American Playhouse Episode Guide

Episode Guide

American Playhouse: Season 12

• Season 12 Episode 1: Tru

  Robert Morse portrays Truman Capote during two days of Christmas 1975 in Jay Presson Allen's 'Tru.'

American Playhouse: Season 11

• Season 11 Episode 1: Fires in the Mirror

  Anna Deavere Smith's one-woman play 'Fires in the Mirror' gives the verbatim reactions of 26 people to the 1991 clash between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

American Playhouse: Season 10

• Season 10 Episode 6: The Sunset Gang: The Home

  A woman (Uta Hagen) balks at placement in a nursing home in Warren Adler's 'The Sunset Gang.'

• Season 10 Episode 5: Hot Summer Winds

  A migrant worker upsets relationships within a Japanese immigrant family in 'Hot Summer Winds.' With Sab Shimono.

• Season 10 Episode 4: The Hollow Boy

  Cultural differences threaten a teen friendship in 'The Hollow Boy.' With Alexis Arquette, Marty Finkelstein.

• Season 10 Episode 3: Three Hotels

  Kate Nelligan and Richard Jordan perform playwright/director Jon Robin Baitz's drama 'Three Hotels.'

• Season 10 Episode 2: The Grapes of Wrath

  The original Broadway cast, including Terry Kinney, Gary Sinise and Lois Smith, performs the acclaimed Steppenwolf Theater Company production of John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath.'

• Season 10 Episode 1: Into the Woods

  Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, Tom Aldredge, Chip Zien, Robert Westenberg, Merle Louise, Chuck Wagner and Ben Wright perform Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's fairy-tale musical 'Into the Woods.' A Sondheim interview follows.

American Playhouse: Season 9

• Season 9 Episode 4: Andre's Mother

  An AIDS victim's lover (Richard Thomas) and mother (Sada Thompson) cope with his death in Terrence McNally's 'Andre's Mother.'

• Season 9 Episode 3: Zora Is My Name!

  Stories and song recall the life of writer/historian Zora Neale Hurston (Ruby Dee). With Louis Gossett Jr., Flip Wilson.

• Season 9 Episode 2: Women & Wallace

  A young man (Josh Hamilton) haunted by his mother's suicide tries in vain to form bonds with women. With Joan Copeland, Joanna Going, Mary Joy, Debra Monk.

• Season 9 Episode 1: Sensibility & Sense

  Three longtime friends reunite and confront personal and political issues. With Elaine Stritch/Lili Taylor, Tom Aldredge/Eric Stoltz, Jean Simmons/Trini Alvarado.

American Playhouse: Season 8

• Season 8 Episode 14: Imagining America

  Four vignettes: 'This Ain't Bebop,' 'Get Your Kicks on Route 66,' 'Tribe' and 'Reflections of a Native Son.'

• Season 8 Episode 12: Big Time

  A ruthless investment banker (Dennis Boutsikaris) sacrifices friends and lovers for material gain. With Mia Sara, Adrian Pasdar, Roxanne Hart.

• Season 8 Episode 11: Land of Little Rain

  Writer Mary Austin defies societal disapproval in 1900s California to live with and write about American Indians.

• Season 8 Episode 10: The Meeting

  Martin Luther King Jr. (Jason Bernard) and Malcolm X (Dick Anthony Williams) meet at the height of the civil rights movement in Jeff Stetson's speculative play.

• Season 8 Episode 9: The Diaries of Adam & Eve

  Mark Twain's story portrays Garden of Eden life. With David and Meredith Baxter Birney.

• Season 8 Episode 8: Life Under Water

  A privileged teen (Keanu Reeves) ponders life's meaning while staying with his divorced mother (Joanna Gleason).

• Season 8 Episode 5: Love & Other Sorrows

  A teen (Stephen Mailer) comes of age in 1950s St. Louis. Based on a short story by Harold Brodkey.

