"The Beauty Queen of Leenane" portrays ancient, manipulative Mag and her virginal daughter, Maureen, whose mutual loathing may be more durable than any love. In "A Skull in Connnemara," Mick Dowd is hired to dig up the bones in the town churchyard, some of which belong to his late and oddly unlamented wife. And the brothers of "The Lonesome West" have no sooner buried their father than they are resuming the vicious and utterly trivial quarrel that has been the chief activity of their lives. "[McDonagh is] the most wickedly funny, brilliantly abrasive young dramatist on either side of the Irish Sea.... He is a born storyteller."--"New York Times"

    In 2001, the mesmerizing film adaptation was released to equally glowing reviews. Brilliantly innovative and oddly endearing, Hedwig and the Angry Inch—inspired by Plato’s Symposium—is the story of “internationally ignored song stylist” Hedwig Schmidt, the victim of a gruesomely botched sex-change operation, as dazzlingly recounted by Hedwig (née Hansel) herself in the form of a lounge act, backed by the rock band The Angry Inch.

    It received its English premiere at the Royal Court Theatre, London in September 1998.

    As the play begins, Dorothea has suffered a stroke, and while Echo has reestablished contact with her mother, it is only through extended telephone conversations, during which real issues are skirted and their talk is mostly about the precocious Echo's single-minded domination of a national spelling contest. But, in the end, after Dorothea's death, both Artie and Echo come to accept their mutual need and summon the courage to try, at last, to build a life together-despite the risks and terrors that this holds for both of them after so many years of alienation and estrangement.

    Changing styles in feminist thought, the tangled connections between creativity and ideology, the writer’s odd place in our money-centered world, the way we turn our friends into surrogate families—while always fluid and lively, the play is thick with ideas, like a stockpot of good stew.” –Michael Feingold, Village Voice“Beautifully layered. Margulies delivers a spot-on glimpse of New York's literary scene: the power of a Times book review, or the milestone of the 92nd Y's authors series, or the significance of a little-known but much-revered lit mag like the now-defunct Grand Street. He's even better at teasing the sense of betrayal that can dissolve creative friendships…the ethics of friendship and fiction smack into each other.” –Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post“[Collected Stories] digs into its engaging tale of aesthetics and ethics with intelligence and sharp, literate humor….Mr. Margulies has found fertile material in the struggles of the creative classes to reconcile the demands of ambition with the exigencies of life.” –New York Times“This provocative piece of theater serves as a timely reminder that we are defined by our feelings and memories — and such precious thoughts are sacred.” –Matthew J. Palm, Orlando SentinelCollected Stories explores the vexed emotional and legal question of a writer's right to create art from the biographical material of another person's life-particularly when that other person is also a writer. Meditating upon the recent, real-life conflict between poet Stephen Spender and novelist David Leavitt, Margulies has created two of the most vivid and moving fictional characters of his career: Ruth Steiner, an aging, highly regarded author who never wrote about her youthful affair with real-life poet Delmore Schwartz, and Lisa Morrison, a student of Steiner's who, after publishing a much-ballyhooed first short-story collection under Steiner's direction, follows up with a novel that draws upon the Schwartz affair. The result is charged drama with the depth and weight of the finest prose fiction. Winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award for Best New Play.Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends. The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. In addition to his adaptation of God of Vengeance, his many plays include Collected Stories, The Country House, Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment, The Loman Family Picnic, What’s Wrong with This Picture? and Time Stands Still. Mr. Margulies currently lives with his wife and their son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.

    Set on the bleak, ghostly landscape of the Bog of Cats, this provocative drama discloses one woman's courageous attempts to lay claim to that which is hers, as her world is torn in two. At the age of seven, Hester was abandoned on the side of the bog by her wild and fiercely independent mother, Big Josie Swane. Hester has spent a lifetime waiting for Big Josie to return. To compound her sense of abandonment, Hester's long-term lover, Carthage Kilbride, with whom she has a seven-year-old daughter, is selling her "down the river" for the promise of land and wealth through a marriage with the local big farmer's daughter. Alone and dejected, Hester has no one to whom she can turn except the local misfits, Monica Murray and the Catwoman. As ever in Carr's dramas, the small community is populated by richly woven characters from the outrageous, stultifying mother of the groom, Mrs. Kilbride, to the brutal and mercenary farmer, Xavier Cassidy. In the final moments of the action, we witness a woman provoked beyond the limits of human endurance. BY THE BOG OF CATS is a furious, uncompromising tale of greed and betrayal, of murder and profound self-sacrifice.

