This image is the cover for the book Buyer & Cellar

Buyer & Cellar

The original script of the award-winning off-Broadway play—“irresistibly entertaining [and] surprisingly moving” (Paul Rudnick).

Alex More has a story to tell. A struggling actor in LA, he takes a job working in the Malibu basement of a beloved megastar. One day, the Lady Herself comes downstairs to play. It feels like real bonding in the basement—but will their relationship ever make it upstairs?

A winner of the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show, Buyer & Cellar is an outrageous comedy about the price of fame, the cost of things, and the oddest of odd jobs.

“Jonathan Tolins has concocted an irresistible one-man play from the most peculiar of fictitious premises . . . This seriously funny slice of absurdist whimsy creates the illusion of a stage filled with multiple people, all of them with their own droll point of view.” —The New York Times

“A gorgeous play: funny and beautifully observed and richly insightful.” —Moisés Kaufman

“Tolins’s writing is smart, sharp, and hilarious—and he paints a vivid picture that even a perfectionist like Barbra would have to applaud.” —James Lapine

Jonathan Tolins

Jonathan Tolins is the author of Buyer & Cellar, which won the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Solo Show and was named Best Unique Theatrical Experience by the Off-Broadway Alliance.  Other plays include The Twilight of the Golds (Broadway, Booth Theatre), If Memory Serves (Promenade), The Last Sunday in June (Rattlestick, Century Center), and Secrets of the Trade (Primary Stages). A collection of his plays has been published by Grove Atlantic. His film work includes The Twilight of the Golds and Martian Child. For television, he was a writer for Queer As Folk, the Academy Awards, the Tony Awards, and Partners. He was the author of Pushkin 200: A Celebration at Carnegie Hall, acted as script consultant on Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular, and co-wrote The Divine Millennium Tour and The Showgirl Must Go On for Bette Midler.  He has written articles for Opera News, OperaMonthly, Theater Week, Time, and the Huffington Post, and is a panelist on the Metropolitan Opera Radio Quiz.  He lives in Fairfield, Connecticut, with his husband, the writer and director Robert Cary, and their children, Selina and Henry. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America.

Diversion Books