• Season 8 Episode 2: Ask Me Again

  A privileged young woman (Leslie Hope) rebels against long-lived parental schemes to marry her to a childhood playmate (Robert Bruce).

• Season 8 Episode 1: A Raisin in the Sun

  A mother (Esther Rolle) tries to keep her family united, as her children and their spouses argue over how to spend insurance money left at her husband's death. With Danny Glover.

American Playhouse: Season 7

• Season 7 Episode 6/7: The Revolt of Mother/Pigeon Feathers

  A woman holds her husband to a long-neglected promise, and a boy forms a concept of immortality in adaptations of short stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman and John Updike.

• Season 7 Episode 15: The Big Knife

  Autocratic Hollywood producer Marcus Hoff (Nehemiah Persoff) blackmails screen star Charles Castle (Peter Gallagher). Based on a play by Clifford Odets. Directed by John Jacobs.

• Season 7 Episode 13: I Never Sang for My Father

  A man (Daniel J. Travanti) recalls his strained relationship with his domineering father (Harold Gould) and reminisces about their final visit. Based on a play by Robert Anderson. With Dorothy McGuire and Margo Skinner.

• Season 7 Episode 12: The Trial of Bernhard Goetz

  Goetz (Peter Crombie) pleads self-defense for shooting four black teens on a New York subway after one asks him for money. Based on a true story.

• Season 7 Episode 10: Journey Into Genius

  A biographical portrait of Eugene O'Neill traces the influence his father, James, had on his artistic development.

• Season 7 Episode 4: The Return of Hickey

  Prep-school students raise the devil at prestigious Lawrenceville Academy. Based on a story by Owen Johnson.

• Season 7 Episode 3: Strange Interlude

  When Nina Leeds' (Glenda Jackson) fiance is lost in war, she weds without love and, later, chooses another man to father her child. From the Eugene O'Neill play.

• Season 7 Episode 2: Strange Interlude

  When Nina Leeds' (Glenda Jackson) fiance is lost in war, she weds without love and, later, chooses another man to father her child. From the Eugene O'Neill play.

• Season 7 Episode 1: Strange Interlude

  When Nina Leeds' (Glenda Jackson) fiance is lost in war, she weds without love and, later, chooses another man to father her child. From the Eugene O'Neill play.

American Playhouse: Season 6

• Season 6 Episode 16: Dottie

  An agoraphobic widow is forced out of her house and must deal with long-hidden family secrets when she finds her sister is dying from leukemia.

• Season 6 Episode 15: Blue Window

  Craig Lucas' off-Broadway play concerns seven disparate New Yorkers who loosen up and get to know each other at a dinner party.

• Season 6 Episode 14: House of Blue Leaves

  Artie's (John Mahoney) schizophrenic wife (Swoosie Kurtz), a deaf movie star (Julie Hagerty), marauding nuns and a bomb upset his plans for the pope's visit to New York.

• Season 6 Episode 13: Gal Young 'Un

  During Prohibition, a young dandy marries a widow of means and builds a still on her land but goes too far when he brings home a young girlfriend.

• Season 6 Episode 12: Charley's Aunt

  Two Yale students coerce a friend, Lord Fancourt Babberly, into impersonating an aunt from Brazil, beginning a comedy of mistaken identities when they invite their sweethearts to tea.

• Season 6 Episode 10: Story of a Marriage

  The Vaughns are reconciled with Elizabeth as World War I and the 1918 flu epidemic change the way of life in the small Texas town.

• Season 6 Episode 9: Story of a Marriage

  Elizabeth's wealthy parents erase her from their lives, as the young couple moves into a boarding house and prepares for their first Christmas. With Hallie Foote, Michael Higgins, Matthew Broderick.

• Season 6 Episode 8: Story of a Marriage

  Elizabeth (Hallie Foote) shocks her wealthy Texas family by eloping with a poorer man in Horton Foote's saga of a turn-of-the-century courtship, marriage and family life.