    Book by Wendy MacLeod, MacLeod, Wendy

    For more than thirty years, Simon's wry and astute observations on life, love, and the human condition have been making audiences laugh uproariously even as his beautifully realized characters touch their hearts. These five plays, including the Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning Lost in Yonkers, show Simon at the pinnacle of his extraordinary career. Rumors Lost in Yonkers Jake's Women Laughter on the 23rd Floor London Suite Including the author's introduction: "How to Stop Writing and Other Impossibilities"

    Refusing the use of sled dogs as unsporting, Scott and his team struggle to drag their heavy gear across a frozen wasteland, only to find that Amundsen has preceded them to their goal. The play is also a study of British pride and upper-class resolve—Scott's aristocratic sense of destiny and command and his young bride's ability to understand her husband's compulsive drive while failing to accept his motivations. But it is in the tragic trip back, as the members of the expedition die one by one, that the play reaches its dramatic apogee, capturing with chilling intensity the awesome bravery of men who must accept the bitter knowledge that suffering and death will be the only reward for their heroism.

    Winner of three Tony Awards, including Best Book, Urinetown is a tale of greed, corruption, love, and revolution in a time when water is worth its weight in gold.

    "Monster," a one-man play, begins in the total darkness of a movie theatre. After a long silence, someone in the audience rudely shushes his neighbour, and the show begins. Daniel MacIvor transforms himself into a series of characters whose lives seem eerily related. There's the young boy who tells the story of the neighbour lad who hacked up his father in the basement. There are alcoholic Al and whiny Janine, the lovers who quarrel, make up, and decide to marry after seeing a movie about a lad who...well, same thing. There's the ex-drunk who dreamed up the movie, but got no credit because he was said to have stolen the idea from a famous unfinished film, a claim that so angered him that he went back on the sauce. And there's the movie maker who made that incomplete epic.

    Contains among others:Phyllis and XenobiaA short short play about two sisters, featuring pudding.

    Here, four plays are brought together, revealing the mordant social observance and subversive wit of a body of work that has struck terror in the hearts of theatergoers on both sides of the Atlantic. Shawn's themes include sexual convention, historical guilt, and the conflict between high and low culture, all described with a remarkable, attentive language that juxtaposes colloquialisms and slang with poetic incision. Brilliant and biting, his plays are sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious, but never, ever dull. They are prizes for any reader ready to be challenged with new, unflinching (and maybe even dangerous) ways of looking at the world.

    The subject matter is a prison scandal which shocked the nation in the mid-thirties when convicts leading a hunger strike in prison were locked in a steam-heated cell and roasted to death. "I have never written anything since that could compete with it in violence and horror",Williams said later about the full-length play he developed in 1938. It shows us the young Williams as a political writer in Depression America; its flashes of lyricism and compelling dialogue presage the great plays Williams was later to write.

    In this case things begin to go awry when Victor Deboshe, a middle-class insurance salesman, becomes impotent, leading his wife, Yvonne, to assume that he has taken a mistress. To test his fidelity she has her friend Lucille write an anonymous letter to Victor, claiming to be infatuated with him and proposing a rendezvous at the notorious Hotel Pussy a Go-Go. Thinking a mistake has been made, Victor persuades his friend Maurice (a famous womanizer) to keep the appointment for him, after which the complications begin to multiply uproariously. Eventually, as must be, things are somehow untangled and set right, but not before the action has expanded to include a violently jealous husband (a hot-blooded Spaniard), a suicidal leap from a window, a nephew with an unfortunate (but hilarious) speech defect, a furious Indian fakir and a lascivious butler, all tumbled together into a riotous medley of slamming doors, revolving beds and wildly amiss gun shots all of which will leave audiences happily breathless from laughter.

