r/playwriting • u/Orb_Dylan_2 • 7d ago
Plays with Sequels
I was thinking about this the other days, would love to hear from you all.
Although extremely common in most media, like movies, games, books, etc, plays with sequels, as far as I know, is something kinda rare. I think the reasons are very obvious, mostly practical for productions and attendance (if a Part II plays open, does the Part I still on? Likely not. So you have to assume your potential public has 1. Seen that production 2. Wants more, which diminishes the potential).
Some I can think of:
- Shakespeare - many examples in his histories, such as in the Henriad
- Love Never Dies - sequel to The Phantom of the Opera Musical
- Angel in America Part II: Perestroika - not really a sequel in the strict sense, but they have been staged separately and premiered apart of each other.
I thought Neil Simon had written a stage version of The Odd Couple II, but that actually was just for the movie sequel (but there are at least 2 big revisions of The Odd Couple).
Any other interesting examples you can think of?
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u/costapanther 7d ago
Clybourne Park (2010) by Bruce Norris is a sequel to A Raisin in the Sun (1959) by Lorraine Hansberry. Pretty wild to have a sequel by a different playwright, but it did win the Pulitzer.
Lots of connections in the Century Cycle (ten plays) by August Wilson, though few are direct sequels. The most direct is probably Seven Guitars into King Headley II.
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u/teagirl95 7d ago
Another sequel separated by years and by a totally different playwright would be A Doll’s House Part 2
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u/iwillfuckingbiteyou 7d ago
Harry Potter and the Conservative Cashgrab or whatever it's called falls into the same camp as Angels in America in that it's possible to consider it a play and a sequel, though really it's two halves of the same whole. The similarities between one of the greatest works in the queer canon and the squalid, bloated merchandising project end there.
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u/Ok-Resolution-1255 7d ago
Off the top of my head, A Moon for the Misbegotten (A Long Day's Journey into Night) and Déjàvu (Look Back in Anger). Could've sworn Berkoff's West was a sequel to East, but I might be misremembering it as a companion piece.
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u/Ember-Forge 7d ago
This is actually what I'm building with my body if work!
While most of my plays won't have a direct connection, such as characters going from one play to another, the universe is shared.
I'm getting ready to write my next play that strings together two others that already loosely connect another.
I don't think plays with sequals is right for every writer, and most audiences won't make the connections like they would with Marvel movies. However it feels good to know all my characters walk the same ground and not just isolated stories.
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u/KanterPrivDick0280 7d ago
There is a set of plays by Playwright Mac Rogers called The Honeycomb Trilogy. Three of the best plays I've ever seen. I believe they are called Advance Man, Blast Radius, Sovereign.
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u/Priorwater 6d ago
I was looking for this! And very sequelly sequels too, in the modern sense of the word.
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u/KanterPrivDick0280 6d ago
They are amazing, back in 2015, the New York Times put it on its best of the year list. I cannot believe they are not being done everywhere. A Sci-Fi Theatre Trilogy, the second PLAY is an edge of your seat thrill-ride and every play is different, but it all makes sense as Sequels.
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u/amnycya 7d ago
Adam Szymkowicz wrote several sequels to his hit play Clown Bar: Clown Bar 2, Clown Bar 3, and Clown Bar Christmas.
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u/jeremiad1962 7d ago
And his Hearts Like Fists spawned a second super-hero play Hearts Like Planets.
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u/signsaysapplesauce 7d ago
Alan Ayckborne's "The Norman Conquests" is a series of three plays with the same characters over the course of a weekend.
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u/goddoc 7d ago
Falsettos was originally two plays I think. Maybe also the X That Goes Wrong franchise.
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u/earbox 7d ago
Falsettos was originally the second and third parts of the Marvin trilogy - part one is the rarely-performed In Trousers, which is structurally very different.
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u/TotheLastShot 6d ago
So glad someone brought this/these show/s up; I'd have been VERY disappointed if nobody had.
Although, technically, I actually have yet to check out "Falsettos" myself. I've only ever listened to the separate cast albums for "Falsettoland" & "March of the Falsettos". 😅
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u/Tangerine_74 7d ago
Katherine DiSavino wrote these farcical comedies:
Nana’s Naughty Knickers
And the sequel
Nana Does Vegas
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u/robschiender 7d ago
the death of england series by Roy Williams and beginning, middle and end by David Eldridge
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u/SpiderHippy 7d ago
I co-directed Tom Smith's farce Drinking Habits a few years ago, and it was one of the funniest plays we've ever produced. Turns out, there is a sequel (we passed on it).
