What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, “The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It’s about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It’s about compassion, but it shows insensitivity.” In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson’s writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

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    Skylight premiered at the National Theatre in 1995 and then went on to become one of the most internationally successful plays of recent years.This is the definitive edition of Skylight.

    This backstage farce by the author of Lend Me a Tenor brought Carol Burnett back to Broadway co-starring with Philip Bosco as her megalomanic, drunken husband and leading man. Fate has given these thespians one more shot at starring roles in The Scarlet Pimpernel epic and director Frank Capra himself is en route to Buffalo to catch their matinee performance. Will Charlotte appear or run off with their agent? Will George be sober enough to emote? Will Capra see Cyrano, Private Lives or a disturbing mixture of the two? Hilarious misunderstandings pile on madcap misadventures, in this valentine to Theatre Hams everywhere.

    McNally later adapted the script for the 1997 film of the same name.

    This humorous and touching one-woman tour de force won NAACP Theatre Awards for Best Play and Best Playwright.

    When first published in 1963, the critics acclaimed the text as "outstandingly skilful and memorable tribute from one Irish artist to another"

    The first major collection of plays by leading lesbian playwright Paula Vogel.

    Book annotation not available for this title.

    

    Having come home to visit her mother, who has been placed in a nursing home, Diane, now a well-known writer, is being interviewed for the local newspaper. Only she speaks. Her remarks are in answer to such questions as where she gets the ideas for her stories; whether her youth in Mountain Grove influenced her work; and why she decided to leave home. At first obliging and matter-of-fact, Diane gradually begins to reveal more than her questioner might have bargained for a childhood marred by the loss of her father and her mother's coldness; the promiscuity she was driven to in search of the love and concern that were denied her at home; and, most devastating of all, the molestation by her stepfather which shaped her character indelibly and led to the harrowing event she describes at the end of her recital. To the world at large Diane is someone who has shaken off the dust of Mountain Grove and has gone on to bigger and better things. To herself, however, it is painfully clear that she is what her earlier life ordained because no one ever really leaves the place from which they came. (1 woman.) A POSTER OF THE COSMOS. The place is a Manhattan police station, where a young man, Tom, is being interrogated after having created a disturbance at the hospital where his friend and lover has just died from AIDS. Although only Tom speaks, it is clear that the flood of memories that bursts forth is triggered by the uncomprehending questions of the policemen who now watch him in stony silence. At first he is defensive and impatient with his questioners' inability to understand his behavior, but gradually, as he recalls his time with his lost friend, the depth of their feeling andcommitment for each other emerges. Recalling a host of "little" details, Tom creates a telling portrait of two human beings who must come to understand themselves as individuals before they can comprehend their relationship to each other much less their position relative to society at large. Sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, Tom's deeply felt words also make it clear that the guilt and remorse he feels should, in truth, be shared by all who do not try to understand or pledge themselves to overcome this terrible pestilence has brought so much loss and suffering to our times. (1 man.)"

    An anthology of five plays by Lee Blessing including: Down the Road; Two Rooms; Lake Street Extension; Patient A; and Fortinbras.

    From the farms and small businesses founded by the first arrivals in the early years of this century, to the trauma of the relocation camps during World War II, to the search for new values in a heterogeneous society, each generation of Japanese Americans has had to confront its own challenges.Exploring the relationships among the Issei (first generation), Nisei (second generation), and Sansei (third generation), playwright Philip Kan Gotanda has crafted four powerful dramas. Japanese American family life is at the heart of the plays, from elder traditionalists and Nisei still troubled by the message of the wartime camps, to women seeking new roles and brash youth seizing opportunities in a larger society. The four plays included are "Song for a Nisei Fisherman", "Fish Head Soup", "The Wash", and "Yankee Dawg You Die."Throughout these dramas, many facets of Japanese American life are revealed as compelling characters interact. Gotanda understands and sensitively depicts the stresses this traditional culture endures, not only in its relation to the heterogeneous society that surrounds it but also among the generations that comprise it. An introduction by Michael Omi, assistant professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, considers the sources of the plays in Gotanda's personal history.

    Book annotation not available for this title...Title: .Twenty One-Act Plays from Twenty Years of the Humana Festival..Author: .Volansky, Michele (EDT)/ Dixon, Michael Bigelow (EDT)/ Humana Festival (COR)..Publisher: .Smith & Kraus Pub Inc..Publication Date: .1995/12/01..Number of Pages: .374..Binding Type: .PAPERBACK..Library of Congress: .95045877

    Plays One: A Chorus of DisapprovalA Small Family Business Henceforward...Man of the Moment Alan Ayckbourn introduces his first volume of collected work that contains his morality plays from the 1980s.

