No one is more excited than Cripple Billy, an unloved boy whose chief occupation has been grazing at cows and yearning for a girl who wants no part of him. For Billy is determined to cross the sea and audition for the Yank. And as news of his audacity ripples through his rumor-starved community, The Cripple of Inishmaan becomes a merciless portrayal of a world so comically cramped and mean-spirited that hope is an affront to its order.

    In doing so, England's reigning man of letters set in motion a series of events that would culminate in his ruin and imprisonment. For within a year the bewildered Wilde himself was on trial for acts of gross indecency and, implicitly--for a vision of art that outraged Victorian propriety. Expertly interweaving courtroom testimony with excerpts from Wilde's writings and the words of his contemporaries, Gross Indecency unveils its subject in all his genius and human frailty, his age in all its complacency and repression. The result is a play that will be read and studied for decades to come.

    E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student named Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the elder Housman confronts the younger version of himself and his memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson -- the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings.

    They sailed far out to sea. The blue one returned to the harbor. The red one sailed home too. But the yellow boat sailed up to the sun." Benjamin always concluded his bedtime ritual by saying, "Mom, you can be the red boat or the blue boat, but I am the yellow boat." This remarkable voyage of Benjamin was extensively developed and widely produced in America for several years, always to ovations. Cast of 4 men and 3 women.THE YELLOW BOAT is based on the true story of David and Sonja Saar's son, Benjamin, who was born with congenital hemophilia, and died in 1987 at the age of 8 of AIDS related complications. A uniquely gifted visual artist, Benjamin's buoyant imagination transformed his physical and emotional pain into a blaze of colors and shapes in his fanciful drawings and paintings. The story of THE YELLOW BOAT Is a glorious affirmation of a child's life, and the strength and courage of all children. Recommended for children of age 8 and older, parents, families and adults.

    Closer is hailed as one of the best plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."

    It is a delicately told tale of the sexual awakening of a young girl under the tutelage of her uncle. The Mineola Twins is an outrageous political satire set on suburban Long Island.

    Though critics reflexively class his work as “magical realism,” Rivera’s extravagant, original imagery always serves to illuminate the gritty realities and touching longings of our daily lives. Also includes: Each Day Dies with Sleep and Cloud Tectonics.

    [MacIvor is a writer with an angular sense of humour and an uncommon knack for probing basic elements and truths of human behaviour." ?Vit Wagner, Toronto StarThis Is a Play is a hilarious postmodern romp through the interior lives of actors in a bad play."Ingenious, whimsical, a lyrical lunacy in the writing, This Is A Play is a theatre experience comedy you might associate with Tom Stoppard." ?Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

    From one of America's freshest, most daring, and truly original playwrights! Marked by biting wit, hilarious parody, revealing characters, and a pastiche of pop culture, the plays of Christopher Durang have garnered Obie awards, acclaim, controversy, and a devout following.

    They resonate with his trademark themes: East London, storytelling, moments of shocking violence, memories of the past, fantastical monologues, and that strange mix of the barbaric and the beautiful he has made all his own. The Pitchfork Disney was Ridley's first play and is now seen as launching a new generation of playwrights who were unafraid to shock and court controversy.  This unsettling, dreamlike piece has surreal undertones and thematically explores fear, dreams and story-telling.  The Fastest Clock in the Universe is a multi-award-winning play which caused a sensation when it premiered at Hampstead Theatre in 1992.  An edgy and provocative drama, it is now regarded as a contemporary classic. Ghost from a Perfect Place is a scorchingly nasty blend of comedy, spectacle and terror where a monster from the past meets the monsters of the present.

    Triply scorned - as an Asian, a homosexual, and now a murderer - nineteen-year-old John Lee has confessed to shooting his lover in a public lavatory in London. Porcelain dissects the crime through a prism of conflicting voices: newscasts, flashbacks, and John's recollections to a prison psychiatrist. A Language of Their Own is a lyrical and dramatic meditation on the nature of desire and sexuality as four men - three Asian and one white - come together and drift apart in a series of interconnecting stories.

    Pamphlet style (staple bound).

    

    The story of two white-collar managers, Chad and Howard, who maliciously plot to jointly romance the lonely, deaf, beautiful office temp Christine before simultaneously dumping her, is cool and compelling in its depiction of the worst sorts of emotional abuse. What begins as a cat-and-mouse game of one-upmanship quickly escalates into full-scale psychological warfare. Only too late does this 'frat boy' prank reveal itself as deadly serious, with a struggle between the two men at the heart of the battle. The woman is only a means to an end, a pawn easily captured and tossed aside in a dark, wicked duel for corporate ascension.

    

    Meanwhile, the confining village of Belmont that Portia calls home is populated by hilarious, brazen and cantan-kerous characters. From Portia to her husband, Raphael, to her vicious-tongued octogenarian granny, Blaize, to her loving aunt, the ex-prostitute Maggie-May, Marina Carr's characters are exquisitely drawn and profoundly human.

    Aimed at pupils who are studying Much Ado About Nothing for the first time, this literature guide provides a straightforward explanation of the text that carefully leads students through the play to reach a better understanding and appreciation of it.  York Notes, the ultimate best-selling literature guides, are a useful background for both quick-reference and insightful interpretations.