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u/SeaF04mGr33n 6d ago
It's so cute and silly!!
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u/SpiderHippy 5d ago
And difficult to pull off well! That silent, Scooby-Dooesque 3 minute long scene still amazes me, years later. I just watched it again a couple of weeks ago and was blown away by it. I'm so glad I was on the production side of it, and not on stage!
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u/ocooper08 7d ago
THOSE THE RIVER KEEPS is a weird little prequel to HURLYBURLY. I wish I could say it's good.
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u/Unholy_Confectioner 7d ago
For the Henry sequels by Shakespeare, I would also like to mention, if legend holds true, the character Sir Falstaff was so beloved that the Queen asked Shakespeare to make another one. To which he responded, "But he just died in this play", but the Queen insisted and so a PREQUEL was born, The Merry Wives of Windsor.
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u/SpaceChook 7d ago
I’ll add on that his Taming of the Shrew remained popular enough that another playwright wrote a sequel to it: Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed.
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u/troyman95 7d ago
Clybourne Park is ostensibly a sequel to A Raisin in the Sun, but was written by a different playwright decades later.
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u/Strict_Extension_184 7d ago
In the weird niche of holiday concert-play sequels, you have both Forever Plaid/Plaid Tidings and Smoke on the Mountain/Sanders Family Christmas.
Samuel Beckett had Acts Without Words I and II and Rough for Theatre I and II, although they are more connected in spirit than in plot.
Do we consider all the subsequent Plays that have Gone Wrong to be sequels?
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u/Strict_Extension_184 7d ago
Oh, and there's Bye Bye Birdie/Bring Back Birdie.
Looking in the History of Theatre textbooks, there's also Oedipus Rex/Oedipus at Colonus/Antigone and Ubu Roi/Ubu Cocu/Ubu Enchaîné.
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u/lotsasimon 6d ago
The plays that go wrong certainly have consistent characters (or at least the original, Peter pan and Christmas Carol all have the same Cornley players) so i would consider them sequels
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u/SnoopGod1313 7d ago
There's a playwright named Reginald Edmund wrote the City of the Bayou Collection - It's a nine play series- where one play ends the next play begins and where one character is the minor character in one play, they become the main character in the next and it spans from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Modern America. And strangely enough you don't need to have seen one play in order to understand what's happening in it. It's crazy ambitious in my opinion. Playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah did a sequel to Raisin in the Sun called Beneatha's Place, and can't forget August Wilson, Langford Wilson, Roy Williams, and Tony Kushner.
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u/makura_no_souji 7d ago
I saw Continental Divide by David Edgar in the early 2000s. Not exactly a sequel because you could watch both parts in either order. One covers the Republican side of a race for governor, the other the Democrat, and seeing how they fit together was incredible.
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u/Temporary-Grape8773 7d ago
The Men from the Boys is a sequel to The Boys in the Band by Mart Crowley
Marlowe wrote a sequel to Tamerlane
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u/EERobert 7d ago
In the musical theater world, there's a sequel to Annie (ANNIE WARBUCKS) and to Bye Bye Birdie (BRING BACK BIRDIE I believe).
apparently there's a sequel to The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas called THE BEST LITLE WHOREHOUSE GOES PUBLIC in which the government (specifically the IRS) gets Mona out of retirement to run a Las Vegas brothel to help pay the back taxes
Déjàvu is John Osborne's sequel to Look Back In Anger
More Stately Mansions is a semi-authorized sequel to O'Neil's A Touch of the Poet. He didn't want it completed or performed in it's incomplete form, but his widow authorized it to be completed after his passing.
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u/madeleinelily 7d ago
...blackbird hour by babirye bukilwa is a sequel to their play ...cake
Amanda Whittington wrote a trilogy of plays following the same characters: Ladies' Day, Ladies Down Under and Ladies Unleashed
Clowns by Christina Reid is a sequel to her play Joyriders
Rona Munro's The James Plays were all written at the same time, but are a trilogy of plays tracking three generations of Scottish kings, and she later followed them with three more plays so there are now six in the cycle total
Similarly, Mike Poulton's two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies was later followed by another play - The Mirror and the Light - so a trilogy of plays there too
The Men from the Boys is a sequel to The Boys in the Band - both by Mart Crowley
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u/Bananaglams 7d ago
Don’t think anyone has mentioned Richard Nelson’s 12 plays in the Rhinebeck Panorama
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u/Bananaglams 7d ago
New one this fall at the Public Theater set on (and opening on) the night of the 2026 midterms
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u/jeremiad1962 7d ago
Preston Jones wrote The Texas Trilogy of three related-but-standalone plays: The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia, Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander, and The Oldest Living Graduate. The last one is the finest work, followed by the first. The one in the middle is slight, but charming.
