Merchandising is a 1999 play by American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

 David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang

David Henry Hwang is an American playwright who has risen to prominence as the preeminent Asian American dramatist in the U.S.He was born in Los Angeles, California and was educated at the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University...

. The play was written as a special commission from the Actors Theatre of Louisville

Actors Theatre of Louisville

Actors Theatre of Louisville is a performing arts theater located in downtown Louisville, Kentucky. It was founded in 1964 by Louisville native Ewel Cornett, local producer Richard Block and actor Ken Jenkins of Scrubs fame, and was designated the "State Theater of Kentucky" in 1974. It is run as a...

's Humana Festival. The 1999 Festival sold "T(ext) Shirt Plays" by authors such as Wendy Wasserstein

Wendy Wasserstein

Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University...

, Tony Kushner

Tony Kushner

Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich.-Life and career:Kushner was born...

, and Mac Wellman

Mac Wellman

Mac Wellman is an American playwright, author, and poet. Wellman is best known for his experimental work in the theater which rebels against theatrical conventions, often abandoning such traditional elements as plot and character altogether...

.

Hwang's play, printed on a navy blue shirt, depicted two filmmakers who lament the failure of their picture and the nature of merchandising in Hollywood.

The play was published, along with the other "T(ext) Shirt Plays" in Smith and Kraus' Humana Festival 1999: The Complete Plays.