    

    . . The writing is razor-sharp, sensitive, quietly eloquent, full of the touchingly drab poetry of lost lives' (Sunday Times); Pale Horse: 'His second Court play is as compelling and extraordinary as his first . . . as taut, tight and atmospheric as Macbeth' (Observer); Love and Understanding: 'This is one of the best plays I've seen, ever, at this powerhouse of new writing . . . tough, eloquent, bruising' (Sunday Times); The Bullet: 'A Death of a Salesman for Britain in the nineties, and it is typical of Penhall's grace as a writer that it consciously echoes Arthur Miller while also emerging as an entirely distinctive work' (Daily Telegraph)

    Anthony Neilson's plays collected in one volumeIncludes the plays: Normal "a tight, powerful, three-hander…achieved with a sense of discipline and thematic energy" (Guardian), Penetrator "This is one of the blackest, funniest and most shocking comedy dramas you will ever see" (Sunday Times), Year of the Family "His writing is as tight and courageous as ever…highly recommended for those who like to think" (What's On), The Night Before Christmas "is a smutty, dangerously funny but ultimately warm-hearted cri de coeur against the Christmas Industry" (Stage); The Censor "is a profound and tragic vision of humanity at its bare forked basics" (Evening Standard).

    A remarkable debut by a talented new African-American playwright.

    Titles include: Good Thing Going * Not a Day Goes By * Our Time * The Hills of Tomorrow * Merrily We Roll Along * Old Friends * Like It Was * Honey.

    (1 man.) THE MADNESS OF LADY BRIGHT traces the mental breakdown of Lesley Bright, an aging homosexual whose past returns to haunt him with the emptiness of the choices he made. (2 men, 1 woman.) THIS IS THE RILL SPEAKING, A Play for Voices, is a poetic, mosaic-style evocation of small-town life told through multiple voices which shift and blend from identity to identity. (3 men, 3 women.) SAY DE KOONING pits an artist and two female lovers against the very strains of modern life they hoped to escape by summering at the beach. Not even there, though, can they avoid the pitfalls of their own demanding personalities.(1 man, 2 women.)

    They have Manhattan apartments and separate unsatisfactory sex lives. Though more loving than most couples and searching for partners, they are incompatible: he is gay. Maddi is overweight and drawn to men who treat her badly. He hides behind snappy retorts and skepticism. Maddie's alcoholic mother, Peter's father, lovers, pickups and friends with A

    The plays in this volume, "Laura Dennis", "Tomorrow," "The Day Emily Married," "Vernon Early," "A Coffin in Egypt," and "Getting Frankie Married - and Afterwards, have never been published in trade editions.

    

    Charleston, the keeper, has taken a job there to flee from a detestable world. Opposing Charleston's pessimism, Streeter, his friend, says he is giving up his job to become an active member of society again. Streeter believes our world can be brought out of its chaos if people do something about it. Filled with this determination, he leaves to become an aviator. Charleston retreats further into a fantastic world of his own building. The people of this world are half a dozen of the 60 who were shipwrecked 90 years ago. Believing that "Mankind's got one future in the past," Charleston breathes life into these creatures of his imagination. They live again on the stage. As he talks to them we see passengers as they really were, each seeking sanctuary from a disturbed Europe, running away from life, yet needing the same hope and strength as Charleston himself. Charleston's sincerity convinces these creatures that he really has the courage to lead his fellowmen into a better world, and in this faith they are content to die again. Inspired by their confidence, the lighthouse-keeper returns to useful work, determined to create a new order out of the chaos of the old."

    But his wife, Nancy, is unwilling to forsake the love and protection of her new "husband," the Reverend Obediah Buckhorn, and return to the brutal, hard-drinking Coleman. And when the strapping Reverend Buckhorn himself arrives, it is quickly evident that Coleman will not be able to take her back by force. Rich with atmosphere and the feel of southern rural life, the play blends humor and poignancy as it probes into the circumstances and stories of the various cult members culminating in a gripping snake-handling scene in which the cynical Coleman, to his own amazement, is himself converted to a true believer.

    Nine parallel lives, interlocked by four infidelities, one missing person and a mysterious stiletto, are woven through a fragmented series of confessionals and interrogations that gradually reveal a darker side of human nature.

