Best of
Plays

1960

The Sound of Music


Richard Rodgers - 1960
    12 selections from the favorite musical. Includes: Climb Ev'ry Mountain * Do-Re-Mi * Edelweiss * Maria * My Favorite Things * Sixteen Going on Seventeen * The Sound of Music * and more.

Auntie Mame


Jerome Lawrence - 1960
    Besides being the source for one of America's most popular musicals, AUNTIE MAME set a standard for Broadway comedy that's been sought after ever since. "Auntie Mame was a handsome, sparkling, scatterbrained and warm-hearted lady who brightened the American landscape from 1928 to the immediate past by her whimsical gaiety, her slightly madcap adventures and her devotion to her young nephew, who grew up to be Patrick Dennis. Through fortunes that rose and fell and a pleasant but brief marriage to a likable Southerner, who had the bad luck to tumble down from the Matterhorn, Auntie Mame's chief concern was that nephew, whom she raised [the play's] central figure is a woman of spirit, innate kindness and undefeatable courage " NY Post.

The Fantasticks


Harvey Schmidt - 1960
    Recommended for all collections." - Choice

A Doll's House and Other Plays


Henrik Ibsen - 1960
     The League of Youth was Ibsen's first venture into realistic social drama and marks a turning-point in his style. By 1879 Ibsen was convinced that women suffer an inevitable violation of their personalities within the context of marriage. In A Doll's House, Ibsen caused a sensation with the his portrayal of Nora Helmer, a woman who, gradually arriving at an understanding of her own misery, struggles to break free from the stifling confines of her marriage. Continuing the theme of tensions within the family in The Lady from the Sea, Ibsen put forward the view that freedom with responsibility might at least be a step in the right direction. Peter Watts's lively modern translation is accompanied by an introduction examining Ibsen's life and times, with individual discussions of each of the three plays. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Five Plays: The Father / Miss Julie / The Dance of Death / A Dream Play / The Ghost Sonata


August Strindberg - 1960
    Strindberg's most important and most frequently performed plays--"The Father, Miss Julie, A Dream Play, The Dance of Death," and "The Ghost Sonata"--are gathered together here in translations praised for their fluency and their elegance.

The Best Man


Gore Vidal - 1960
    The Best Man.

The Killer, and Other Plays


Eugène Ionesco - 1960
    In The Killer, a three-act drama staged with great success in Paris and London, he creates a study of pure evil. Bérenger, a conscientious citizen, finds himself in a radiantly beautiful city marred only by the presence of a mysterious, irrational killer. Bérenger's determination to find the murderer in the face of official indifference, and his final defeat at the hands of an impersonal, pitiless cruelty are the elements of a parable which speak with the universality found in Kafka's The Trial. The Killer, says Pierre Marcabru in Arts, is "Ionesco's best play...Never has despair had such a tone, at first ironic and ultimately lugubrious. Here good will and hate clash in an implacable encounter where evil triumphs...Ionesco has transcended his own earlier dramatic limits. Beginning with a verbal revolt, he has reached a point of logical revolt."In Improvisation, or The Shepherd's Chameleon, Ionesco plays the part of himself facing three learned scholars who claim to know better than he what he should write and how he should set about it. Inspired by one of Moliere's farces, Improvisation is a wildly hilarious comedy that sets forth the playwright's own ideas of the theater. The last play, Maid to Marry, creates a comic frenzy out of the phony verbiage in a conversation between a man and a woman.

The Bachelor Party


Paddy Chayefsky - 1960