Broadway Play Publishing Inc
A seamstress is catapulted into a new life, new house, and new government job. But good fortunes quickly change when her new position attracts unexpected guests and reveals more secrets about herself than about political conspiracies.
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)
Full Length Drama (about 100 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Marilyn Stasio, Variety
“Intar has such a lock on plays by disgruntled Cubans that references to US bumbling on the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis echo throughout much of the company’s work. Rogelio Martinez breaks with tradition by setting ALL EYES AND EARS between those two events and aiming his satirical barbs at the Soviet Union. He also takes a novel approach to another perennial theme of displaced Cubans — rage at countrymen who turned communist informers — by writing a role for a vengeful ghost. Even in this uneven production, the playwright earns points by finding new twists on old topics.”
Richard Hinojosa, nytheatre.com
“The fear that suddenly rushes down your spine when you’re alone in the dark and realize that someone or something may be watching you or that someone or something might jump out and attack you can be extended into the fear of character assassination. After all, this sort of attack is an attack in the dark — you don’t know what people are saying about you when you’re not there. In ALL EYES AND EARS, playwright Rogelio Martinez brilliantly uses this fear to create a dynamic power struggle that stirs your senses scene by scene.”
Broadway Play Publishing Inc.
Cuba. Two brothers, both writers, meet again after a long absence. What follows is a fierce and hilarious fight to determine who has the right to tell the family’s story. In the middle of this is a mysterious sister whose needs, like the country she lives in, seem to have been neglected.
Cast: 3 total (1 female, 2 male)
Full Length Drama (about 110 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Enrique Fernandez, The Sun-Sentinel
“Both [brothers] are successful writers. And both are, as the play jokes about at the start, whores. The play lays out the compromises artists make in both capitalism and communism and makes no judgment, except to indict them both equally. Sitting as judge and jury is their sister, the woman who stayed behind to keep the house as if a museum … Cuba’s tribulations are but a setting and mechanism for the play’s larger question. From the quagmire of the bad intentions of history, who will emerge to tell the true story?”
Broadway Play Publishing Inc
Two of history's most enigmatic leaders — Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev — meet to halt the arms race. A crafty game of one-upmanship ensues, while their wives engage in a passive-aggressive tango over tea in this compulsively fascinating, slyly comic backstage glimpse of a twentieth-century landmark event.
Cast: 7 total (2 female, 5 male, plus ensemble of 6 actors)
Full Length Drama (about 135 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes
Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times
“BLIND DATE, Rogelio Martinez’s playfully titled and altogether amusing geopolitical romp … might very well be described as a ‘Ron-com.’ Ron as in Ronald Reagan, the actor, California governor and 40th President of the United States whose military and foreign policies some say helped bring the Cold War to an end (at least temporarily). Whatever the long-term historical assessment of all that might be, there can be no doubt that one of the most notable events in late 20th century US–Soviet relations occurred during two days in November, 1985: Reagan, (who seemed to have bounced back from a 1981 assassination attempt, but as always was somewhat indecipherable), met for the first time at a summit in Geneva, Switzerland with Mikhail Gorbachev, who had only recently been elected to serve as General Secretary of the Soviet Union, and was something short of secure in his position. As with all blind dates, the ‘couple’ … arrive in a state of both apprehension and hopefulness. And their actual meeting (‘truthy’ as it might or might not be here, and without the presence of translators who are always essential elements in the room) is marked by all the nervous humor, misunderstandings, game-playing and awkwardness of such encounters.
The two men also arrive with their respective wives … Also in attendance are the all-important advisors: US Secretary of State George Shultz, and the sophisticated Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, whose introductory lunch cannily reveals much about both men. Dancing around the edges of it all is Edmund Morris, the British–American historian whose much-anticipated biography of Reagan ultimately became what he described as ‘a work of nonfiction by an imaginary author’ — largely the result of Reagan’s impenetrability. Most crucially, given the moment in which audiences are now watching BLIND DATE, there is a fully ‘meta’ quality about the play, with the decorum and diplomatic interplay of the historical event free of the social media contagion of the moment, and with the press corps very much of a long-gone era. In fact, if you tend toward nostalgia, you also might delight in the witty, zestful way in which Larry Speakes, Reagan’s Mississippi–bred acting Press Secretary, handles his job. Yet more than anything, there is a sense of constructive peace-making and future-building (if far from naive ‘trust’) here — one that might just keep mutually assured nuclear destruction at bay. To be sure, BLIND DATE … is no documentary. But the Cuban-born Martinez, who has riffed on the Cold War era in several other plays, captures both the personalities and issues in play, including the Reagan administration’s ‘Strategic Defense Initiative,’ which raised the hackles of the Soviet Union, a nation already suffering from the fallout of its war in Afghanistan, a flailing economy, and Gorbachev’s untested leadership. Two more wildly different personalities than ‘Ron’ and ‘Misha’ could not have been put in a room together. And yet, for whatever reasons (a mutual wish for a sane approach to major differences), they managed to find some common ground. And now, seen with the power of hindsight, a sort of melancholy overlays the farcical aspects of the play simply because we know Gorbachev’s short tenure ultimately led to the arrival of Vladimir Putin, that Reagan’s legacy was laced with a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and that nuclear war is no longer a matter of just two sides …”
Broadway Play Publishing Inc
It’s 1961. Fidel has turned Havana upside down. Veronica’s family has fled the country, leaving her behind to find a new family. Pregnant and ready to participate in whatever Fidel throws her way, she is not fully prepared for everything the revolution has in store. ILLUMINATING VERONICA is a play about betrayal and hope that looks at Castro’s Cuba, not as a demonic state, nor as a perfect paradise, but as a work in progress.
Cast: 6 total (2 female, 4 male)
Full Length Drama (about 115 minutes)
Single Set
Contemporary Costumes
Broadway Play Publishing Inc
Based on the true events surrounding the groundbreaking table tennis tournament that marked a decisive new chapter in US–China relations, PING PONG is the story of the extraordinary young man who played the game that changed the world and the political actors who were playing him. With Nixon and Mao on either side of the court, free-spirited hippie Glenn Cowan reaches across the net to usher in a fragile new friendship between two great countries in this funny, incisive, and wildly imaginative new play about the little moments of history that set up the big ones.
Cast: 8 total (3 female, 5 male, doubling, bit parts)
Full Length Drama (about 90 minutes)
Minimal Set Requirements
Contemporary Costumes