Sweeping all major theater awards, including the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama, as well as four 1996 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score for a Musical, Rent captures the heart and spirit of a generation, refleting it onstage through the emotion of its stirring words and music, and the energy of its young cast. Now, for the first time, Rent comes to life on the page -- through vivid color photographs, the full libretto, and an utterly compelling behind-the-scenes oral history of the show's creation. Here is the exclusive and absolutely complete companion to Rent, told in the voices of the extraordinary talent behind its success: the actors, the director, the producers, and the librettist and composer himself, Jonathan Larson, whose sudden death, on the eve of the first performance, has made Rent's life-affirming message all the more poignant.

       The Beauty Queen of Leenane was first presented as a Druid Theatre/Royal Court Theatre co-production in January 1996.

    The gaucheness, the rush of excitement, and the inarticulate tenderness of young love are beautifully captured in writing of great truth and delicacy. Only the most irrational of homophobes could fail to be moved by it."—Daily Telegraph"Deliciously upbeat ... seldom has there been a play which so exquisitely and joyously depicts what it's like to be sixteen, in the first flush of love and full of optimism. Truly a most unusual and beautiful thing."—Guardian"An unfakeably truthful portrait of adolescent self-discovery, showing sensitivity and fun pushing up like wild flowers through the concrete crevices of a Thamesmead estate. This is the most heartening working-class comedy since A Taste of Honey."—Independent on Sunday

    The evening consisted of six Durang one act plays. It was directed by Walter Bobbie; set was by Derek McLane, costume by David C. Woolard, lighting by Brian Nason, sound design by Tony Meola; production stage manager was Perry Cline, stage manager was Greg Fletcher. Durang/Durang is an evening of six one acts. It is thus not a full length play, but it is a full evening.

    The critically acclaimed drama by one of England's most successful mid-century playwrights.

    Quills premiered at Washington, D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in 1995 and subsequently had its debut Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop. Quills garnered the 1995 Kesselring Prize for Best New American Play from the National Arts Club and, for Wright, a 1996 Village Voice Obie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Playwriting.

    This revised and expanded Black Theatre USA broadens its collection to fifty-one outstanding plays, enhancing its status as the most authoritative anthology of African American drama with twenty-two new selections.This collection features plays written between 1935 and 1996.

    Premiered at the Bush theatre in 1993 Beautiful Thing was released as a feature film by Channel Four films in 1996 directed by Hettie Macdonald and featuring Meera SyalBeautiful Thing explores pre-teenage homo-erotic sensuality and the frictions and intimacies of living cheek by jowl on a Thamesmead housing estate.

    In Leaking From Every Orifice she was a lesbian, had a sexual relationship with a gay man and ended up pregnant…"She make you laugh as she kicks you in the teeth" (Guardian)

    A play of twisted circumstance, mistaken identity and surprising turns, it is deliciously absurd, incredibly funny and poignantly tender.

    The first play collection by a young master of razor-sharp wit and black humor.

    here, together with the complete plays and poems, is The Aran Islands, Synge's chronicle of the life and the people that inspired his work and his words.

    The following year Getting Out was featured in the Burns Mantle Theatre Yearbook as one of the best plays of the New York season, published by Avon Books, and chosen as a Fireside Book Club Selection.

    Plays are Balm in Gilead, Rimers of Eldritch, Gingham Dog, Lemon Sky, and The Sand Castle.

    Kenneth McCallister is a dole clerk who tolerates his marriage, his in-laws and Ulster until, on the fateful night in November in Belfast, as the Republic of Ireland qualifies against Northern Ireland for the World Cup, he finds himself watching the sectarian hatred of the crowd rather then the match.

    The discovery causes a dramatic struggle as representatives from the worlds of art history, religion, and politics stake their claims for the ultimate prize. The unexpected arrival of twelve refugees sets events spiraling toward an explosive climax. This powerful play by the Tony Award winning adaptor of Nicholas Nickleby and author of numerous plays won the Evening Standard Award for Best Play of 1995.

    His chracters are the conflicts of the soul struggling for inner peace. At the center of his plays is loneliness, loss, grief, fear, courage and love: the existential state of our common humanity." - Robert Ellermann, from the Introduction

    It contains twelve plays by women from the Americas, Europe and Asia, spanning a national and stylistic range from Swedish realism to Russian symbolism. Six of these plays are appearing in their first English-language translation. Playwrights include: * Anne-Charlotte Leffler Edgren (Sweden) * Amelai Pincherle Rosselli (Italy) * Elsa Berstein (Germany) * Elizabeth Robins (Britain) * Marie Leneru (France) * Alfonsina Storni (Argentina) * Hella Wuolijoki (Finland) * Hasegawa Shigure (Japan) * Rachilde (France) * Zinaida Gippius (Russia) * Djuna Barnes (USA) * Marita Bonner (USA) This groundbreaking anthology explodes the traditional canon. In these plays, the New Woman represents herself and her crises in all of the styles and genres available to the modern dramatist. Unprecedented in diversity and scope, it is a collection which no scholar, student or lover of modern drama can afford to miss.

