Features the complete script and song lyrics, with 4-color spot illustrations throughout, an original introduction by the creators, and a foreword by Mark Harris.The Book of Mormon, which follows a pair of mismatched Mormon boys sent on a mission to a place that's about as far from Salt Lake City as you can get, features book, music, and lyrics by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone.Parker and Stone are the four-time Emmy Award–winning creators of Comedy Central's landmark animated series South Park. Tony Award–winner Lopez is co-creator of the long-running hit musical comedy Avenue Q. The Book of Mormon is choreographed by three-time Tony Award–nominee Casey Nicholaw (Monty Python's Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone) and is directed by Nicholaw and Parker.The book includes • an original foreword by journalist Mark Harris (author of Pictures at a Revolution) • an original introduction by the authors on the genesis of the show • a production history • the complete book and lyrics, with four-color spot illustrations throughout.

    If they over think it, they'll never do it. But if they rush, it could be a disaster.Lungs premiered in October 2011 at the Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C.In 2019 a production of the play was hosted at The Old Vic starring Matt Smith and Claire Foy.

    At the end of a long day in which the actresses Thomas auditions fail to impress him, in walks Vanda, very late and seemingly clueless, but she convinces him to give her a chance. As they perform scenes from Thomas’s play, and Vanda the actor and Vanda the character gradually take control of the audition, the lines between writer, actor, director, and character begin to blur. Vanda is acting . . . or perhaps she sees in Thomas a masochist, one who desires fantasy in “real life” while writing fantasies for a living.   An exploration of gender roles and sexuality, in which desire twists and turns in on itself, Venus in Fur is also a witty, unsettling look at the art of acting—onstage and off.

    Meeting with cruelty wherever he goes, and increasingly desperate and vengeful, he determines to track down his creator and strike a terrifying deal.I followed nature into her lair, and stripped her of her secrets! I brought torrents of light to a darkening world! Is that wrong?Urgent concerns of scientific responsibility, parental neglect, cognitive development and the nature of good and evil are embedded within this thrilling and deeply disturbing classic gothic tale.Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, adapted for the stage by Nick Dear, premiered at the National Theatre, London, in February 2011.

    Matthew Shepard’s death became a national symbol of intolerance, but for the people of the town, the event was deeply personal. In the aftermath, Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project went to Laramie and conducted more than 200 interviews with its people. From the transcripts, the playwrights constructed an extraordinary chronicle of life in the town after the murder. Since its premiere, The Laramie Project has become a modern classic and one of the most-performed theater pieces in America.         Now, in this expanded edition, The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later adds an essential sequel to the original work. Revisiting the town a decade after the tragedy, the troupe finds a community grappling with its legacy and its place in history. The two plays together comprise an epic and deeply moving theatrical cycle that explores the life of an American town over the course a decade.

    Winner of  the Olivier Award and set to open on Broadway in September 2011, The Mountaintop is set at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in 1968, on the night before Martin Luther King is assassinated and on the day he delivered a speech in which he foretold his own fate, “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know that tonight, we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”  Playwright Katori Hall takes this historic date with destiny and weaves a powerful surrealistic fantasy about a conversation between King and a mysterious hotel maid who brings him a cup of coffee and prompts him to confront his life, his past, his legacy and the plight and future of African-Americans. Hall's insight, light touch and lively mood depicts King as a real man with very human foibles who was nonetheless capable of inspiring millions to hope and move toward a momentous societal shift for equality and justice.

    To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Reduced Shakespeare Company's classic farce, two of its original writer/performers (Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield) have thoroughly revised the show to bring it up to date for 21st-century audiences, incorporating some of the funniest material from the numerous amateur and professional productions that have been performed around the world. The cultural touchstone that is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) was born when three inspired, charismatic comics, having honed their pass-the-hat act at Renaissance fairs, premiered their preposterous masterwork at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987. It quickly became a worldwide phenomenon, earning the title of London's second-longest-running comedy after a decade at the Criterion Theatre. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) is one of the world's most frequently produced plays, and has been translated into several dozen languages. Featured are all 37 of Shakespeare's plays, meant to be performed in 97 minutes, by three actors. Fast paced, witty, and physical, it's full of laughter for Shakespeare lovers and haters alike.

    Lindsay-Abaire offers us both his "quiet three-dimensional depth" ("Los Angeles Times") and his carefully observed humor in this exploration of life in America when you're on your last dollar.