    "This is a thrilling piece of work, both study aid and gripping theatre" John Peter, The Sunday Times "I'd forgotten the play could be so good. I seemed to hear the words for the first time" Jeremy Kingston, The Times "Prepare for a bracing and brilliant shock to the system...an inspired new theatrical take on this early masterpiece" Paul Taylor, IndependentThis award-winning play, which ran for a year in New York, is published to tie in with the Arts Theatre, London run in early September 2003

    Cowen's hero, just about to turn twenty, is discovered dreaming in the backyard (or is it less friendly territory?) and the action of the play is mostly what happens in his head as he surveys his life up to this particular afternoon. Going backward and forward in time with the swiftness of reverie, we see the young man's relationships with his well-meaning but obtuse father, his loving but possessive mother, his compliant but unsentimental girlfriend. The father keeps after him to dress better, make a lot of friends, stick to business, 'be a man.' The mother shuttles between a desire to see him out of the nest and a yen to keep him at home. The girlfriend will be faithful to him while he's in the Army; but, of course, she'll go to the movies with other fellows. Another character is a neighbor boy, in effect the hero's little brother and sometimes in effect, the hero as a kid. And there is a soldier who helps spell out the true location of this friendly summertree." Which is, ultimately, Vietnam, and a battle from which there will be no return. But the life cycle goes on, sometimes happy, sometimes sad, but filled, always, with the bittersweet memories which must become, in the final essence, all that we can truly hold onto.

    Jason, the prodigal son who's been in the Navy since a violent confrontation with his father, has just called from the airport, announcing that he's on his way home. Jason's family his parents Jack and Irene, his sisters Jeanann, Maureen and Peggy, and Aunt Bernice and Uncle George await his arrival as they drink, fight, joke, sing Girl Scout songs, threaten each other with playing Charades and otherwise stake out their territories. Jason arrives with presents for his family from around the world, and a freshly killed pig in the garbage bag to roast, creating a stir at the party and forcing emotions to rise. After Santos, the next door neighbor, casts doubt as to what's really in the garbage bag, Jason takes his family hostage and forces them at gun point to play a life and death game of Charades.

    Both are piano prodigies, and will be rivals in a forthcoming, and prestigious, competition. And both, unfortunately, are smitten by the same girl, the lovely Fern Phipps, who (to the dismay of both the Rosen and Yanover families) is not even Jewish. But friendship wins out over ambition when both boys contrive to play poorly in the competition-so that neither will win. Also, as Fern has decided to award her favor to the winner of the piano contest, that problem is dealt with as well. And, again, all is put forth with such good humor and warmth that the play, like the others in the trilogy, becomes a lesson in the value of simple, family virtues and the essential brotherhood of man.

    Like a master craftsman, he’s carved out each word and phrase for maximum effect, yet his authorial presence is never intrusive or showy. And his humor is razor-sharp…” – Erik Jackson, Timeout New York“A very entertaining, slightly off-center exploration of breathtaking sleaze... Here is a Hollywood comedy that sports not only superior wisecracks, but also the long-term point of view of a moralist.” – Vincent Canby, New York TimesMasterfully revising and expanding his first produced play, Jon Robin Baitz skewers the Hollywood of his youth with affectionate rue and wicked wit.Jon Robin Baitz is the author of Three Hotels, The Film Society, Other Desert Cities, The End of the Day, and The Substance of Fire, which he adapted into a major motion picture. He was the showrunner on ABC’s Brothers & Sisters. He also wrote the screenplay for the upcoming film Stonewall directed by Roland Emmerich. He lives in New York.

    The killer, Bill Reach, has admitted to the murders of nineteen women, but there may have been more. Over many weeks of interviews, the couple Dan and Iris Henniman grow more and more uncertain of the ethics of what they are doing. Are they simply relating terrifying events, or are they helping readers consume rape, murder and mutilation as if they are consuming any other product of our society? Are they, in fact, helping to turn Bill Reach into a celebrity?

    The plays in this volume include: "The Hotel Baltimore," "Serenading Louie," "The Mound Builders," and "Angels Fall."

    This anthology, compiled by an authority on children's theatre, collects new and overlooked scripts that represent the best of modern playwriting for children. From works adapted from classic children's stories to original contemporary scripts, each play inspires the imagination as it entertains.With complete scripts for twenty plays plus a biographical sketch of each playwright, Theatre for Young Audiences is invaluable for anyone involved in children's theatre, from community theatre groups to teachers and students of dramatic literature.Plays included in this book:Charlotte's Web ... Joseph RobinetteThe Arkansas Bear ... Aurand HarrisReally Rosie ... Maurice SendakThe Secret Garden ... Pam SterlingWiley and the Hairy Man ... Suzan ZederAccording to Coyote ... John KauffmanThe Mischief Makers ... Lowell SwortzellThe Wise Men of Chelm ... Sandra F. AsherCrow & Weasel ... Jim LeonardThe Ice Wolf ... Joanna H. KrausHome on the Mornin' Train ... Kim HinesThe Falcon ... Greg PalmerThe Man-Child ... Arnold RabinHush: An Interview with America ... James StillBocon! ... Lisa LoomerThe Crane Wife ... Barbara CarlisleJungalbook ... Edward MastA Thousand Cranes ... Kathryn S. MillerThe Yellow Boat ... David SaarSelkie ... Laurie Brooks Gollobin

