“I think he was who he was. Sometimes the spirit in a man knows itself in all the fullness of its existence, and the playwright that he is tells it.”
Bill Shaker in the play -The Shakes
About
Vincent Sessa is the author of an expansive body of plays, various in subject and manner. Many are comedies, or have elements of comedy. The plays have in common a lyricism of language and illuminating imagery. All evoke the condition of humankind through incisive portrayals of men and women in personal, often political struggle.
Testimonial
“I am writing you about Vincent Sessa, a playwright whose work I have recently come to know. I’ve come to know it in some detail, actually, because Vincent has written many plays, and once I read the first one that was shown to me, I demanded to see more. Vincent is that ideal thing: an eclectic writer with a personal style... a combination that gives his work both range and intimacy. His sense of dramatic language is simply extraordinary. The people he writes about come vividly alive in the dialogue he writes, and what fascinating people they are. And this language is at once heightened and absolutely down-to-earth. I don’t know how he does that. But it allows him to blaze his way into many different worlds, and make us, his readers and his audience, feel alive there. I recommend Vincent, and anything he writes, to anybody who’s looking for a new, electric voice in the American Theatre.”
Austin Pendleton
Plays
Found here is an alphabetical list of thirty-four plays written over the course of thirty years. My project these past years has been to complete a master script of each play (to my mind: a new play; a play thought through anew and lived again moment by moment).
The most recently completed plays are Assisted Living and Living Will, companion plays written in 2023 and 2024. The plays may be performed in repertory or independently of each other.
Cast size is indicated for each play with a brief, limited description. Upon inquiry I will be happy to provide additional information including any production history. Here is a unique body of plays for the English-speaking and world stage.
I remain, as the plaque in New York's Shubert Alley reads, “Dedicated to all those who glorify the theatre and use this short thoroughfare.”
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Cast size: 11. A sprawling, multi-character, two-part political play following the rise of a governor of New York State to the presidency. One character in the play describes the evolving gamesmanship as “a bedroom story about politics.” Ideally performed in repertory, the Alice plays offer a timely, and timeless, take on the state of the union.
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ASSISTED LIVING
Cast size: 5. On a bright Fall morning, residents assemble in the Lowly Lobby in anticipation of a day trip to Corlears Hook. The two woman and three men understand theoretically that it’s best to come to terms with their fraught individual experiences.It's best to keep at it. To keep at their lives. If only it were possible. If only they could forgive.
LIVING WILL
Cast size: 5. On a cool afternoon in Fall, four elderly residents (two men and two women), assemble in the Lowly Lounge to consider the decision they've made to take their lives by the 10th of the month. Much thought has gone into the decision, but there still remain urgent matters to attend to, such as estate planning. Carlotta, a young staff member at the Corlears Hook Senior Residence, passes in and out of the Lowly Lounge throughout the afternoon, engaging the residents with her lively outlook on life. -
Cast size: 3. (All female cast.) A play in three scenes: 1944, 1975, 1995. The consequences of war and grief and of love. A family’s story set in three different eras.
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Cast size: 2. A mother and father face the aftermath of a school shooting committed by their son.
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Cast size: 2. A searing sexual encounter between an older man and a young man based on the homecoming of Odysseus.
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Cast size: 7. An unusual romantic triangle tears a rural family apart.
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Cast size: 6. “The theatre has become a minefield of grievances- race, sex, gender- name it.” Exasperated playwright Callum Drummer abandons New York City for a little known town upstate, Galoshes Fall. There, on the momentous autumn day that the play takes place, townspeople occupy his waking hours, and he finds he is not far away at all from the divisions that rankle contemporary theatre; nor can he escape, or separate, the comedy and tragedy of his life.
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Cast size: 7. A fractured love story and political drama reconstructed and recounted by a madman.
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Cast size: 4. Friends gather to bury Glad Grace, and set out for the day to the sea, with a picnic along the way, remembering her all the way there.
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Cast size: 9. A young man in rural America is discovered to have a unique structure in his brain that may be a leap in human evolution. He’s fled town, and everyone in town has an idea about that. The play in large part is told in monologues.
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Cast size: 6. A lurid and thrilling tale set in NYC of misattributed love and misattributed artwork, and ending in murder.
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Cast size: 6. Two Manhattan detectives, one Black, one White, investigate a brutal murder at the home of the US Ambassador to the UN. A search for a possible terrorist device hidden in the city ensues. The play is a city-song of the men and women caught up in the search.
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Cast size: 10. A multi-character play that takes place from Monday to Friday at the offices of a cruise line in Manhattan. The ship: The Wine Dark Sea. Based on Homer’s Odyssey.