• Season 6 Episode 6: Eleanor: In Her Own Words

  A one-woman drama on Eleanor Roosevelt (Lee Remick) captures the First Lady's charisma and influence.

• Season 6 Episode 5: A Mistaken Charity

  The poverty and increasing infirmity of two sisters in 19th-century New England prompt neighbors to pay for their care in a home for retired ladies.

• Season 6 Episode 3: The Wide Net

  A Eudora Welty story of newlyweds in the 1930s, whose problems disrupt their entire town.

• Season 6 Episode 2: The Prodigious Hickey

  Owen Johnson's turn-of-the-century Saturday Evening Post stories concern the antics of prep school students.

American Playhouse: Season 5

• Season 5 Episode 19: Sunday in the Park With George

  Bernadette Peters (Dot/Marie) and Mandy Patinkin (Georges/George) head the cast of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical about the life, love and creativity of French neoimpressionist Georges Seurat.

• Season 5 Episode 18: Roanoak

  After being stranded in England for three years, White returns to find his family and the colony gone.

• Season 5 Episode 17: Roanoak

  As the English settlement and fort are completed, hunger and disease begin to destroy relations between the two peoples.

• Season 5 Episode 16: Roanoak

  A historical miniseries about the ill-fated English settlement begins with explorers taking 'savage specimens' to England.

• Season 5 Episode 15: Painting Churches

  A New Englander who returns home to paint a portrait of her eccentric parents must come to terms with their advancing age. With Roxanne Hart, Sada Thompson and Donald Moffat.

• Season 5 Episode 14: A Case of Libel

  A brilliant lawyer (Edward Asner) attempts to prove a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (Daniel J. Travanti) guilty of libeling his client (Gordon Pinsent).

• Season 5 Episode 13: Rocket to the Moon

  A dentist (John Malkovich) with a possessive wife takes her father's (Eli Wallach) advice and romances a secretary (Judy Davis). Based on Clifford Odets' play. Director: John Jacobs.

• Season 5 Episode 12: Damien

  A priest's spirit (Terence Knapp) observes his funeral procession and reflects upon his 16-year ministry in 1800s Hawaii helping the outcast lepers on Molokai. Based on a true story.

• Season 5 Episode 10: The House of Ramon Iglesia

  A father seeks his estranged son's help in moving the family back to Puerto Rico.

• Season 5 Episode 9: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Two con men planning to swindle a town force Huck and Jim to transport them. When they sell Jim to slave traders, Huck pretends to be Tom Sawyer to help him escape.

• Season 5 Episode 8: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  When con men sell Jim to slave traders, Huck pretends to be Tom Sawyer to help him escape, then flees 'sivilizing' to float on down the river.

• Season 5 Episode 7: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Two vagabond cons planning to swindle a town force Huck and Jim to transport them.

• Season 5 Episode 6: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Huck attends his own funeral disguised as a girl but returns to warn Jim of slave hunters.

• Season 5 Episode 5: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Huck escapes to an abandoned island after his alcoholic father kidnaps him from the home of Widow Douglas. Huck attends his own funeral disguised as a girl but returns to warn Jim of slave hunters.

• Season 5 Episode 4: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Huck escapes to an island after his alcoholic father kidnaps him from the Widow Douglas.

• Season 5 Episode 3: Valentine's Revenge

  From an O. Henry story of a former safecracker who will reveal his past if he opens a vault to get a little girl out.

• Season 5 Episode 2: The Roommate

  John Updike's story tells of 1952 college roommates, a straight-laced premed student (Lance Guest) and a yoga-studying eccentric (Barry Miller); a discussion with Updike follows.

• Season 5 Episode 1: The Rise and Rise of Daniel Rocket

  Tom Hulce re-creates his 1982 off-Broadway role of a boy who flies away from his scoffing schoolmates, returning as a hero 20 years later to the girl he loves.

American Playhouse: Season 4

• Season 4 Episode 22: Cat On a Hot Tin Roof

  Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play of a frustrated woman (Jessica Lange) and her alcoholic husband (Tommy Lee Jones) battling the power and influence of his domineering father (Rip Torn).