    Did You Here the One About the Irishman? shows how both nationalists and loyalists are dependent on one another; Joyriders, grew out of the work Reid did with residents at the notorious Davis Flats estate and is structured around the day-to-day activities of four Catholic teenagers on a youth training scheme running at a now-disused textile mill in Belfast and plays on the idea of Britain taking a joy-ride through Ireland; The Belle of Belfast city shows Dolly, a former music-hall star whose bawdy songs and unconventional antics conjure a magical Belfast far removed from that represented by her nephew Jack, a hardline loyalist politician. My Name, Shall I Tell You My name? is "Fierce, poignant…a formidable portrait of intransigent, archaic patriotism" (The Times) and Clowns (the sequel to Joyriders) is a "warmhearted, compassionate play". (The Guardian)

    She's set up a date for kinky sex with a john who likes to watch her with someone else, but the trouble is all her usual partners are busy. Then her long-lost bisexual brother, Chris, walks through the door and Noelle gets to thinking... "Blood" is certainly funny, but it is actually a potent drama about the impossibility of moral certainties and the possibilities of love. If Noelle is willing to have sex with her own brother, then Chris in his turn is willing to fulfill a lifelong incestuous fantasy. Walmsley follows this pair into a moral swamp in which, when not trying to drown each other or themselves, they struggle for salvation. In a tightly-wound two-act script that makes Sam Shepard look like Neil Simon, they engage in spiraling negotiations over drugs, sex, power, love, and death."—"Globe and Mail"

    From the story of the teenage Lucy in Invisible Friends who revives her childhood imaginary friend when things get difficult at home, onto the storytellers in My Very Own Story and This Is Where We Came In and, finally, to young Ernie who 'illucinates' all sorts of wild and weird happenings with astonishing results.

    Both young girls come of age in their own way as they learn that life is not always fair. (2 men, 4 women.) In THE PRISONER'S SONG, Mae tries to boost the confidence of her out-of-work husband, John, while he waits for the "right" job. Finally admitting he can't support them, he realizes he must take what is offered from an old friend of Mae's family, whose grief over the death of his daughter masks his own understanding of the hardships around him. (2 men, 2 women.) When McHenry, THE ONE-ARMED MAN, comes back to his old job to reclaim his arm lost in an accident, his old boss, C.W., is unsympathetic. The accountant, Pinky, tries to convey just how serious McHenry is, but only when McHenry shows C.W. the loaded gun, and then shoots him, do we all know how far he will go to become whole again. (3 men.) In THE LAND OF THE ASTRONAUTS Phil, who always wanted to be an astronaut, finally heads to Houston to try and find a job with the space station, just to be near the astronauts. His wife, Lorena, realizes something is wrong when, back at their home in Harrison, there is no word from Phil right before the long-awaited tap dance recital in which their young daughter, Mabel Sue, will dance. Lorena begins her search in Harrison and, with the help of good neighbors and off-beat lawmen and women, finds Phil wandering around Houston, preparing to go into space, but really half-crazed over his own failures. Taking him home, Lorena helps Phil find his mythical utopian land in his home and family. (10 men, 8 women, 1 boy, 1 girl, flexible casting).

    She is also set upon by the Balloon Man, a villainous creature who is responsible for any number of nefarious schemes, including making people buy things just to create litter. This, of course, complicates the life of the Litterman who, with Steve, Chris and Alphonse (three versions of the same character and played by the same actor) contrives to save Madeline from the Balloon Man and give him his comeuppance. Filled with fast-paced action, charming songs and dazzling magic tricks, the play is a constant joy and a theatrical event unique of its kind.

    But now, at thirty, the glory years are gone, and the few Gents who still acknowledge their leader, Frankie, are mired in slum defeatism and a sense of nowhere to go. Unemployed and bitter, they hang around street cor-ners guzzling wine and cracking jokes and deriding the two characters who symbolize what are, in truth, the only alternatives really left to them: the drunken derelict, Zeke, and the flashy small-time racketeer, Braxton. In a desperate attempt to resurrect The Mighty Gents, Frankie takes his men on one final raid the robbery (and accidental murder) of Braxton. But, in the electrifying conclusion of the play, their brief victory turns to ashes and ends in the destruction of Frankie, brought about, ironically, by the de-spised and rejected Zeke.