    Fluidly incorporating film and video elements into her writing for the first time, Nottage's comedy tells the story of Vera Stark, a headstrong African American maid and budding actress who has a tangled relationship with her boss, a white Hollywood star desperately grasping to hold onto her career. Stirring audiences out of complacency by tackling racial stereotyping in the entertainment industry—a topic that remains largely unexplored in mainstream arts and entertainment—Nottage highlights the paradox of black actors in 1930s Hollywood while jumping back and forward in time and location in this uniquely theatrical narrative.Lynn Nottage's plays include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined; Intimate Apparel, the most widely produced play of the 2005–06 theater season in America; Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'knockers; and POOF!

    Based on Carlo Goldoni's classic Italian comedy The Servant of Two Masters, in this new English version by prize-winning playwright Richard Bean, sex, food, and money are high on the agenda.

    A composer coming to terms with his genius. And, even though they're separated by 200 years, these two people share an obsession that might, even just for a moment, make time stand still. Drama, memory and music combine to transport you from present-day New York to nineteenth-century Austria in this extraordinary American play about passion, parenthood and the moments of beauty that can transform a life.

    . . . Ruhl writes with the imaginative sweep that allows Woolf's poetry to soar."—Variety"Sarah Ruhl's smart new translation [of Three Sisters] feels just right to contemporary American ears—lean, colloquial, and conversational for us and true to Chekhov's original work."—The Cincinnati EnquirerIn her stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending, period-hopping novel, award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl "is her usual unfailingly elegant, unbeatably witty self, cleverly braiding her own brand-name wit with Woolf's" (New York )magazine. Preserving Woolf's vital ideas and lyrical tone, Ruhl brings to the stage the life of an Elizabethan nobleman who's magically transformed into an immortal woman. In her fresh translation of Three Sisters, the Anton Chekhov classic of ennui and frustration, Ruhl employs her signature lyricism and elegant understanding of intimacy to reveal the discontent felt by fretful Olga, unhappy Masha, and idealistic Irina as they long to leave rural Russia for the ever-alluring Moscow.Sarah Ruhl's other plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) and The Clean House, as well as Passion Play, Dean Man's Cell Phone, Demeter in the City, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, and Late: a cowboy song. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her plays have premiered on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in many theaters around the world.

    Toulou escapes from the Mississippi cotton fields in the 1930s to pursue her dream of singing the blues in Memphis. When she meets a rambling blues singer, the notorious Ace of Spades, her dreams are realized in a way she could never have imagined.Hurt Village is set in a real-life Memphis housing project, which has become a painful symbol of urban decay. The piece focuses on a young African-American man who returns from fighting in Iraq to find that his home is being demolished. It explores in vivid and sometimes brutal detail a long-lasting legacy of drug abuse, child abuse, crime, and self-hatred within a poor, working-class, multi-generational Black family.Winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play 2009, The Mountaintop is a historical-fantastical two-person play, set at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where on the following evening, Martin Luther King will stand on the balcony to greet a crowd and be shot dead. Portraying rhetoric, hope and ideals of social change, The Mountaintop also explores the constraints of being flawed and human in the face of inevitable death.Saturday Night/Sunday Morning is set in a Memphis beauty shop/boarding house during the final days of WWII, a group of African American women struggle with the heartbreak of losing their men to the war and with the uncertainty of what the future may hold when - and if - their soldiers return. Rich with humor and history, it is a story about friendship and finding love in unexpected places.

    The third part of Tarell Alvin McCraney's Brother/Sister play cycle.Set in the fictional Louisiana town of San Pere, the play follows 16-year-old Marcus on a journey to find his father, whilst discovering himself, his sexuality, his friendships and his world.

    She herself rejected an emphasis on the pioneering aspects of her career, saying that “it’s almost like it’s an honor rather than a disgrace” and that she should “be the fiftieth and the thousandth by this point”—a remark that suggests the complexity and singularity of vision to be found in her plays. Childress worked as an actress before turning to playwriting in 1949, and she was a political activist all of her life.  Spanning the 1940s to the 1960s, the plays collected here are the ones Childress herself believed were her best, and offer a realistic portrait of the racial inequalities and social injustices that characterized these decades. Her plays often feature strong-willed female protagonists whose problems bring into harsh relief the restrictions faced by African American women. This is the first volume devoted exclusively to the work of a major playwright whose impact on the American theater was profound and lasting.