• Season 4 Episode 21: Paper Angels

  A poetic drama based on the experiences of Chinese emigrants awaiting admittance to the United States in 1915.

• Season 4 Episode 20: Three Sovereigns for Sarah

  Sarah fights to clear her sisters' names after Rebecca Nurse and Mary Easty are hanged as witches.

• Season 4 Episode 19: Three Sovereigns for Sarah

  Rebecca Nurse and Sarah are condemned to prison to await trial as witches.

• Season 4 Episode 18: Three Sovereigns for Sarah

  Vanessa Redgrave portrays the youngest of three sisters accused during the Salem witch trials.

• Season 4 Episode 15: Displaced Person

  Kurt Vonnegut's story of a black sergeant who must deal with a young, half-black German orphan who believes the soldier is his father.

• Season 4 Episode 14: Under the Biltmore Clock

  F. Scott Fitzgerald's comedy profiles a stylish flapper (Sean Young) who can't compete with her chosen husband's family.

• Season 4 Episode 12: Breakfast With Les & Bess

  Dick Van Dyke and Cloris Leachman portray a couple that broadcasts a 1961 radio talk show from a New York apartment. Adapted from Lee Kalcheim's off-Broadway comedy.

• Season 4 Episode 11: Charlotte Forten's Mission

  A docudrama of a young Philadelphian's (Melba Moore) determination to educate the emancipated black slaves of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia during the Civil War.

• Season 4 Episode 10: Some Men Need Help

  A good-natured neighbor tries to help a suicidal, alcoholic advertising executive. With Treat Williams, Philip Bosco.

• Season 4 Episode 9: The Star-Crossed Romance of Josephine Cosnowski

  Jean Shepherd's comedy about a '50s Midwestern teenager with a crush on an exotic Polish girl from East Chicago.

• Season 4 Episode 8: Overdrawn at the Memory Bank

  John Varley's science-fiction story about a futuristic data processor (Raul Julia) banished into a computer after he disobeys policy by watching old movies.

• Season 4 Episode 7: The Joy That Kills

  A young Creole wife (Frances Conroy) leads a fantasy life in 1877 New Orleans when her husband (Jeffrey DeMunn) refuses to let her out of the house.

• Season 4 Episode 3: Solomon Northup's Odyssey

  A docudrama of the experiences of a free black man from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., who was kidnapped and sold into slavery on a Louisiana plantation.

• Season 4 Episode 2: A Matter of Principle

  A humorous Christmas story about a stern father (Alan Arkin) who refuses to celebrate the holiday and the mother (Barbara Dana) who rebels.

American Playhouse: Season 3

• Season 3 Episode 16: Concealed Enemies

  The conclusion of a second trial finds Alger Hiss guilty on two counts.

• Season 3 Episode 15: Concealed Enemies

  The Hiss typewriter is found and Chambers' homosexuality becomes known as the grand jury considers whether Hiss is guilty of perjury.

• Season 3 Episode 14: Concealed Enemies

  Hugh Whitemore's dramatization of the Alger Hiss case begins in 1948 when Hiss (Edward Herrmann) is accused of being a Communist by Whittaker Chambers (John Harkins), editor of Time magazine.

• Season 3 Episode 13: Hughie

  Eugene O'Neill's comedy about a 1920s penny-ante gambler, 'Erie' Smith (Jason Robards), and the night clerks in the seedy hotel where he has lived for the last 15 years.

• Season 3 Episode 12: City News

  A madcap editor-publisher (Elliot Crown) struggles to keep an underground newspaper solvent.

• Season 3 Episode 10: The Killing Floor

  The story of a black man's rise to leadership in the all-white union dramatizes the struggle of slaughterhouse workers in Chicago during World War I.

• Season 3 Episode 8: The Gin Game

  The Pulitzer Prize-winning story of a couple (Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy) in a nursing home, where card games become forums for their deepest thoughts.

