UPSTAGE LEFT PRESS

OUR MISSIONUpstage Left Press is a feminist publisher of original dramatic literature by female identifying persons. We curate potent, enduring work that commands the page, with or without production history.

FORTHCOMING - MAY 20, 2025

When Churchyards Yawn and Other Plays
by Jeanmarie Simpson

First Edition, 2025 – Upstage Left PressThis collection gathers four extraordinary theatrical works that span the mythic and the intimate, the political and the personal. At its center is When Churchyards Yawn—a fiercely funny, deeply spiritual reimagining of Hamlet set in Purgatory, where the characters must face their sins (and each other) before anyone can ascend. Built on Shakespeare’s bones but utterly original in voice, it’s a play about grief, consequence, community, and the long road to forgiveness. And it’s a damn good time.Alongside it, we find Lear (A Solo Adaptation)—a devastating portrait of a king unraveling in the final flickers of life; Ghosts of the Gilded Stage—a theatrical haunting steeped in legacy and gender; and Even Unto Death—a raw, intimate meditation on belief, betrayal, and survival.These plays are deeply theatrical, emotionally alive, and structurally inventive. They were written in the shadow of the pandemic and bear the imprint of that urgency: the need to say what must be said, to reckon with the past, to reach toward something holy—however broken.What we love most about this collection is its emotional range. It makes room for rage and tenderness, irreverence and reverence, ghosts and grace. It invites us into a theatre of consequence—where the story doesn’t end with death, and no one gets to exit before reckoning with what they’ve done.These are plays for actors to devour, for audiences to argue over, and for readers to return to again and again.We’re proud to welcome When Churchyards Yawn & Other Plays into the world—and into the heart of what Upstage Left Press stands for.

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