Best of
Drama

1955

The Diary of Anne Frank: And Related Readings


Frances Goodrich - 1955
    There are 10 reading parts.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof


Tennessee Williams - 1955
    The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt. In spite of the public controversy Cat stirred up, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Award for that year. Williams, as he so often did with his plays, rewrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for many years—the present version was originally produced at the American Shakespeare Festival in 1974 with all the changes that made Williams finally declare the text to be definitive, and was most recently produced on Broadway in the 2003–2004 season. This definitive edition also includes Williams&rsquoi; essay “Person-to-Person,” Williams’ notes on the various endings, and a short chronology of the author’s life. One of America’s greatest living playwrights, as well as a friend and colleague of Williams, Edward Albee has written a concise introduction to the play from a playwright’s perspective, examining the candor, sensuality, power, and impact of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof then and now.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays


Tennessee Williams - 1955
    The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore is a passionate examination of a woman's life as she recounts her memoirs in the face of death. In The Night of the Iguana a group of diverse people are thrown together in an isolated Mexican hotel, all imprisoned in their own way.

Six Plays of Strindberg: The Father / Miss Julie / The Stronger / Easter / A Dream Play / The Ghost Sonata


August Strindberg - 1955
    It includes three examples of his naturalism -- The Father, 1887; Miss Julie, 1883; The Stronger, 1890 -- two of his expressionism -- A Dream Play, 1902; The Ghost Sonata, 1907 -- and Easter, a play whose interest derives from Its defying either of these categories.On these new translations by Elizabeth Sprigge, whose biography of Strindberg is the standard work on that figure, the American reader will have his first opportunity to know the true genius of the great Swedish playwright, for Miss Sprigge's unique achievement has been to render the original texts into an English that is at once fluent and accurate and to provide plays that capture the full vigor and impact of the original.

Death Of Tarelkin And Other Plays: The Trilogy Of Alexander Sukhovo Kobylin (Russian Theatre Archive Series ; Vol. 7))


Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin - 1955
    Out of the drama of his own life, Sukhovo-Kobylin fashioned a trilogy of plays remarkable for the acidity of their satire against the tsarist bureaucracy and police. It is not only for their pungent satire that the plays have continued to attract attention ever since. They are, above all, splendidly theatrical and encompass not one but several different traditions of theatre from the "well-made play" of Scribe to the absurd comedy of Gogol. "As for sheer stagecraft," writes Price D.S. Mirsky in his "A History of Russian Literature," "they have no rivals in Russian literary drama."Harold B. Segel is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of ten books and numer

The Suicide


Nikolai Erdman - 1955
    It gave Joseph Stalin a pain and Erdman got twenty years in a Siberian work camp. But a strikingly American adaptation of Erdman's political farce is proving just the pill for election-year depression. Playwright Richard Nelson's rollicking, larger-than-life adaptation of the 1920's Russian script explodes with laughter." Jack Lesar, U P I

The Modern Theatre, Vol. 1


Eric Bentley - 1955