• Season 3 Episode 7: The Cafeteria

  A writer (Bob Dishy) and a female refugee (Zohra Lampert) meet in a New York cafeteria filled with Holocaust survivors. Based on Isaac Bashevis Singer's story.

• Season 3 Episode 6: Refuge

  Four people (Anne Twomey, James Congdon, Alexandra O'Karma, Will Jeffries) share a complex and often disturbing living arrangement on an isolated island off the coast of Maine.

• Season 3 Episode 5: Popular Neurotics

  Two worry-plagued people (Jeff Goldblum, Mimi Kennedy) nervously begin an affair after meeting at an automated teller machine.

• Season 3 Episode 3: True West

  Sam Shepard's award-winning play tells the story of a man (John Malkovich) who finds success by selling a screenplay to his playwright-brother's (Gary Sinise) producer.

• Season 3 Episode 2: Pudd'nhead Wilson

  A slave woman switches her light-skinned baby with her master's; years later, town lawyer Pudd'nhead Wilson (Ken Howard) probes a mystery of murder and deceit. From a Mark Twain story.

• Season 3 Episode 1: The Ghost Writer

  A drama based on Philip Roth's best seller about a young artist's visit with a famous author who lives in seclusion with his wife and a beautiful younger woman.

American Playhouse: Season 2

• Season 2 Episode 12: The Rothko Conspiracy

  Larry Hoodekoff, Andrea Levine and Barry Morse star in Michael Baker's tale of the suicide and ensuing scandal of artist Mark Rothko.

• Season 2 Episode 11: Wings

  In an adaptation of Arthur Kopit's play, Constance Cummings recreates her Broadway role of an aging aviator recovering from a stroke.

• Season 2 Episode 10: Until She Talks

  A young woman is subpoenaed and imprisoned for her refusal to supply information to a grand jury.

• Season 2 Episode 9: Verse Person Singular

  New video techniques aid Richard Kiley in capturing the imagery of Lewis Carroll, Robert Browning, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Vincent Benet and Edgar Lee Masters in a one-man show.

• Season 2 Episode 8: For Us, the Living: The Medgar Evers Story

  Howard Rollins portrays the slain civil-rights leader who was field secretary of the NAACP from 1954 to 1963. With Irene Cara, Roscoe Lee Browne and Paul Winfield.

• Season 2 Episode 7: The File on Jill Hatch

  As an adult, the daughter of a racially mixed couple supervises a community theater of black West Indian teenagers and participates in race riots.

• Season 2 Episode 6: The File on Jill Hatch

  During the civil rights movement, the daughter of a racially mixed couple experiences the same prejudice her parents combatted.

• Season 2 Episode 5: The File on Jill Hatch

  During World War II, a black U.S. soldier marries a white Englishwoman, but circumstances separate them until they emigrate to America at the war's end.

• Season 2 Episode 4: Keeping On

  A local factory's efforts to unionize provoke disputes within a small Southern mill town. From a story by Horton Foote.

• Season 2 Episode 3: Family Business

  A terminally ill father (Milton Berle) abruptly changes his will to the consternation of his four quarrelling sons. Based on the off-Broadway drama by Dick Goldberg.

• Season 2 Episode 2: Miss Lonelyhearts

  An aspiring journalist (Eric Roberts) becomes personally involved in the lives of his readers. From a story by Nathanael West.

• Season 2 Episode 1: The Skin of Our Teeth

  Thornton Wilder's 1943 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy about the folly of humanity features Sada Thompson, Jason Robards and Blair Brown.

American Playhouse: Season 1

• Season 1 Episode 24: Oppenheimer

  After fighting unsuccessfully to be reinstated, Oppenheimer returns to Princeton to spend the last 13 years of his life teaching.

• Season 1 Episode 23: Oppenheimer

  During postwar years, Robert Oppenheimer becomes chairman of the president's General Advisory Committee, but he is discredited when former associates are accused of espionage.