    Yet Steven Adly Guiguis has created a profane, hilarious masterpiece that earned a "hatful" of theatrical accolades in 2011, including a Drama Desk award for Outstanding Actor in a Play for Bobby Cannavale. Stars the original Broadway cast: Chris Rock, Bobby Canavale, Annabella Sciorra, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Yul Vazquez.

    blu, steeped in poetic realism and contemporary politics, challenges us to try to imagine a time before war.Selected as the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama competition from more than 950 submissions, Virginia Grise's play blu takes place in the present but looks back on the not too distant past through a series of prayers, rituals, and dreams. Contest judge David Hare commented, "Virginia Grise is a blazingly talented writer, and her play blu stays with you a long time after you've read it." Noting that 2010 was a banner year for women playwrights, he added, "Women's writing for the theatre is stronger and more eloquent than it has ever been."

    Four full-length plays and two previously unpublished shorts from the multi-award-winning author of Jerusalem.The collection includes: Mojo, The Night Heron, The Winterling, Leavings (previously unpublished), Parlour Song, The Naked Eye (previously unpublished).

    

    

    

    The show presents 30 plays in 60 minutes, 50 weeks a year, to a devoted following. The ensemble of writer-performers generates between two and 12 new plays each week, as dictated by a roll of the dice, creating a constantly changing menu of plays. In 2004, a New York ensemble was formed and the show has been running there since, playing to houses of younger, culturally adventurous audiences as well as seasoned theater-goers. The 225 plays in this volume, culled from more than 1,300 the New York company has generated since 2004, reflect the diversity of 35 current and past ensemble members and the multiplicity of viewpoints and voices they bring to the stage. The material runs the gamut of style, tone, and topic: musical, confession, agit-prop, poetic gesture, physical comedy, puppet theater, audience interrogation, folk song, sex joke, and many more.

    To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Plays by Eugene O'Neill.

    Jessica Titus, a frustrated actress living in Boston, has become distraught over local job opportunities and she is feeling trapped in her long standing relationship with her boyfriend Tom. She suddenly decides to pursue her dreams in

    

    A dangerous place to have a sense of humour; even more so a sense of freedom. Mikhail Bulgakov, living among dissidents, stalked by secret police, has both. And then he's offered a poisoned chalice: a commission to write a play about Stalin to celebrate his sixtieth birthday.Inspired by historical fact, Collaborators embarks on a surreal journey into the fevered imagination of the writer as he loses himself in a macabre and disturbingly funny relationship with the omnipotent subject of his drama.Killing my enemies is easy. The challenge is to change the way they think, to control their minds. And I think I controlled yours pretty well. In years to come, I'll be able to say: Bulgakov? Yeah, we even trained him. He gave up. He saw the light. We broke him, we can break anybody. It's man versus monster, Mikhail. And the monster always wins.John Hodge's blistering new play depicts a lethal game of cat and mouse through which the appalling compromises and humiliations inflicted on any artist by those with power are held up to scrutiny.Collaborators by John Hodge premiered at the National Theatre, London, in October 2011. It is published here with an introduction by the author.

    This volume, with a Foreword by the author, contains:The Ginger Ale Boy (Walsh's first play, previously unpublished)Disco Pigsmistermanbedbound The Small ThingsChatroomAlso included are two previously unpublished short plays, How These Desperate Men Talk (2004) and Lynndie's Gotta Gun (2005).

    . . . Tiny Kushner exists in its own imaginative realm, engaged in the process of working out the American experience without approval or condemnation."—Variety"Kushner's eclectic, wicked wit makes for a great deal of charm and excitement. . . . Hefty political and moral issues dance with buoyant shtick. . . . Penetrating comedy and theatrical strokes light up the stage."—San Francisco ChronicleDescribed as "a thinking person's comedy" (The New York Times), Tiny Kushner is a series of five short works from one of the most important voices in the American theater. Best known for his Pulitzer Prize– and Tony Award–winning seven-hour epic Angels in America, Tony Kushner shows audiences his talent for brevity with this collection of works, which recently co-premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. The pieces include no fewer than two therapy sessions (one with Richard Nixon's shrink), a trip to the moon, Queen Geraldine of Albania, tax-evading New York City cops, and Laura Bush reading Dostoyevsky to a class of dead Iraqi schoolchildren—to give you a taste. Includes: Flip Flop Fly!; Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" or Ambivalence; East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: a little teleplay in tiny monologues; Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker in Paradise; and Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.Tony Kushner's plays include A Bright Room Called Day; Angels in America, Parts One and Two; Slavs!; Homebody/Kabul; and the book and lyrics for Caroline, or Change. His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards for Best Play, and three OBIE Awards for Playwriting.

