A Narrow Bed - Samuel French Acting edition, 2010, play. Loved by audiences and critics nationwide, this compassionate and reflective play about two women coping with loneliness and loss was also successfully presented Off Broadway. The women are the last members of a rural commune founded in the 60's. One's husband was killed in Vietnam and she still clings to his memory. The other's wisecracking husband is hospitalized and dying. Both women find the courage to accept their "narrow bed" and get on with their lives. Click here to purchase the script from Amazon.

Actor's Choice: Monologues for Women, Volume 2 - Playscripts, 2013, collection of monologues. Actor's Choice: Monologues for Women, Volume 2 continues the Actor's Choice series with a brand-new selection of exceptional contemporary monologues. Explore the work of today's most celebrated theatrical voices. Click here to purchase the book from Playscripts.

Ajax in Iraq - Playscripts, 2008, play. Past and present collide in Ellen McLaughlin's mash-up of Sophocles' classic tragedy Ajax with the modern-day war in Iraq. The play follows the parallel narratives of Ajax, an ancient Greek military hero, and A.J., a modern female American soldier, both undone by the betrayal of a commanding officer. Click here to purchase the script from Playscripts.
Premiere: A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training. Cambridge, MA. October 1, 2008.
Upcoming: Texas State University. San Marcos, TX. November 1, 2016.

Days and Nights Within - Theater Communications Group,1984, play. Premiered in1985 at Actors’ Theater of Louisville, directed by artistic director Jon Jory, where it won the Great American Play Contest. The play dramatizes the complex relationship between a political prisoner and her interrogator in communist East Berlin in 1950. Published by TCG in the Plays in Process edition, 1985.
Premiere: Actors’ Theater of Louisville. Louisville, KY. 1985.

The Greek Plays - Theatre Communications Group, 2004, book. Contains the following plays: Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Helen, Lysistrata, The Persians, The Trojan Women. Click here to purchase the book from Amazon.

Helen - Playscripts, 2002, play adapted by Ellen McLaughlin from the play by Euripides. In this fresh take on Euripides' tragicomedy, Helen never went to Troy but spent the war fought in her name in an Egyptian hotel room waiting for her husband Menelaus to come find her and take her home. Bewildered by her strange escape from her own story, even Menelaus' final arrival cannot save Helen from the legend that has grown far larger than the woman who inspired it. Click here to purchase the script from Playscripts.
Premiere: The Public Theater. New York, NY. April 1, 2002.

Infinity's House - Theatre Communications Group, 1990, play. Professional premiere: 1990 at the Actors’ Theater of Louisville Humana Festival. The play involves three groups of historical figures circling the unnerving emptiness of the American desert—pioneers attempting to cross the Humboldt Desert in 1850, the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 with the driving of the stake in Promontory Point, UT, and the meeting of the railroad crews, the Chinese coming from the west and the Irish from the east, and finally the physicists who created the atomic bomb at the testing in the Alamogordo Desert in 1945.

Iphigenia and Other Daughters - Playscripts, 1994, play. Adapted by Ellen McLaughlin from the plays Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Electra, this three-play cycle is a modern retelling of the fall of the House of Atreus. It follows the children of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, siblings who are both players in the family tragedy and victims of it. Click here to purchase script from Playscripts.
Premiere: Classic Stage Company. New York, NY. January 13, 1995. Directed by David Esbjornson.
Published by Playscripts and as one of the anthology of her plays in The Greek Plays, TCG 2005

Kissing the Floor - A radical re-imagining of Sophocles’ Antigone, set in Depression Era America. With their disaster of a brother Paul in prison, two adult sisters, Annie and Izzie, struggle to find a moral ground in the fallout of their family’s tragic and ignoble saga.
Premiere: One Year Lease. New York, NY. January 2023.

Lysistrata - Playscripts, 2006, play adapted by Ellen McLaughlin from the play Aristophanes. This fresh, fast-paced comedy follows Lysistrata, an Athenian housewife, who calls for the women of Greece to help end the Peloponnesian War. She proposes a radical plan: all Greek women must refuse to engage in love making until the men see reason, lay down their arms and come home to lay down with their wives in peace. Click here to purchase script from Playscripts.
Premiered as a reading directed by McLaughlin with an all-star cast at the Harvey Theater at Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Lysistrata Project, the global protest reading movement on March 3, 2003.