    

    With a book by acclaimed playwright Alfred Uhry (Driving Miss Daisy) and a rousing, colorful and haunting score by Jason Robert Brown (Songs For a New World, The Last Five Years, Bridges of Madison County), Parade is a moving examination of the darkest corners of America's history.In 1913, Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-raised Jew living in Georgia, is put on trial for the murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, a factory worker under his employ. Already guilty in the eyes of everyone around him, a sensationalist publisher and a janitor's false testimony seal Leo's fate. His only defenders are a governor with a conscience and, eventually, his assimilated Southern wife who finds the strength and love to become his greatest champion.

    Book by David Ives

    The chilly wind blows outside as they pass the time with stories and memories. Suddenly one member, Percy, so far absent, bursts in and collapses on the floor. When the troupe realizes their friend has been chased by a white mob, they must find a way to protect him and themselves. Fear, anxiety and deep honesty surface as these black men blacken their faces with burnt cork, trying to allow their friend to avoid detection. The white mob realizes where Percy is and shows up at the train where Percy goes out to face them, hoping to save the others.

    Miller's drama involves two middle-class families that outwardly symbolize the tranquillity of stable suburbia. But behind the green shutters and the contentment of sustained affluence lies the latent turmoil all too frequently documented in police records, the tragedy of households divided against themselves with children and parents going separate routes to common disaster. In one of Mr. Miller's families the Masons a sixteen-year-old girl takes LSD and worse. In the second family the Hoffmans the son turns out to be the wise-guy pusher coining a fortune in debasing his peers. The girl's destruction is remorselessly unfolded the wild fantasies of trips on drugs, the filth and sordidness of an East Village pad, the unsuccessful attempts at group therapy, the pure horror of the understaffed ward for the disturbed and finally the distinct possibility that the child may face a controlled environment for the rest of her life." In a final scene of explosive fury her father lashes out against the forces that have destroyed his daughter, but it is too late and his own share of the guilt too great. There is only the hope that others will understand and learn from his agony.

    Moving swiftly from one adventure to another (with all the people whom they encounter played by the same actor) they botch an attempted robbery (because the drawer of the cash register is stuck); are swindled out of the Buick by a fast-talking used car dealer; run afoul of a sexually voracious lady farmer (who is "ugly enough to turn a train down a dirt road"); fall into the clutches of a larcenous country preacher; and try to make off with the automobile of a politically ambitious small town doctor who wants to exhibit them as examples of what poverty can do to people. Eventually Weasel is hired on by a construction company (and actually buys a car), but when they refuse to take on T Bone as well, because of his color, it is back on the road again, pausing only to make out their last wills and testaments disposing of all their "worldly goods" which, for T Bone is nothing at all, and, for Weasel, consists primarily of his used Chevette-with thirty-two payments still to go.

    

    George, who has served as husband and father to a woman and her two small children for the past year, awaits the arrival of Carl. Carl is the real husband and father. He is also a member of a religious sect called The World Family Church. When Carl arrives, George is torn between ridiculing him as a harmless crackpot, and fearing him as a very real threat to his role as father. Carl, on the other hand, is concerned with the spiritual welfare of his children. The resulting confrontation is at times funny, at times heartbreaking; and ultimately, the plight of George, a man desperate for love and normality in a broken world, is deeply affecting. A play that addresses the changing nature of the family in our society."

    Includes: Amy Hill: Tokyo Bound; David Henry Hwang: Bondage; Velina Hasu Houston: As Sometimes in a Dead Man's Face; Lane Nishikawa and Victor Talmadge: The Gate of Heaven; Dwight Okita: The Rainy Season .