    The range of plays in this volume displays a tough sensibility and a courage to confront the more unsettling challenges of our times.Harper Regan follows a woman's road trip through the heart of England in a violent and comic exploration of the moralities of sex and death. Quietly harrowing, this play is a barometer for our times exploring dark secrets and familial estrangement.Marine Parade is a musical about sex, betrayal and hope, set in a run-down B&B on Brighton's waterfront. A moving and poignant play, it 'captures the peculiar aroma of Brighton, with its mix of the bracing and the melancholy' (Guardian).Olivier award-winning play On the Shore of the Wide World is an epic piece about love, family, Roy Keane and the size of the galaxy.Punk Rock is based Stephens' experience as a teacher and he describes this play as 'The History Boys on crack'. It explores the underlying tensions and potential violence in a group of affluent, articulate seventeen year old students.

    For one thing, Wonderland isn’t quite as wonderful anymore; the sparkle fades and the characters lose their luster. But rumor has it that thoroughly modern Alice, who prefers the name, Allie, is coming back. There’s hope yet for Wonderland if only the Cat can convince her that the imagination is not only real but necessary. This is the opportunity for your actors and your audiences to see Alice in a new light and follow her through the rabbit hole where she rediscovers the magic of Wonderland along with all your favorite characters from the White Rabbit and the Caterpillar to Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum, the Mad Hatter and the March Hair. And Wonderland wouldn’t be complete without the Queen of Hearts with her Flamingo croquet mallets who still threatens to “cut off her head!” But Allie has a weapon of her own; a Triple Chocolate Espresso Mocha Latté with whipped cream.

    Digital Sheet Music of Sunny AfternoonComposed by: Ray DaviesPerformed by: The Kinks

    A drama in one act. *Approximate Run Time: 15 to 20 minutes*Roles for 1 female, 1 male, 3 either gender*Simple staging*Dramatic monologue for a woman in her 20s or 30s

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    Poetry. From three-time Obie Award-winner Mac Wellman comes this complex and provocative play about two simple events. Yamaha Nazimova drops a glove. Jewel Beckett picks it up. Between these two occurrences, a band of moths, fingers, demons, and all-too-human pronouns sing 27 choruses rich with puns, reversals, exclamations, whisperings, cries of loss, cries of victory, arguments, and resolutions. Turning dramatic convention on its head, LEFT GLOVE offers a profound view of a mishap and its ramifications in the public and private sphere. "Chorus of One Resolved, that: LEFT GLOVE will fit thee like a glove if thou relishest the sort of play in which the most awe-inspiring acrobatic feats are performed by no other character than language. A left glove may have been lost, but here thou shall encounter dexterous play bountifully. And that is that. YEA" Monica de la Torre. Front cover art and design by Jonathon Rosen."

    In London, Michael listens carefully to a conversation recorded twenty years ago. Can he hear a third silent person on the tape? In a small Russian town, Irina searches desperately for her missing friend, piecing together fragments from his life.From urban noise to rural emptiness, through rationalism to spirituality, from Russia to the UK, Silence is the latest collaboration between the celebrated theatre company Filter and RSC Associate Director David Farr.Filter create rich stories that awaken the imaginative senses of an audience and they are renowned for a distinctive theatrical style that exposes the workings of a production: video is mixed onstage, sound is produced live by a musician and the performers to create a unique, 'live chemistry' experience for audiences. Silence is a work which combines narrative impetus with astounding, original ideas and theatrical presentation.

    Dramatic Society are no different, with the possible exception that almost everything that could happen does. The scenery collapses, cues are missed, lines forgotten, and the sound effects take on a strange note at times, as the ladies present their ambitious evening's entertainment with the cunning whodunit, "Murder At Checkmate Manor". And just in case the audience should get bored there's a Film and Fashion Show and Murder Mystery Quiz complete with Prize. The crunch comes in the denouement when the "murderer", about to be revealed, has to rush home to bandage up an injured daughter. But Mrs. Reece, doyenne of the group, rises above the slings and arrows of outrageous dramatics to save the situation and provide the final inventive twist.

    He loves hip hop and Dungeons and Dragons. He has thick-ass glasses. He is a weird kid in a place where weirdness can be fatal: Long Beach, California. Since his best friend moved and his mother died, the only person he can talk to is a human skull he keeps hidden in a cookie jar. Year Zero is a comedic drama about young Cambodian Americans - about reincarnation, reinvention, and ultimately

    These honest, truthful depictions of contemporary life focus attention on the social forces that help to shape a character's behavior or direct attention to actions and attitudes that reveal a character's point of view. The excerpts are grouped in chapters framed by themes, such as 'Rage and Retribution, ' 'Faith and Folly, ' and 'Regret and Romance.' A brief yet thorough background sketch provides an initial glimpse of the given circumstances and emotional or intellectual tenor for each monologue or duo scene, as well as performance hints. The selections from recently produced contemporary plays as well as from emerging playwrights encompass a range of literary styles and thematic storylines to challenge you in acting assignments, classroom discussions, or formal auditions.

