Take Ten II: More Ten-Minute Plays »

Nina Shengold won the ABC Playwright Award and the LA Weekly Award for her play "Homesteaders." Her one-acts have been performed all over the country, and her TV scripts include Hallmark Hall of Fame's "Blind Spot," starring Joanne Woodward, and "Silent Night." A founding member of the theater company Actors & Writers, she lives in upstate New York.

Eric Lane is an award-winning playwright, filmmaker and book editor. Plays include: Times of War, Cater-Waiter and Dancing on Checkers’ Grave, which starred Jennifer Aniston. His new play Heart of the City has been optioned for off-Broadway. Eric has written and produced two short films: First Breath and Cater-Waiter, which he also directed. Honors include a Writer’s Guild Award, La MaMa Playwright Award, Berrilla Kerr Award and two-time O’Neill Center finalist. He has won fellowships at Yaddo and St. James Cavalier in Malta. Eric is Artistic Director of Orange Thoughts Productions, a not-for-profit theater & film company in New York City.

Shengold and Lane are the editors of Plays for Actresses and Take Ten: New Ten-Minute Plays, both in Vintage. For Penguin they edited Moving Parts: Monologues from Contemporary Plays, The Actor's Book of Scenes from New Plays, and The Actor's Book of Gay & Lesbian Plays, which was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award.

A ten-minute play is a blaze of theatrical energy. In this follow-up to their groundbreaking collection Take Ten, editors Eric Lane and Nina Shengold have put together a veritable bonfire of talent. Take Ten II: More 10-Minute Plays provides a fast-track tour of the current theatrical landscape, from the slapstick ingenuity of David Ives’ Arabian Nights to the searing tension of Diana Son’s 9/11 drama The Moon, Please, to Susan Miller’s luminous fable The Grand Design. This remarkably diverse anthology includes thirty-five short plays by such major American playwrights as Christopher Durang, Warren Leight, Romulus Linney and Donald Margulies, alongside a host of exciting new voices.

Actors, directors, producers and teachers will find Take Ten II an invaluable source of meaty roles for people of every age, ethnicity and gender; lovers of theatre will find it a richly satisfying read. These deceptively short plays throb with life in all its variety: harrowing, hilarious, and breathtakingly vital.