• Season 1 Episode 22: Oppenheimer

  Robert Oppenheimer predicts the use of the atomic bomb, but the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shocks Los Alamos scientists.

• Season 1 Episode 21: Oppenheimer

  The development of the first atomic bomb proceeds among disputes between the scientists and a realization of the weapon's devastating power.

• Season 1 Episode 20: Oppenheimer

  J. Robert Oppenheimer's past haunts him during security clearances for what will become the Manhattan Project.

• Season 1 Episode 19: Oppenheimer

  Suspected by the FBI of being a Soviet spy, Oppenheimer is pressured into revealing the identities of his leftist friends.

• Season 1 Episode 18: Oppenheimer

  J. Robert Oppenheimer (Sam Waterston), a theoretical physicist at the University of California, rejects any party affiliation though he is involved with an avid Communist Party member.

• Season 1 Episode 16: Private Contentment

  A young soldier matures emotionally before leaving for World War II when a personal tragedy uncovers family secrets.

• Season 1 Episode 15: Weekend

  A college professor searches for his lost youth through his attractive students. Stars Barbara Hershey, Tony Musante.

• Season 1 Episode 14: Working

  An adaptation of Studs Terkel's best seller reveals how a steelworker, parking lot attendant, editor, prostitute, stonemason and housewife feel about work.

• Season 1 Episode 13: Medal of Honor Rag

  A black Vietnam veteran who received the Medal of Honor cannot support his family when he returns home.

• Season 1 Episode 11: Pilgrim, Farewell

  An independent woman who expects no one to depend on her discovers that she has cancer.

• Season 1 Episode 10: The Great American Fourth of July and Other Disasters

  Playwright Jean Shepherd chronicles the pangs of growing up in the Midwest in the 1930s. Stars James Broderick, Barbara Bolton, Matt Dillon.

• Season 1 Episode 9: The Fifth of July

  Richard Thomas and Swoosie Kurtz re-create their Broadway roles in Lanford Wilson's play about old friends and family members reunited one summer weekend for the first time since college.

• Season 1 Episode 8: Carl Sandburg: Echoes and Silences

  Actual film of Carl Sandburg supplements John Cullum's narration and portrayal of the best-known biographer of Abraham Lincoln.

• Season 1 Episode 7: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf

  Six black women share their pain, terror, warmth and love. Based on Ntozake Shange's award-winning play.

• Season 1 Episode 6: Come Along With Me

  A recent widow pursues her long-denied interest in the supernatural. With Estelle Parsons, Barbara Baxley, Sylvia Sidney.

• Season 1 Episode 5: Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's Is a Friend of Mine

  A 12-year-old boy learns a valuable lesson about friendship and the power of imagination from a stranger calling himself 'Mister Dickens.' With Fred Gwynne.

• Season 1 Episode 4: Who Am I This Time?

  A meek hardware clerk (Christopher Walken) impresses his co-star (Susan Sarandon) as Stanley Kowalski in 'A Streetcar Named Desire.'

• Season 1 Episode 3: Seguin

  A military leader raises an army in San Antonio, Texas, to fight the Mexican forces of Gen. Santa Anna at the Alamo. Based on the life and memoirs of Juan Seguin.

• Season 1 Episode 2: King of America

  B.J. Merholz's drama traces the experiences of a strong-willed Greek sailor in 1915 New York.

• Season 1 Episode 1: The Shady Hill Kidnapping

  George Grizzard, Polly Holliday, Paul Dooley and Celeste Holm star in an original John Cheever comic teleplay about a suburban family that believes its youngest member has been kidnapped.

American Playhouse:

• Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City

  Mary Ann works at the crisis switchboard; Anna Madrigal and Edgar fall in love; blackmailer Carson Callas haunts DeDe; Mona's ex-lover visits.

• Mrs. Cage

  A suburban housewife (Anne Bancroft) turns violent after witnessing a murder at the supermarket. With Hector Elizondo.