    Supplemented by essays by major theater practitioners, the book approaches the recent avant-garde as a non-linear, pluralistic phenomenon, includes collaborative constructed scripts, and highlights the complex dynamic between avant-garde text and performance.

    Kalb's sense of nuance, unpredictability, and the complexity of perception brings these productions to life. He is our surrogate, our scapegoat even, enduring the length of these productions so that he can convey the essence of their power." ---Stanton B. Garner, Jr., University of Tennessee"Jonathan Kalb takes us on a tour of monumental theater events, which flaunt the rules of economy, Aristotelian and otherwise. Kalb captures these unwieldy marathon productions by skillfully mixing personal experience and scholarly analysis. I read this engaging book in a single sitting---and came away ready to join the first theater marathon I could find." ---Martin Puchner, Harvard University"Jonathan Kalb's Great Lengths leaps to the head of any class in theatre history. Rich with critical perspective of 'marathon' works by Peter Brook, Tony Kushner, Robert Wilson, and others, and written with panache and lucidity, Kalb's book is filled with suspense as he describes and demystifies more than the post-modern and post-dramatic haunting recent theatre. This is history as present event, embracing the Greeks, Shakespeare, and even Charles Dickens." ---Gordon Rogoff, Yale UniversityWe know that size matters in many areas of human endeavor, but what about works of the imagination? Why do some dramatic creations extend to five hours or more, and how does their extreme length help them accomplish extraordinarily ambitious aims? In Great Lengths, theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb addresses these and other questions through a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, and the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby, and the “durational works” of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. This is a book about extreme length, monumental scope, and intensive immersion in the theater in general, written by a passionate spectator reflecting on selected pinnacles of his theatergoing over thirty years.The book's examples, deliberately chosen for their diversity, range from adapted novels and epics, to dramatic chronicles with macrohistorical and macropolitical implications, to stagings of super-size classic plays, to "postdramatic" works that negotiate the border between life and art. Kalb reconstructs each of the works, re-creating the experience of seeing it while at the same time explaining how it maintained attention and interest over so many hours, and then expanding the scope to embrace a wider view and ask broader questions. The discussion of Nicholas Nickleby, for example, considers melodrama as a basic tool of theatrical communication, and the section on Peter Brook's The Mahabharata explores the ethical problems surrounding theatrical exoticism. The chapter on Einstein on the Beach grows into a reflection on the media-age status of the much-debated Gesamtkunstwerk (or "total artwork") and a reassessment of the long avant-gardist tradition of challenging the primacy of rational language in theater. The essay on Peter Stein's Faust I + II becomes a reflection on the interpretive role of theater directors and the theatrical viability of antitheatrical closet drama. Great Lengths thus offers a remarkable panorama of the surprisingly broad field of contemporary marathon theater---an art form that diverse audiences of savvy, screen-weaned spectators continue to seek out, for the increasingly rare experiences of awe, transcendence, and sustained immersion that it provides.Great Lengths will appeal to general readers as well as theater specialists. It situates the chosen productions in various historical and critical contexts and engages with the many lively scholarly debates that have swirled around them. At the same time, it uses the productions as springboards for wide-ranging reflections on the basic purpose and enduring power of theater in an attention-challenged, media-saturated era.

    In Anton Chekhov’s play, an upper-class family comes home a few months before they lose their orchard because of debt. Similarly, El Nogalar finds an upper-class Mexican family about to lose their orchard. El Nogalar is a story about family, self-identity and how one defines home when it is set against the violence and drug cartels plaguing Mexico today.

    Texts discussed range from Shakespeare and Milton to Coetzee and Barker.

    Three one-act plays from one of the master stage writers of our time:

    But, piece by piece, a mystery unfolds as fact blurs with fiction, past collides with present, and the elusive truth about Juliana boils to the surface. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Hugo Armstrong, Calista Flockhart, Kalen Harriman, Gregory HarrisonDirected by Rosalind Ayres. Recorded by L.A. Theatre Works before a live audience.