    Jones, John O. Keefe, Charles Ludlam, OyamO, Craig Lucas, Pedro Pietri, Eric Overmyer, Constance Congdon, Maria Irene Fornes, Holoy Hughes, Len Jenkin, Erik Ehn, Charles L. Mee, Jr., Richard Caliban, Suzan-Lori Parks, John Steppling, Tina Howe, Lynn Alvarez, David Greenspan, Murray Mednick, Mac Wellman, Kier Peters, Naomi Iizuka, and Tony Kushner.In his introduction Marc Robinson observes that "If nothing else, this anthology should put to bed some tired words. 'Experimental,' 'alternative,' 'avant-garde':…Perhaps such terms meant something in the early days of American theater, when writers eager for success had to buckle under a dominant style. Then the naysayers were a tiny, if resilient bunch. But now, after three generations of artists challenging assumptions about what constitutes a good play, the modes of innovation are too various to be summed up in a phrase or too energetic to be confined to the culture's margins. The alternative itself has become a tradition."From the park bench of Albee's "The Zoo Story" of 1960 to the cemetery on Martha's Vineyard, where friends have gathered in Toy Kushner's play to bury illegally their playwright associate, the plays of this volume reveal the life and death, the genius and absurdity, the towering power and silly fears of the American people through a vibrant and poetic dramatic expression oer the last fort years. This important anthology reveals similarities and dissimilaritites between the past and present, enough to fill a lifetime of theater going.

    16 plays, ed w/intro by Douglas Messerli

    He probes the agency of the ordinary man and woman in an age when the possibilities for productive labor have been globalized, capital is hoarded in the strongboxes of a relatively small number of transnational corporations, and a Nigerian elite further strips the nation of its tremendous physical and moral resources. Grounding his vision of change in a dialectical reading of history, Osofisan manipulated his Yoruba and Western heritages in order to speak of the challenges facing his society and to scrutinize the practice of art. To some Nigerians, he is a radical who is sounding a welcome critique; to others, he is a subversive, intent on wrenching society from its moorings; and to still others, he is a contradictory mix of socialist rhetoric and romantic, elitist impulses.This volume comprises four plays-THE ORIKI OF A GRASSHOPPER, ESU and the VAGABOND MINSTRELS, BIRTHDAYS ARE NOT FOR DYING, and MOROUNTODON-and an introduction by Abiola Irele that examines the playwright's achievement. The plays combine traditional Nigerian folk figures and legends with modern themes, or use the traditional to underscore, and comment on, the corruption and danger found in modern life.

    The brilliany original play by a rising young British playwright.

    Presenting 17 one-act and full-length works by a new generation of American playwrights, this groundbreaking book reflects the diversity of voices emerging in today's theater.

    "By a mile, the best new play of the season>"--John Heilpern, New York Observer.

    

    

    With a palpable affection for the traditions of the stage and a taste for surreal comedy, Margulies "manages to transform what might have been kitchen-sink drama into theatre that is unsettling, imaginative and quite hilarious"--Howard Kissel, New York Daily News

    Treating her is Dr Ruth Kovacs, who finds in Effie's extraordinary story of injustice and official callousness the key to her own suppressed anger and power. Taut and powerful, tender and often funny, Effie's Burning is an emotional switchback of a play, with a searing anger at its heart.2 women

    But the cracks in their marriage widen, their past catches up with them and their relatives become increasingly resentful. Jean keeps winning and Morris takes off to Amsterdam with an old flame, but will his prophecy that bad luck always follows good turn out to be true?2 women, 2 men, 4 women or men

    This deviously dark comedy takes us behind the scenes of this incredible invasion. This behind the scenes world is not on the island, however, it is with the speech writers and spin doctors who won America's first "public relations" war.

    

    Drawing on everything from street life to lives of the saints, Lope de Vega was a prolific and compelling writer who treated an enormous range of subjects, often mixing comedy with tragedy, much to the horror of the classicists.

    The soldiers find their captive to be a foe from without and within, being so much alike and different from themselves. To Buffalo Hair, his captors are slaves to the white man and enemies of his true people, the Cheyenne. In the morning, a hundred Cheyenne warriors will come to the river to take Buffalo Hair back. Now the soldiers must choose whether to stay loyal to the army and fight, or let Buffalo Hair go and have a chance at saving themselves. Disagreement between the troopers builds to a confrontation. In the excitement a pistol is fired, bringing a hundred Cheyenne warriors down on the island. When the dust clears, the soldiers are captives and now it is Buffalo Hair's turn to choose. He can kill and scalp the black soldiers to prove he is a true Cheyenne, or let them live and become one of them. In the end, Buffalo Hair chooses the warrior's road, and extracts ritual atonement from the abandoned black soldiers.