The Names We Gave Him - 2021, musical. Loosely based on a true story, this musical concerns an amnesiac veteran of the First World War, the doctor who treated him, and the many women who, in denial of their grief, claimed him as their lost beloved. The piece explores the agony of war for both the soldiers and the families they leave behind, the distorting power of loss and the insistence of love. What is a country’s identity in the aftermath of such devastation? What is a self without memory?
“His masterpiece” Adam Gopnick wrote, in his article in the New Yorker about Peter Foley’s scores.
Premiere: Montclair State University. Montclair, NJ. April 2021.

Oedipus - Playscripts, 2005, play. Adapted by Ellen McLaughlin from the play Sophocles. A plague grips the city of Thebes. Desperate to save his people, King Oedipus sends a messenger to the oracle at Delphi and discovers that the city's salvation lies in finding and punishing the murderer of the former king, Laius. Click here to purchase this script from Playscripts.
Premiere: Guthrie Theater. Minneapolis, MN. January 15, 2005.
Recent: Odyssey Theater. Los Angeles, CA. April 11, 2015.

Penelope - One-woman play and song cycle, commissioned and first produced by the Theater at the Getty Villa, CA. Written and performed by Ellen McLaughlin, Music by Sarah Kirkland Snider. A woman's ex-husband appears at her door after an absence of 20 years, suffering from brain damage. A veteran of a modern war, he doesn't know who he is and she doesn't know who he's become. While they wait together for his return to himself, she reads him The Odyssey, and in the journey of that book, she finds a way into her former husband's memory and the terror and trauma of war.

“…she unfolds a story in absolute grace and brilliance until you feel your own soul very raw yet luminous.” — Kate Gale, Red Hen Review
“An eloquent meditation on death, memory, being lost, and homecoming.” — Jason Green, Pitchfork Review

Pericles - ACMRS Press, 2022, play. A modern verse translation of the play by William Shakespeare. Commissioned by the Play On! Shakespeare Project, which originated at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McLaughlin’s version of the play is considered a “translation” rather than an adaptation because it hews closely to the original, matching the meter, and aims to achieve a modern equivalent to Shakespeare’s poetry. Premiering in 2015 at Orlando Shakespeare Festival, in a production directed by the artistic director, Jim Helsinger, the play received praise as being immediate but still rich, and accessible without losing the majesty of its source. Published in 2022 by ACMRS Press, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, at Arizona State University, distributed by The University of Chicago Press.

The Persians - Playscripts, 2003, Based on the play by Aeschylus. In this moving and poetic adaptation of Aeschylus' drama, Queen Atossa and her subjects anxiously await news of their King Xerxes' expedition to Greece. Click here to purchase this script from Playscripts.
Premiere: National Actors' Theater. New York, NY.  2003.
Subsequent: Shakespeare Theater Company, Washington, DC, 2006.

The Tongue of a Bird - Samuel French Inc, 2007, play. Maxine, a search and rescue pilot, returns in midwinter to her childhood home in the Adirondacks. There she conducts a search for a girl who, while on a field trip in the mountains, was abducted by a stranger in a black pick up truck. The search lasts for three days. Each night Maxine must face the girl's distraught mother, Dessa, and her own grandmother, Zofia, a reclusive Polish refugee. In sleep, Maxine is prey to nightmares and fragmented memories of a mother who abandoned her in childhood and was lost to insanity. Click here to purchase this script from Amazon.
Premiere: The Intiman Theater, Seattle, WA, 1997.
Subsequent: The Almeida Theater, London, 1997.
The Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles, CA 1999.
The Public Theater, New York, NY, 1999.

The Trojan Women - Playscripts, 2003, from the play Euripides. In the wake of their devastating defeat, the women of Troy, now refugees, wait on the beach below the ravaged city to be claimed by their Greek conquerors as slaves and concubines. Click here to purchase this script from Playscripts.
The play has been produced professionally all over the world but originated as a staged reading which was produced at Classic Stage Company in 1995, 1996, and 1997 under the auspices of The Balkan Theater Project and directed by Ellen McLaughlin. The text was performed during and immediately after the Balkan War by refugees from all sides of the conflict living in the NY area.