    In A Life this intriguing character is at the end of his life and setting his emotional accounts in order. Two casts represent the young and the old Desmond Drumm, his simple and loving wife, and the one true love of his life, who rejected him for a lovable ne'er do well. Now near death and isolated from the world by his "high principles," Drumm comes to realize he has never given his life or the people in it, a chance."Eloquent, literate, witty and touching."- Christian Science Monitor"A marvelous, remarkable play."- WCBS-TV

    

    Includes: Della, Skyvers, and The White Witch.

    Wet and wild romantic comedy!

    That you will have left.Leonard and Violet, young, restless and in love, spend their first night together knowing it may also be their last. It's 1942 and, in a hotel room in Bath, they dream of their future while preparing for Leonard's departure to the war. But the bombs begin to fall and their world will never be the same again.In the year 2002, the couple look back at what might have been.Examining the impact of the Second World War on two ordinary lives and a love that spans more than sixty years, Nick Payne's One Day When We Were Young premiered at the Crucible Studio, Sheffield, in October 2011 in a Paines Plough production.

    Princess Genevieve wants to marry Henry, but he’s just a common cook. Of course, the king thinks this is ridiculous and takes it upon himself to choose who will be the next king and a suitable husband for his daughter. Though the princess begs her father to let her lead the kingdom herself, the king instead decides to hold a contest to find the next king. Princess Genevieve is outraged that she has been reduced to a trophy for her father’s contest, so she and Henry cook up a plot to have Genevieve enter the contest herself. Disguised as a prince, Genevieve is intent on proving to her father that she is worthy to wear the kingdom’s crown. Meanwhile, to cover for her absence, Henry clumsily masquerades as the princess, and Genevieve’s maid tries to cover for the cook! Filled with mistaken identities, tongue-in-cheek humor and over-the-top characters, your audiences will cheer for the princess as she tries to outsmart Prince Air-Guitar and evil “Prince Fluffy” and battle the great chicken-dragon, with some help from Henry’s delicious lasagna!

    The works variously address immigration, racism, stereotyping, identity, generational tensions, assimilation, and upward mobility as well as post-9/11 paranoia, racial isolation, and adoptee experiences.Each of these works engages directly and actively with Asian American themes through performance to provide an important starting point for building relationships, raising political awareness, and creating active communities that can foster a sense of connection or even rally individuals to collective action.

    With a preface by director Mark Wing-Davey and an introduction by dramaturg Mead K. Hunter, this volume will impact American theatre for a long time.

    Point first. Press it between those rosebud lips. Prise it between your pearly whites. Gently. I wouldn't break a single tooth. Philip Ridley's first new play since 2008 marks a change of direction for the acclaimed, ever restless and maverick writer. Tender Napalm is a high-impact, high-concept two handed play which explores the landscape that is a relationship between a man and a woman. Explosive, poetic, brutal and ultimately redemptive, the play weaves a compelling theatrical tapestry to re-examine and re-define the language of love.This abstract play is cool, slick and savagely romantic. There are no defined settings, narratives or characters. Instead, Tender Napalm is 70 minutes of real time drama: simply a man and woman dissecting their relationship through a mixture of memory, fantasy, and a mixture of the two. And, by doing this, they touch upon zeitgeist concerns of violence, war and faith. Tender Napalm is a showcase of the imaginative, fantastical and magical poeticisms Ridley can achieve from the bleak and brutal themes of war and destruction.This volume also contains five poems from the performance sequence Lovesongs for Extinct Creatures, publishing for the first time extracts from Philip Ridley's cycle of love poetry.

    Screenwriter's Toolkit: 101 Writing Exercises will help you practice your writing skills. If you're experiencing writer's block, use the exercises to get your creative juices flowing.

    A new retelling of an ancient classic for theatre lovers, critics, fans of South African literature, drama teachers and students.

    A doting suburban mother, Annie is blindsided when her son, Peter, falls in love with Julie, a passionate environmental activist. Unable to reconcile herself to Julie’s radical worldview, Annie struggles desperately to keep Peter from falling further into the young woman’s dangerous world. Climate change, S’mores, SUVs, and Noah’s Ark are all onstage as Annie sets out to save her son, and unwittingly throws herself into the path of events larger than she ever could have imagined. Touching and provocative, Kayak invites us all to confront our choices in the landscape of the growing environmental crisis.