    Both young men have fallen in love with unlikely, and penniless beauties, and both need money to help solve their dilemmas. Scapin knows a good ruse will always win the day and he drafts Sylvestre, Octave's servant, into his schemes. Convincing Sylvestre he's a wonderful actor (and allowing him to build characterizations using movie cliches), Scapin has him play characters who will deceive the family patriarchs into parting with large sums of money. The final scene of the first act is a vaudeville/music hall version of Moli

    

    Each of the eight interviews is presented as a narrative, in which the subject reveals what is brought her to acting, what draws her to a particular role, her method of preparation and other elements of acting technique, and her experiences with different directors. The actresses include:Joanne Woodward Sarah Jessica Parker Gwen Verdon Mary Alice Judith Ivey Cherry Jones Mary McDonnell Donna Murphy. The insight these narratives provide makes "Eight Women of the American Stage" the perfect book for acting teachers and students at the university/conservatory level, as well as for professional actors and directors.

    This series is specifically designed for high school classes. Students will be able to see each play as a whole. In their introduction to each of the plays, editors Mack and Boynton suggest ways of approaching the text that allow the reader a broad range of imaginative involvement. Their observations are intended to help students read and experience the play, not to discourage them with critical jargon or peripheral historical information. Students will be reading the best text both in terms of visual excellence and quality of scholarship. They'll immediately appreciate the large page format and highly readable typography. Each volume is consistent with the most authoritative early edition of each play. The glosses are full and clear but don't belabor the obvious or clutter the text. Background information includes the editors' detailed analysis of the Elizabethan theatre and its relation to Shakespeare's dramaturgy, C. W. Hodges's drawing re-creating the original Globe Playhouse, a brief account of Shakespeare's life and a chronological listing of his works, and a bibliography, lists of videotapes (VHS), records, and tapes of the complete plays. Students will experience added critical and imaginative dimensions. An essay following each play suggests ways of approaching it as a live dramatic experience in the theatre of the mind. The concern is not how the play might be produced in a theatre, but rather how parts of it may be realized in the imagination through close attention to what the language is saying and suggesting. Students can get a deeper understanding of each scene through helpful, detailed questions included at the back of each volume. These questions encourage group discussion or written response. Also included are topics for longer papers.

    A collection of screen and radio plays including: Cigarettes and Chocolate "one of the best radio plays I ever heard…profoundly original" (Financial Times); Hang Up "an intense and brilliantly realised study of a love affair" (Telegraph); What If It's Raining? "a tender, sensitive play while also being the most no-bones-about-it account of adultery I have seen on TV" (Guardian); Truly, Madly, Deeply (which starred Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman) - "This lovely, original comedy…is the work of a mature artist, one with the skill to draw us into a fresh and startlingly humane vision of urban life." (The New York Times)

    This comprehensive anthology includes a varied selection of plays drawn from the classical period, to support a variety of approaches in teaching drama and theater.

    

    Alkestis is a moving "romance" with death; it has parallels to Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Helen, an alternative version of the tragic portrayal of the Trojan War, shows Helen "relocated in a delightful comedy" (Observer) - as an innocent victim of her own beauty, hidden in Egypt by the gods while her image has been abducted by Paris. In Ion, a father who thought he was childless discovers his son, and a son who thought he was motherless finds his mother.

    I was cold in my vest. I licked her deodorant while she was out the room, what's happening to me? A crack-addicted street-walker and a vulnerable, broken man try to salvage an awkward intimacy away from harsh and ugly streets. Jim Cartwright is one of the mavericks of British theatre - Daily Telegraph.

    He vividly re-creates more than a dozen representative performances across three centuries. Bringing together theatre history and the interests of cultural criticism and performance theory, Dawson traces the Anglo-American acting tradition and provides a succinct account of the interpretative problems associated with texts, character, design, and the production of meaning. The final chapters extend the analysis to a number of film versions, notably those of Olivier, Kozintsev and Zeffirelli, as well as to several important European stage productions.

    And then the fun begins. A boring, run-of-the-mill murderess until her frank confession creates an opportunity for profit, Roxie begins a transformation to rival that of Pygmalion’s statue. She becomes, as Thomas H. Pauly points out in his introduction, a "tabloid Cinderella."

    Mike ("20/20") and his half brother, Billy ("Torch"), have retreated to an abandoned crack den on the Lower East Side in the aftermath of a drug heist gone sour. Torch has just killed one of the henchmen of the neighborhood's reigning drug lord. Having planned no means of escape, Mike summons his former colleague Tony ("The Tiger") to help them out of this jam. What follows is a continuing three-way confrontation in which guns are drawn, allegiances shifted and secrets uncovered. Themes of lost brotherhood and friendship are evident, while the bleakness of each of the characters' lives is chillingly suggested. The jittery Torch recounts the fight that led to the killing of the small-time punk with a harrowing, perplexed sense of detachment. Mike recounts a heavy-breathing date with a woman so hot she would look good even "if you dressed her up in garbage bags and put TV dinners on her head." As the play races towards its climax, Tony recites a flashy, epic jailhouse poem that is both cynical and romantically heroic, and it touches the very heart of each of the characters' shared sense of delusion.

    Eric Swan (aided by his Uncle George and unbeknown to his wife, Linda) has pocketed thousands of pounds through fraudulent DSS claims. When Norman Bassett (the lodger) opens the door to Mr Jenkins, the DSS Inspector, deceptive mayhem follows - as do the undertaker, bereavement counsellor, psychiatrist, Norman's fiancee, a corpse, the ominous Ms Cowper and a rather rebellious washing machine!

    'Scober' MacAdam is the king. He has acquired by greed and exploitation a former 'Big House' in Co. Leitrim. But he is sexually impotent. Goaded by gossip, he devises a plot to impregnate his young wife. The latent savagery of McCabe's domestic tragedy discloses in the couple's struggle to converse a series of wounds in the household and in the neighboring community.