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Cast size: 6. A playwright walks the city in an attempt to piece together a play that he’s abandoned. The characters in the abandoned play accompany him. An exploration of self and playwriting and the creative process.
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Cast size: 7. Three middle-aged friends meet after long silence on a hot summer day upstate, in driving distance from Manhattan. Lunch is interrupted when three young people out for a day hiking ask for some water. Old friends and new friends meet, and they may all be the same friends.
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Cast size: 6. Noel Berol, the leading expert on William Butler Yeats, is compelled to hire a detective to investigate some very shady goings-on at the home of friends where he had recently stayed a night. It’s the most tangled, fraught of situations and everyone (almost everyone) speaks with an English accent.
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Cast size: 7. Mrs. Stanchion delivers a “commitment-talk” at a college about “the perniciousness of theatre” and its malign influences. The dean of the college, emboldened by students awakening to a new experience, begs to differ. Miraculously the lecture becomes live theatre.
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Cast size: 8. A retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo & Juliet.” And like none other.
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Cast size: 12. A contemporary play set in Greenwich Village at the fabled bar, The Golden Swan, where once Eugene O’Neill reveled. The frequenters of the bar this long night revel too, in laughter, in anger, in romantic pursuit, in sexual assault, in violence. A question of Black/White relations enters the bar-light atmosphere. An artist confronts the merciless bargain he’s made, that he might paint his masterpieces. A dapper gangster confronts the past, that he might come to know his son. The play meets the dawn as a paean to New York and the Broadway theatre.
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Cast size: 11. A multi-character comedy of the theatre. A takedown, a sendup. Hilarious, with a heartbreaker ending.
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Cast size: 24. A Sicilian idyl. A writer crosses paths with the others of his life as he walks the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, Sicily. Inspired by the C. P. Cavafy poem, “Myres: Alexandria in 340 A.D.”
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Cast size: 3. A young woman is dying of love. Is she? An intense drama of love and obsession.
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Cast size: 5. Based on the history of Lizzie Borden, and the murders that took place in Fall River, MA on the morning of August 4, 1892. This is Greek drama. This is modern drama, as real-time as the headlines today.
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Cast size: 6. Set in a mythical kingdom. King, queen, wizards and dunces. Shakespearian in the writing. An adult fairytale. The power of love. The power of destruction. The power of renewal.
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Cast size: 16. Set in the Hotel Heliotropic, during the course of a weekend, family and guests gather to celebrate the life of Titus Brown, military marshal and man of the people. An event planner, Kaiser Rise, has been hired to plan and direct the celebration. Much is known of Titus Brown’s heralded, decorated life, his military and civilian achievements. But there is still a history to be discovered. The play is a dazzling battlefield of human comedy and terror.
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Cast size: 4. A mysterious young lady jumps all the way up into the air, as high and higher than she can go, and falls onto the deck of a boat. A father and his two sons have fled a world spiraling to its end, and call the boat their home. What will they do with her? What will she do with them?
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Cast size: 7. A dystopian tale of a world and a society come apart and cracked open, and still people have to decide what to do now. The battered house belonging to the Keenings family is located a way up from the railroad station. Those from the house and those passing through the station anticipate the train’s arrival. But will it, and where is it to?
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Cast size: 8. Passengers are crossing Bounder’s Bay to Finback Landing aboard the ferry, The Carys Grace. On board with the passengers is the former skipper of the ferry, who, after a mysterious encounter rescuing a figure from the bay, is now going blind. To provide light snacks and light entertainment while crossing the bay, “the independent refreshment couple” is available. But all aboard The Carys Grace are alarmed by reports of an encroaching, all-encompassing darkness. The play is a scarifying meditation on the loss of light everywhere and among all peoples.
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Cast size: 6. The love story of Longfellow Putti, astrophysicist, and Parker Since, anthropologist, and it all takes place one afternoon in the offices of Broker Cinch, arms manufacturer to the world.
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Cast size: 7. Brooklyn, and a man thinks he’s Shakespeare. The play unfolds through the eyes (and the narration) of the man’s son. A soaring play of ambition and heartbreak.
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Cast size: 6. A four-act play that takes place in one day, set on Long Island in September 1990, the day before a wedding. An unconventional, deeply layered and moving family drama. An Italian-American family, and a friend of the family, a Dutch woman who emigrated to America at the end of WW2, prepare for the wedding. Leaves are added to a table to accommodate one generation passing into another.
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Cast size: 4. The rise of a new political party personified by one woman, Belle Abide, and the past, as far back as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, converge in a family home in Connecticut.