    

    During the Reformation, however, many images of the Virgin were destroyed, as Protestantism rejected the way the medieval Church over-valued and sexualized Mary. Although increasingly marginalized in Protestant thought and practice, her traces and surprising transformations continued to haunt early modern England. Combining historical analysis and contemporary theory, including issues raised by psychoanalysis and feminist theology, Gary Waller examines the literature, theology and popular culture associated with Mary in the transition between late medieval and early modern England. He contrasts a variety of pre-Reformation texts and events, including popular mariology, poetry, tales, drama, pilgrimage, and the emerging New Learning', with later sixteenth-century ruins, songs, ballads, Petrarchan poetry, the works of Shakespeare, and other texts where the Virgin's presence or influence, sometimes surprisingly, can be found.

    

    A young female soldier returns from Afghanistan to a home she no longer recognizes. She has proved herself in combat but her hardest battle is yet to come.

    I expect you have been told fairytales before. But you have never really heard a fairytale until you have heard it told by a real fairy.’ The theft of a single rose has monstrous consequences for Beauty and her father. Because this is no ordinary rose...and this is no ordinary fairytale. Narrated by a pair of mischievous fairies, a very helpful Rabbit, and a Thoughtsnatcher machine, this timeless story is sure to surprise, delight and enchant. A wild and twisted tale, full of exciting and intriguing challenges for drama groups wishing to stage their own production.

    Adria begs her cook, a proud and loyal woman who values her mistress's friendship, to promise she will protect the mansion from the communist upheaval. Over the next forty years Gladys keeps this promise, despite tremendous emotional and physical loss. When Adria's daughter vacations in Cuba and comes to see her mother's old house, Gladys is forced to confront harsh truths. Not only has Adria forgotten her, but now Glayds is accused of leading a life of betrayal in a house that isn't hers. Gladys's struggle mirrors the cultural divide in Cuba that separates the delicately preserved past from the need to survive that is molding a rough-hewed future from the majestic determination and nobility of the Cuban people."Completely riveting.''-Newsday"First rate.... Machado uses the kitchen as a metaphor to examine the oppression and betrayals of both exile and revolution. A shining theatrical experience.''-The New Yorker"Powerful. The] writing is political and unflinching."-Miami Herald

    presents 15 of their very best short comedies. From a blind dating debacle to a silly Shakespeare spoof, from a fairy tale farce to a self-hating satire, this anthology contains hilarious large-cast plays that have delighted thousands of audiences around the world.Includes the plays The Audition by Don Zolidis, Law & Order: Fairy Tale Unit by Jonathan Rand, 13 Ways to Screw Up Your College Interview by Ian McWethy, Darcy's Cinematic Life by Christa Crewdson, The Whole Shebang by Rich Orloff, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Fifth Period by Jason Pizzarello, Small World by Tracey Scott Wilson, The Absolute Most Cliched Elevator Play in the History of the Entire Universe by Werner Trieschmann, The Seussification of Romeo and Juliet by Peter Bloedel, Show and Spell by Julia Brownell, Cut by Ed Monk, Check Please by Jonathan Rand, Aliens vs. Cheerleaders by Qui Nguyen, The Brothers Grimm Spectaculathon by Don Zolidis, 15 Reasons Not To Be in a Play by Alan Haehnel

    This collection includes the critically acclaimed Disco Pigs, misterman, bedbound, and The Small Things, as well as four previously unpublished plays (The Ginger Ale Boy, Chatroom, Lynndie's Gotta Gun, and How These Desperate Men Talk).Enda Walsh is the author of five Edinburgh Festival Fringe First Award–winning plays, including The Walworth Farce, The New Electric Ballroom, and Penelope. His award-winning play Disco Pigs was also a highly acclaimed film in 2001, and he co-wrote the film Hunger (2009), winner of the Camera d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival.

    Here are portraits of American life during the Great Depression and after, populated by a hopelessly hopeful chorus girl, a munitions manufacturer ensnared in a love triangle, a rural family that deals “justice” on its children, an overconfident mob dandy, a poor couple who quarrel to vanquish despair, a young “spinster” enthralled by the impulse of rebellion, and, in “The Magic Tower,” a passionate artist and his wife whose youth and optimism are not enough to protect their “dream marriage.” This new volume gathers some of Williams’s most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas: “The Pretty Trap,” a cheerful take on The Glass Menagerie, and “Interior: Panic,” a stunning precursor to A Streetcar Named Desire.The plays include:     • At Liberty     • The Magic Tower     • Me, Vashya     • Curtains for the Gentleman     • In Our Profession     • Every Twenty Minutes     • Honor the Living     • The Case of the Crushed Petunias     • Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry     • The Dark Room     • The Pretty Trap     • Interior: Panic     • Kingdom of Earth     • I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays     • Some Problems for The Moose Lodge

    His daughter is left to wander. In a rash moment, Beatriz offers to take the child back to her father, and so starts an unimaginable journey across continents and in and out of war zones. But in their need to survive, the woman and the child transform in ways that become irreversible. "The Wheel" by Zinnie Harris premiered at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2011 in a production by the National Theatre of Scotland. Zinnie Harris is a playwright and screenwriter, her work includes the multi-award-winning play "Further than the Furthest Thing", and "Spooks". "A glorious luminosity of spirit ...really rather special". ("Financial Times" on "Further than the Furthest Thing").

