Stephen Adly Guirgis Selected Works

Stephen Adly Guirgis takes his signature style to another level in this play about the harrowing, humorous, and heartbreaking inner workings of a women’s halfway house in New York City.

Guirgis's black comedy takes us into the world of Maggie, a shoplifter looking to change her life. Paul is her sponsor in a twelve-step program. Flaco is her charismatic but jealous drug dealing-boyfriend. Boochie, Flaco's girlfriend, is a topless dancer. When this unlikely squad gets together to steal $750,000 in unprotected drug money, they become prisoners in a mob boss' basement. Told that they have until sunrise to choose one person to die and three to donate their thumbs, the four engage in verbal gymnastics as they struggle for self-awareness and self-acceptance in a high-octane battle for survival.

Presented as part of Ensemble Studio Theatre's 2006 Marathon of One-Act Plays.

City Hall is demanding more than his signature, the Landlord wants him out, the liquor store is closed — and the Church won’t leave him alone. For ex-cop & recent widower Walter “Pops” Washington and his recently paroled son Junior, when the struggle to hold on to one of the last great rent stabilized apartments on Riverside Drive collides with old wounds, sketchy new houseguests, and a final ultimatum, it seems the Old Days are dead and gone — after a lifetime living between Riverside and Crazy.

When Therese Marie arrives in the emergency room of a small hospital in the Bronx, suffering from hypothermia and in shock, no one there knows her story. To the doctors and nurses, she is just another abandoned elderly woman who can’'t even tell them her name. But Therese Marie’'s dementia is not all that it seems. And when her prodigal son, Danny, returns to New York, Therese Marie must fight to maintain her dignity in light of her son’'s insistence on confronting the ugly secrets of their past. In this unconventional family drama, Stephen Adly Guirgis gives us a mother and son who must face a long family legacy of abuse in order to find the true meaning of grace.

Things are looking up for recovering alcoholic Jackie and his girlfriend Veronica——until Jackie spots another man's hat in their apartment and embarks on a sublimely incompetent quest for vengeance. Fast-paced and uproarious, Mother is a gleefully foul-mouthed look at modern love and other addictions.

In this raucously funny and deeply spiritual play, a group of childhood friends reunite in Harlem for the wake of their beloved, yet feared teacher, Sister Rose. Gathered together for the first time in years, passions are ignited, tensions are heightened and old wounds are opened. Playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis brings his trademark intensity and a unique, urban style to this moving, hilarious story.

New York City's Riker's Island: home to the most hardened criminals in the nation. Meet Angel, a young man who may have been incarcerated for all of the wrong reasons and who is walking the tightrope between salvation and the point of no return. Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train is a brilliant, visceral examination of justice and morality that explores the validity of one prisoner’'s supposed salvation after he has committed a string of brutal murders and questions the difference between true faith and self-serving uses of religion.

Lenny is a recently released ex-convict. Despite his imposing size, he was gang raped repeatedly while incarcerated and struggles to find his manhood on the outside. Daisy, his alcoholic girlfriend, craves a "real" life with a "real" man and abandons him at a seedy pre-Giuliani Times Square bar in pursuit of some cheap Chinese takeout. At the bar is Skank, a former failed actor turned junkie, who is trying to outlast the rain storm and get a buyback from the long-missing Irish bartender as he begins to go through withdrawals. Also at the bar is Sammy, an old, dying guilt-ridden drunk who exists somewhere between reality and the afterlife. DeMaris, a seventeen-year-old gun-brandishing single mother, wants to learn to turn tricks. She enlists the aid of Chickie, Skank's girlfriend, a young crackhead hooker who plays Go Fish with the simple-minded day bartender Cha-lie, who thinks he's a Jedi warrior and who buys meals for Chickie because he loves her and because he lives for the day they can go out someday, "just as friends." The owner of the bar is Jake. The place was his father's before him, and after thirty years, he longs for the chance to leave "this sewer" for a re-invented life in Florida. The real-estate boom, "gentrification" and the emergence of Disney in Times Square affords him that opportunity. Unaware that their last piece of home is about to be pulled out from under them, the bar patrons struggle on. Their sense of humor, their misguided hopes and dreams, and their lack of self-pity are badges that are tattooed to their souls. They will all, before the end, demand and take the chance to face head on their complicated and sad truths.

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot is a wildly funny court-room drama in which history's most infamous betrayal is dissected by forces of good and evil. In a court room that owes as much to the ghetto as to the Gospels, figures such as Pontius Pilate, Mother Teresa and Sigmund Freud are called to testify in a trial of God and the Kingdom of Heaven and Earth versus Judas Iscariot.