Helen Plum Library

Jacky Ha-Ha loves to make people laugh, and cracking wise helps distract her from thinking about not-so-funny things in her life, like her mom serving in a dangerous, faraway war, and a dad who's hardly ever home. When she's required to act in the school play, she must conquer her stutter. When she makes a promise to give up the one thing that makes her happy, in order to keep her family together, will she stop being her real self?

When Kyle writes a play about a full moon, his best friend Katie decides she will write one about a star, but they realize it is always more fun to do things together, and combine both plays to make a new one

"The first novel in nearly twenty years from the acclaimed actor/writer/director is a book about art and love, fame and heartbreak--a blistering story of a young man making his Broadway debut in Henry IV just as his marriage implodes. A bracing meditation on fame and celebrity, and the redemptive, healing power of art; a portrait of the ravages of disappointment and divorce; a poignant consideration of the rites of fatherhood and manhood; a novel...

Shira Gordon is painfully shy. She rarely speaks and blushes at everything. And yet, when she's alone in her room, she'll sing and dance, dreaming she were different. So when her best friend forces her to audition for their school's production of The Music Man, she's mostly hoping the play will get canceled . . . but a tiny part of her hopes she'll get in. And she does. As a member of the barbershop quartet. Playing a dude with a mustache is not exactly...

Zoe is chosen for the role of Cinder Rabbit in her school play and is also supposed to lead the class in the Bunny Hop at the end, but ever since wicked Winifred laughed at her for landing in a mud puddle, Zoe has forgotten how to hop

"Windy Corner is being remodeled into a writers' retreat. Two of the young workers, Jake and Roman, are showing too much of the wrong kind of interest in Katie, Emily's young single-mother housekeeper. It's a stormy autumn and Emily is reading Wuthering Heights. Roman, a dark and brooding type, reminds her of Heathcliff. At a Halloween murder mystery fundraiser at Windy Corner, someone is found stabbed to death. Windy Corner's very own detective,...

After being cast as Romeo in the school play, Dean realizes he wants everyone to see him as he really is, a male, and not just play one on the stage, despite the risk of losing everything Dean Foster has watched enough YouTube videos and done enough questioning to be sure he's a trans guy. But everyone at his high school thinks he's a lesbian-- including his girlfriend Zoe, and his theater director, who just cast him as a "nontraditional" Romeo....

"One hundred incisive, idiosyncratic essays on life and theater from a major American playwright "Don't send your characters to reform school!" pleads Sarah Ruhl in one of her essays. With titles as varied as "On Lice" to "On Sleeping in Theaters" and "Motherhood and Stools (The Furniture Kind)," these essays are artful meditations on life in the arts and joyous jumbles of observations on everything in between. The pieces combine admonition, celebration,...

In Acton, Oregon, sisters Alex, Stevie, and Joey take turns telling about their lives, including auditioning for the same part in the school musical, baking contest-worthy cupcakes, and becoming obsessed with "Little Women."

After moving across the country, thirteen-year-old Natalie auditions for her new school's play and overcomes her fears and insecurities about performing in a wheelchair