    broadens its collection to fifty-one outstanding plays, enhancing its status as the most authoritative anthology of African American drama with 22 new selections. Building on the well-respected first edition published in 1974, this edition features previously unpublished works including In Dahomey, Liberty Deferred, and Star of Ethiopia, and the Department of Interior's infamous 1918 food pageant. Contemporary plays by women have been added - Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape, Anna Deavere Smith's Fires in the Mirror, and Aishah Rahman's The Mojo and the Sayso, as well as the modern classics - Ntozake Shange's Colored Girls..., Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro, and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. The range of this collection extends from 1847 to 1992, including the great names in the African American pantheon of writers - Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angelina Grimke, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. The chronology begins with William Wells Brown's The Escape: or, a Leap for Freedom, based on his own life as an escaped slave. Two expatriot authors, Ira Aldridge and Victor Sejour, provide glimpses of life in Europe, while at home, playwrights struggled with the issues of birth control, miscegenation, lynching, and migration. The book embraces both commercial successes such as George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum, and Charles Fuller's A Soldier's Play, as well as lesser-known masterpieces - Ben Caldwell's The First Militant Preacher, Owen Dodson's The Confession Stone, and Ted Shine's Contribution. The stylistic range, too, runs the gamut of genre from the realism of Ted Ward,Lonne Elder III, and Ed Bullins to the surrealism of Marita Bonner and Aishah Rahman. Comedy is present in Abram Hill's On Strivers Row and Douglas Turner Ward's Day of Absence which mock the racism of both Blacks and Whites.

    It is a northern Under Milk Wood, high on pills and booze" (Sunday Times). Bed: "Cartwright writes better about old people than anyone I know, except perhaps Beckett. This is an odd, harrowing and hilarious piece, entirely without sentimentality, sturdy but moving." (John Peter, Sunday Times) Two: "A sharp, salty quickfire evocation of the surface gaiety and underlying melancholia of English pub life." (Michael Billington, The Guardian). The Rise and Fall of Little Voice: "A northern showbiz fairytale, a backstreet Cinderella story, with a built-in kick." (Guardian)

    Tood, Weetsie and Sybill are brides in rural Louisiana in 1943. Each married a Cliffert brother. The men are off to war and a local news story about these young wives keeping the home fires burning intrigues Henry Luce. He decides that they belong on the cover Life Magazine and assigns Kate Miller to the story. She has been covering the war in Europe and, though she views doing a "women's piece" as a career set back, she accepts because it will be her first cover story. Kate spends a week with the Cliffert women and her haughty urban attitude gives way to sympathy as she begins to understand them while coming face to face with her own powerlessness in a man's world. Filled with charm and fun, The Cover of Life is a deeply affecting story about the struggle for self worth. "The kind of roles actresses dream of. Robinson's writing has a warm, rural flavor and the] conflicts are laced with a poignant urgency." Variety. "Vivid." Newark Star Ledger. "Stirring and funny." Teaneck Daily Record.

    Ansky played a seminal role in the establishment of modern Jewish fiction. This generous collection of his work includes the classic drama, The Dybbuk, a haunting tale of ill-fated love, possession, and exorcism in an Eastern European village.

    A collection of plays dealing with family, friendship, freedom, and courage.

    This volume contains the texts of six plays written by Fletcher and his collaborators, Nathan Field, Philip Massinger, Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Ford and John Webster. The plays are The Honest Man's Fortune, Rollo, The Spanish Curate, The Lovers' Progress, The Fair Maid of the Inn and The Laws of Candy.

    This volume, featuring plays from the 1995 theatre season, includes: Dance with Me by Jean Reynolds, Emma's Child by Kristine Thatcher, Green Icebergs by Cecilia Fannon, Sacrilege by Diane Shaffer, and Vladivostok Blues by Jocelyn A. Beard.

    A collection of four Alan Bennett plays, with an introduction by the author which describes the background to their writing and performance.

    

    All plays are suitable for performance and class reading with large groups. Living with Lady Macbeth uses the device of a play within a play to examine some of the issues of power and ambition invested in the character of Lady Macbeth. Lily is determined to audition for this part, as she is tired of always being behind the scenes, of being ordinary and reliable. Disregarding derision from those around her, Lily stuns everyone with a chilling performance of Act I Scene V, but finally chooses to do the costumes - not out of defeat, but because she has satisfied her ambition.

    We not only watch the romantic heroes interact, but their thoughts are revealed as well - their insecurities, fears, and dreams about relationships. Betsy and Michael each have confidants, Josie and Lonnie, who advise them on how to "play the game" with the opposite sex and how to gain the tactical advantage in the relationship. Josie and Lonnie draw on sports and war analogies to make their points. We track the relationship from first meeting to first phone call to first date to first kiss to first time making love to falling in love to moving in together to problems and the horror of "routine" to marriage proposal to breakup. MOOSE MATING will make you think twice before entering the moose-jammed forest of a modern-day relationship.

    Alceste abhors hypocrisy and the well-rehearsed, sycophantic pleasantries of the chattering classes. He tells the truth, even it hurts. Alceste is in love with Jennifer (Celimene), but thinks she's in love with a theatre critic who thinks he can write plays.