mud over a seven-year stalemate.

The Duchess marries her steward. Her brothers react by turning their court into a torture chamber.

Athens is small, everyone is related, and every young man is one clever servant away from a wedding.

Twenty classic plays lose their iambic pentameter but keep the magic, the murders, and the questionable parenting choices.

Mrs. Alving builds an orphanage to hide her husband's past. The past refuses to stay buried.

A man writes poetry for his rival to woo the woman he loves, then hides it for life.

Two best friends survive a war only to declare a death match over a woman they watched through a window.

A bankrupt farmer hopes to talk his way out of debt, but learns bad arguments instead.

Three con artists turn a plague-vacated London house into a laboratory for fleecing the city's most ambitious idiots.

A king, a judge, and a ghost walk into a sixteenth-century tragedy.

Two men leave Athens to start a city in the clouds. Birds take over.

A princess dances for her stepfather, demanding the head of a prophet on a platter.

A French statesman analyzes the chaotic energy of Shakspeare, weighing the richness of English passion against the severe demands of Gallic taste.

A marksman shoots an apple off his son's head. The governor files it under immediate regret.

A god shows up in Thebes to start a cult. The King says no.

A priestess must choose between deceiving her savior-king and watching the state-mandated execution of her long-lost, matricidal brother.

A junior clerk commits a forgery. The law, as it turns out, is quite unsympathetic.

A Scythian shepherd trades his crook for a crown, cages the Turkish Emperor, and redefines the limits of human ambition.

Dionysus goes to the Underworld to rescue a poet, but the candidates won't stop bickering.

A gentleman thinks he is staying at a hotel, but he is actually at his future father-in-law's dinner table.

A king discovers his parentage, a sister breaks the law, and gods never stop watching.

A peasant girl saves the French crown, then tries to survive being a holy icon.

A courtesan loses her jewelry, a Brahman loses his wealth, and a small clay toy becomes the pivot for a revolution.

A stranded traveler is mistaken for a government inspector, so he lets the corrupt local officials pay his bills.

Before Netflix, medieval towns turned the Bible into local theater for the public to enjoy.

A king returns from war to a murderous wife, starting a cycle of family killings that only a trial can end.

Two actors collect their friend's work. It becomes the bedrock of English literature.

A king forgets his wife, a cloud delivers a letter, and a solar dynasty conquers heaven across eight Sanskrit classics.

King Brutus leaves his sons a divided nation, a Scythian invader, and a secret affair that drowns the royal family.

A man tries to outrun his own marriage, but Ann Whitefield is a very persistent guardian.

Two men invent fake brothers to escape dull dinners, then find their lies are legally required.

A professor bets he can turn a flower girl into a duchess, then forgets she's human.

An Irish mother loses her last son to the waves after a spectral rider signals the end of her family line.

An aging actress, a frustrated writer, and a lake where everyone talks but nobody listens.

A vast assembly of dramatic voices where a rat catcher, a goddess, and a suspicious lover all share the floor.

A woman returns from a honeymoon she hated and discovers her house is full of boring people.

A factory director tries to build a human utopia without work, but his synthetic laborers eventually demand a promotion to masters.

Christ returns to sixteenth-century Seville; the local authorities arrest Him for being inconveniently free.