    Meet Gideon and Margie, an unlikely pair of historical reenactors, circa now. A museum tour goes off the rails in this jaunty tale of old places, new beginnings and timeless questions."A twisty, humorous tale of significance" - Iris Wiener, TheaterMania.com"Mensch's script is a layered, clear-eyed work of art" - Di Jayawickr

    From the initial pool of over 850 submissions, the Final Forty plays were chosen to be performed over a period of one week. A panel of judges compri

    

    In so doing, they also illuminate many social, political, and environmental issues central to American life. Besides telling the kinds of stories that the news media could not, these plays explore the deeply rooted problems plaguing New Orleans. The factual basis of these plays serves a documentary purpose, but, as drama, they also depict the flood's consequences for individuals - unimaginable loss, powerlessness, displacement. The plays collected here - Rising Water by John Biguenet; The Breach by Catherine Filloux, Tarell Alvin McCraney, and Joe Sutton; Because They Have No Words by Tim Maddock and Lotti Louise Pharrissis; Trash Bag Tourist by Samuel Brett Williams; and Katrina: The K Word by Lisa Brenner and Suzanne Trauth - show how theatre can both enhance our understanding of disastrous events and facilitate a sense of community between audiences and those who experienced them.

    Unfortunately, almost nothing is as he remembered it. The entire house is tilted at a distinct angle, the dog hasn't been fed in five years, and Avery's Grandmother, who everyone thought was dead, is still alive and kicking. Forced to either accept the oddities of his family, or leave them behind, 37 Postcards suggests that you can, in fact, go home again... You just never know what you're going to find.

    It is an unforgiving, tender, and humorous exploration of the universal desire for intimacy, and how we cope with the repression of that desire. It also provides a window into an extraordinary community.

    With she and the family broke and mostly out of work, looks like that college education is not going to happen.Which gets Sally to thinking. And brooding. And worse, carrying a rifle around wherever she goes which is getting her family a little nervous. Worst of all, when she’s all alone, she’s visited by four very different revolutionary spirits from the past: John Brown (Mr. Ottavino), Harriet Tubman (Stacy Sargeant), Nat Turner (Daniel Morgan Shelley), and believe it or not, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh (Mr. Donaldson). All four tell their stories of resistance to an unjust government and, not too obliquely, urge her to use that firearm of hers, as they once did, to fight for The Cause.

    There's Harvey, who wrote Dave's material; Vi, Harvey's wife; Kevin, Dave's agent, and Kevin's wife Jane. Dave's glamorous widow Laura has arranged a funeral to remember, complete with a horse-drawn hearse and an attendant dog. An unfamiliar woman in flamboyant mourning clothes turns out to be Kay, Dave's ex-wife from before he was famous, and a series of revelations end with Kevin throwing a drink into the coffin and all the guests asking themselves if they ever knew the 'real' Dave. Act II opens three weeks later for the disposal of Dave's ashes. The atmosphere is tense and Kevin is wearing a controversial tie, but as more truths are revealed, even from beyond the crematorium Dave seems to be having the last laugh. "Wife After Death" was first presented at the Theatre Royal, Brighton in March 2010, with Tom Conti playing Harvey. "...a terrific evening of love and laughter." ("The British Theatre Guide").

    

    It was long considered to be the earliest surviving tragedy. Even after the mid-20th century, when new evidence established a later date for the play, critics tended to condemn it for its alleged 'archaic' features. As a result it has long been underestimated, although a careful examination reveals it to be one of the most exciting tragedies. This companion employs a variety of critical approaches to set the play in its literary, dramatic, social and historical contexts, and also offers a thorough examination of the performance of the tragedy, investigating topics such as stage, action, music, song and dance.

    

    15 Sondheim standouts simplified for beginning players: Anyone Can Whistle * Broadway Baby * Children Will Listen * Comedy Tonight * Good Thing Going * Johanna * Losing My Mind * Loving You * Not a Day Goes By * Not While I'm Around * Old Friends * Pretty Women * Send in the Clowns * Side by Side by Side * Sunday. Includes lyrics and a composer bio.