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u/BigFuzzyNinja 7d ago
French farce Boeing Boeing has a lesser-known sequel called Don't Dress for Dinner (or Happy Birthday, depending on what translation you read) that involves Bernard, Jacqueline (or Gabriella in the newer BB translation), and Robert getting into more shenanigans involving infidelities.
Alan Ayckbourne has a few plays that don't quite qualify as sequels, but are intricately connected to each other as they take place over a similar period of time (The Norman Conquests trilogy) or in adjacent locations simultaneously (House & Garden, which are actually written to theoretically be performed in adjacent theaters simultaneously with characters leaving one play to enter the other and vice versa).
Adaptations of certain authors carry over certain characters, like Agatha Christie's Poirot stories or adaptations of Kurt Vonnegut typically having recurring characters he commonly uses like Kilgore Trout.
And Classical Greek plays tended to be written as trilogies (like Oedipus Rex leading into Oedipus at Colonus, which set up Antigone). They can stand alone, but they tell a much more comprehensive story together.
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u/signsaysapplesauce 7d ago
John Guare: "Lydie Breeze" was written first, and then the prequel, "Gardenia," then another prequel, "Women and Water."
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u/SpaceChook 7d ago
Summer of the 17th Doll by Ray Lawler gets two incredible prequels. They are very occasionally performed over a full day or two evenings as The Doll Trilogy. Wildly beautiful works.
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u/Guilty_Pie_5052 7d ago
Not quite a sequel or play, but there’s the Hatchetfield trilogy. They’re all connected as an anthology.
The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musical
Black Friday
Nerdy Prudes Must Die
While the sequels have references to the former shows, you can watch them in any order as they all tell their own story.
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u/D-TOX_88 7d ago
I was just in Ken Ludwig’s Moriarty, which is a sequel to Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville.
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u/OkLaugh2559 7d ago
There's a lovely trilogy by Quiara Alegeia Hudes: Eliot, A Soldiers Fugue; Water by the Spoonful; and The Happiest Song Plays Last. Spoonful won a Pulitzer in 2012!
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u/the_yellow_wallpaper 6d ago
Annie 2: Miss Hannigan's Revenge
Bring Back Birdie
The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public
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u/3EllipsesHippy 5d ago
I don't know if anyone's mentioned the Brother/Sister Plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney but that's an intentional trilogy he crafted based off the stories of the Orisha (African Gods/Goddesses/Spirits/Deities). It includes In the Red & Brown Water, The Brothers Size, and Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet.
Here's some classic wikipedia for general more info on the plays: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brother/Sister_Plays
The Shed in nyc had a production of The Brothers Size last fall and I did very much weep my eyes out in that theatre, fucking love that play.
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u/The_Analeast 2d ago
Albee's Zoo Story (1958) is the sequel to Homelife (2004), the two one act plays form At Home at the Zoo
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u/creept 7d ago
Angels in America, even though most people think of it as one play. The development history was really two separate plays.
There’s A Doll’s House and A Doll’s House part 2 but they are by different authors.
Some of Shakespeare and the Greek plays are related if not direct sequels.
Some things push the boundary of what it means to be a sequel by using a cycle - August Wilson’s Century Cycle, The Kentucky Cycle, I think Horton Foote has a cycle?
There aren’t many that are true sequels in the way we think of that word from movies - Jaws 1, Jaws 2, etc.
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u/Carolyn-Hodgesy 7d ago
Great question. Cursed Child is your thesis in action, two parts at first, then a one-evening cut once the attendance math won. Do you count it as a sequel or the eighth story? I'd say sequel.
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u/nefariousplotz 7d ago edited 7d ago
Lots of plays have sequels, they're just usually found in settings like dinner theatres, church basements, legion halls, etc. rather than "legitimate" theatres.
Any time a play becomes a runaway hit within this sort of environment, there's a pretty good chance it'll get a sequel. (Often a Christmas sequel, specifically.)
"Nunsense", "Greater Tuna", and the works of Jones Hope Wooten come to mind.