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    But their daughter and son-in-law are on the way over to drive them, so they wait and are caught in a crossfire of bickering when the younger couple arrives. When the others go out to bring the car around, Agnes and Andrew take advantage of their absence to slip off. They are alone once more, just the two of them, as they were so many years ago before life and children and illness brought them to where they are now. They walk along slowly, enjoying the fine day, stopping for coffee, reminiscing about the past. And out of their serenity comes an odd but arresting fact. They realize that, looking back, what they miss most of all is what their daughter and her husband have now—the glorious, exhausting, infuriating, but exhilarating fights and the energy to make the most of them. This is what Agnes will speak of on Tuesday—knowing that in her daughter and her husband she sees, and yearns for, the Agnes and Andrew of forty years ago. THE LOVELIEST AFTERNOON OF THE YEAR: He and She first meet when She is feeding pigeons in the park, and He asks her for the plastic favor at the bottom of the Crackerjack box. He tells her that his wife takes all his money, bends the coins in her teeth, and shoots at his feet with a rifle with a blue silencer. She doesn't know what to make of him, but they begin to meet regularly, and gradually more of his story comes out. He tells her he is a seeing-eye person for blind dogs; that years ago his sister Lucy's arm was ripped off by a polar bear in the park zoo and that as a result she became covered all over with white hair; and then that he doesn't have a wife at all. He embarrasses her by singing at the top of his lungs—and She begins to wonder if he is not utterly mad. She is lonely and wants to be married, but is that the answer? The sight of a fat woman pushing two gross children in a perambulator increases her doubts, but then she notices that a blind dog walks beside her, and everything begins to make strange, awful and rather dismaying sense. The fat woman pulls out a rifle with a blue silencer and fires. He and She fall, mortally wounded. Was it all true? Does He really have a sister named Lucy? With his dying breath He proclaims that he does, and they expire contentedly, reaching out for each other as they tumble to the ground.

    The place is the front entrance of Graceland, the late Elvis Presley's Memphis mansion, the time, five o'clock in the morning, three days before the estate is to be opened to the public. Two ardent Presley fans, Bev and Rootie, are camped out before the gates, each determined to be the first to enter the sacred precincts. Bev is a bewigged, middle-aged lady with too much make-up and a brassy down-home style; Rootie is young and shy and somewhat intimidated by the raucous Bev. Wary at first, the two soon progress from dispute to shared confidences and a growing compassion that, in the end, moves the essentially warm-hearted Bev to defer the place of honor to her waif-like and touchingly sincere rival. (2 women.) ASLEEP ON THE WIND. The time is ten years before the time of GRACELAND, the place, a small clearing in Bayou Teche, Louisiana, the "special place" that Rootie refers to in the other play. This is where Rootie and her favorite brother, Beau, a handsome, sensitive and restless young man of thirty come to talk in private and to escape her other brothers, two high-spirited hot rodders who seem to delight in pestering their shy, reclusive sister. This time Beau has a double purpose for their meeting: to persuade Rootie to try to stick it out at home and in school and to reach beyond him for companionship; and also to tell her that he has enlisted in the army and has requested service in Vietnam. Inevitably the news comes as a deep shock to Rootie, but it is the way of its telling that makes the play so touching and evocative-and that in the end allows Rootie to accept the fact that her life, for better or worse, will never again be the same. (1 man, 1 woman.)"

    From this fleetingly irritating and insignificant encounter, the viciously murderous and incredulously bizarre plot emerges into the full-blown twilight of what appear to be their insignificant and meaningless lives. And it is this very absence of significance and meaning in the lives of the characters which produces both the mindless evil and the greeting-card redemption that give them their shape. This is a universe in which Camus meets Dali, where Goya meets Disney, where gunshots and bathtub drownings, disillusion and dismemberment become the Seventh Seal of the Grey Flannel set.

    Kemnitz and Jennifer McMaster, Reverse Transcription by Tony Kushner, Waterbabies by Adam LeFevre, Just One Night by Kim Levin, Compatible by Anna Li, Stars by Romulus Linney, What I Meant Was by Craig Lucas, Making the Call by Jane Martin, The Sin-Eater by Don Nigro, August Afternoon by Rich Orloff, 187 by José Rivera, If Susan Smith Could Talk by Elaine Romero, Gave Her the Eye by Mayo Simon, The League of Semi-Super Heroes by Valerie Smith and Michael Bigelow Dixon, The Unintended Video by Dale Griffiths Stamos, Median by John Stinson, The Guest of Honor by Richard Strand, Token to the Moon by Brian Christopher Williams, and Contract With Jackie by Jimmy Breslin.

