In the second, a man walking along the seashore recalls his dead father while other familiar voices speak to him from the past.

    He went on to become an internationally renowned master of modern drama, famous for the comic proportions and bizarre effects that allow his work to be simultaneously hilarious, tragic, and profound. As Ionesco has said, "Theater is not literature. . . . It is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means."

    Jean Anouilh Five Plays—the finest English-language anthology of his works—crackles with both his sharp wit and his icy cynicism. In Antigone, his preeminent play and exemplar of his themes and style, he creates a disturbing world in which fate may be no more than a game of role-playing. Eurydice, The Ermine, The Rehearsal, Romeo and Jeannette are the other plays included in this edition.

    

    Williams through the most sympathetic voice among his characters, 'is a true story about the time and the world we live in.' He has made it seem true-or at least curiously and suspensefully possible-by the extraordinary skill with which he has wrung detail after detail out of a young woman who has lived with horror. Anne Meacham, as a girl who has been the sole witness to her cousin's unbelievably shocking death, is brought into a 'planned jungle' of a New Orleans garden to confront a family that is intensely interested in having her deny the lurid tale she has told. The post-dilettante's mother is, indeed, so ruthlessly eager to suppress the facts that she had the girl incarcerated in a mental institution and she is perfectly willing, once she finishes her ritualistic five o'clock frozen daiquiri, to order the performance of a frontal lobotomy. A nun stands in rigid attendance; a doctor prepares a hypodermic to force the truth; greedy relatives beg her to recant in return for solid cash. Under the assorted, and thoroughly fascinating, pressures that are brought to bear, and under the intolerable, stammering strain of reliving her own memories, Miss Meacham slowly, painfully, hypnotically paints a concrete and blistering portrait of loneliness.of the sudden snapping of that spider's web that is one man's life, of ultimate panic and futile flight. The very reluctance with which the grim, hopeless narrative is unfolded binds us to it; Mr. Williams threads it out with a spare, sure, sharply vivid control of language.and the spell is cast."

    This volume also contains 'Something Unspoken' and 'Summer and Smoke'.

    brats) and the witch is a charming old girl with a college degree in witchcraftThe play begins as the witch wakes up on a miserable rainy day in the forest and exclaims, "Such a day — makes you glad to be alive"Then she gets into an argument with the second-class enchanter, which is interrupted by the arrival of the much-abused parents of Hansel and Gretel, followed closely by the little fiends themselvesThey haven't the slightest interest in anything that's usefulHansel and Gretel find the witch's gingerbread house and start tearing it to piecesThe children are so eager to push the witch into the stove that it makes the old girl terribly nervous!Cast of 7 or more

    His determination to be transferred to the infantry soon spells trouble among generals and sergeants, his fellow service men and, in particular, a military psychiatrist. Thus begins the desperate efforts of the Air Force to classify this highly unclassifiable mountain boy. Not miffed, our hero is soon sent off on what becomes a comic voyage, in an airplane manned by some weary flying officers, most suffering from hangovers. Even though the plane does get lost and heads towards an atomic explosion in Yucca Flats, the hilarity of the play's endearing hero leaves few moments to contemplate the ensuing disaster.