    While the initial situation seems to be nothing more than a typical girls' night out, the reader is soon presented with a wealth of mystery, suspense, and intrigue as the characters reflect on the tragic murder of their classmate Clara, who was killed on graduation day by one of the women present at the reunion. As the mystery unfolds, the playwright examines such issues as truth, ritual, conspiracy, and woman's psyche. In addition to the play, the volume includes introductory notes and production photos.

    A startling collection of plays by playwrights working in the north and south of Ireland, all of which have been groundbreaking events in contemporary Irish theatreAt The Black Pig's Dyke by Vincent Woods depicts a group of mummers in the borderland between North and South, blending their rituals of death with the all-too-modern assassins going about their awful task; in Hard To Believe by Conall Morrison an army intelligence agent for the British invokes his Protestant preacher grandfather and his turncoat father who married a Catholic and thereafter denied his background; in Disco Pigs by Enda Walsh two friends bonded in their fantasies and shared baby-talk face into Cork city on their seventeenth birthday; Frank Pig Says Hello by Patrick McCabe (Winner of the 1997 George Devine Award) is about the sullen meanness of a village community towards an innocently simple young man; in Language Roulette by Daragh Carville a group of young people in Belfast come together for a reunion and the underlying atmosphere is anger and revenge; Bat The Father, Rabbit The Son by Donal O'Kelly is a powerful personal story about the reversal of a father-son relationship where the son is envious of the father's unambitious expressiveness.Foreword by the award-winning Irish playwright, Sebastian Barry

    In a series of twenty-four “snapshots,” That Woman is a devastating Judeo-Christian allegory where voyeurism, fantasy, masturbation, seduction, violence and loss are revealed in fugue-like monologues by the three characters present on stage: a woman who was thirsty, her son who liked to laugh, and an old man who watched them. It is a play which makes the literal “patriarchal gaze” emanating from three fisheye holes into the most private rooms of the woman’s apartment the searing light which withers every impulse to joy and creation, and in which the Mary-Eve schizophrenia of the feminine archetype “wastes” the seed of the equally schizophrenic, celibate/dreamer-rapist/destroyer, male archetype of the patriarchal Catholic tradition.

    . . by Andreea Valean (Romania), translated by Cheryl Robson and Claudiu Trandafir; Soap Opera by Gyorgy Spiro (Hungary), translated by Andrew Bock.

    Spanning twenty-six centuries, the play evokes the words and feelings of women who were frequently obliged to hide behind anonymity or male names in order to practice their art, and from whom fantastic strength of character and indomitability were required. That they succeeded so brilliantly in their efforts is not only a tribute to these talented women in particular but, in a more general sense, to the irrepressible spirit of the entire "other half" of humanity, whose voice would not be denied.

    First presented on New York's Channel 13 (Educational Television) as part of FOUL!, a special program on pollution and conservation, this madcap spoof of TV advertising has been specially adapted and expanded by the author for stage presentation. Antic and wildly funny in its approach, the play offers both a good-humored comment on our national preoccupation with deodorants and hair sprays, and also a sobering revelation of the self-justifying defensiveness with which our worst polluters excuse and perpetuate their actions. (2 men, 2 women.) A DAY FOR SURPRISES. Zany and absurdist in style, this hilarious short play deals with the surprising day on which one of the stone lions in front of New York's Public Library left its perch long enough to devour one of the lady librarians. The victim was also the fiance of a fellow worker whose grief leads to an enormously funny recounting of their brief liaison. But, as the satiated lion resumes his customary perch, consolation is at hand in the form of another lady librarian, and we are aware that still more surprises are likely to come as life goes on its unpredictable way. (1 man, 1 woman.)"

    

    But when she becomes hopelessly and physically attached to one in a crowded Fifth Avenue bus a most engaging one at that we realize that her determination will be put to a strenuous test. The intricacies that follow her to a fairly conventional line, reaching a climax at the end of the first act with the arrival of the rich and desirable townie from Albany, who has decided to claim her legally. A fig for the fact that she and her new friend are in bathrobes! She merely introduces him as her brother. This would seem to present an unraveling problem of impossible proportions, but Mr. Krasna meets it head on in the second act and brings it to a safe conclusion, carefully guarding his heroine's virtue." And, as the action moves swiftly from scene to scene, the complications multiply uproariously. A small fib, made to avoid a misunderstanding, grows enormous and our heroine is hard-pressed to convey the truth which will save her engagement and her reputation. Fiance, brother and friend are ultimately set straight on what has transpired, but the tangling is wildly funny.