Book picks similar to
The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh
plays
drama
irish
school
An American Daughter
Wendy Wasserstein - 1998
She is the wife of a professor and the owner of a lovely house in Georgetown. She is also the president's nominee for Surgeon General. When the media discovers that once, long ago, she failed to respond for jury duty, this relatively minor misstep is portrayed as a serious moral lapse. A good friend uses the incident to make a point, scarcely thinking of the implications, and Lyssa must suffer the consequences. From that moment on, Lyssa Dent Hughes sits helplessly as the press investigates her family and friends, shattering her privacy, her career, and her world. Wendy Wasserstein's trenchant humor and sizzling dialogue combine with biting political commentary to produce a masterful, and topical, drama.
The Wife of Willesden
Zadie Smith - 2021
Mother. Lover. Aunt. Friend.She plays many roles round here. And neverScared to tell the whole of her truth, whetherOr not anyone wants to hear it. WifeOf Willesden: pissed enough to tell her lifeStory to whoever has ears and eyes . . .'Zadie Smith's first time writing for the stage, The Wife of Willesden is a riotous twenty-first century translation of Geoffrey Chaucer's classic The Wife of Bath's Prologue, brought to glorious life on the Kilburn High Road.Commissioned to celebrate Brent's year as Borough of Culture 2020, The Wife of Willesden will premiere at the Kiln Theatre, London in September 2020.
Nine Horses
Billy Collins - 2002
The poems in this collection reach dazzling heights while being firmly grounded in the everyday. Traveling by train, lying on a beach, and listening to jazz on the radio are the seemingly ordinary activities whose hidden textures are revealed by Collins's poetic eye. With clarity, precision, and enviable wit, Collins transforms those moments we too often take for granted into brilliant feats of creative imagination. Nine Horses is a poetry collection to savor and to share.
Those Who Can’t, Teach
Haresh Sharma - 2010
As the teachers struggle daily to nurture and groom, the students prefer to hang out and “chillax”. With upskirting and Facebooking, griping and politicking, school takes on a whole new meaning as the colourful characters struggle to prove that those who can, teach.Written by Singapore’s most prolific playwright Haresh Sharma, Those Who Can’t, Teach was first staged by The Necessary Stage in 1990 to critical acclaim. Twenty years later, Sharma revisits this classic to revitalise it for the Singapore Arts Festival 2010, transforming it into a powerful portrayal of the pressures and challenges facing teachers (and students) in schools in the 21st century.“The play throws up questions on the roles of parents, students and teachers, but does not collapse into an impotent tirade against society. The script is joyous. The laughter is warmly wry, not caustic.” —The Straits Times“Those Who Can’t, Teach does much to do away with the stereotypes and fallacies of the teaching profession.” —The Business Times
As Bees in Honey Drown
Douglas Carter Beane - 1998
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I Adopted My Mom at the Bus Station
Savannah Hendricks - 2020
Having a fear of germs is inconvenient when you’re on a road-trip adventure. However, needing to know what it’s like to have a mom, and to finally see the beach means more than anything to an eleven-year-old.Some twenty years later, a man Sandy never wanted to see again shows up at her doorstep. When Sandy’s best friend places an ultimate life-changing decision in her hands, Sandy must venture back down the road, this time with the father she hates.Making these decisions will be much easier with Justin, a long-time friend, by Sandy’s side. Yet, Justin’s help only leads to continued mixed emotions Sandy has been fighting for some time.Sandy is searching for what she lost, but will she accept what she finds? A journey rich in history, the truth, and determining forgiveness with a touch of humor is the portrait of life.
All My Sons
Arthur Miller - 1947
Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went on to make lots of money. In a work of tremendous power, a love affair between Keller's son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Herbert's daughter, the bitterness of George Keller, who returns from the war to find his father in prison and his father's partner free, and the reaction of a son to his father's guilt escalate toward a climax of electrifying intensity.Winner of the Drama Critics' Award for Best New Play in 1947, All My Sons established Arthur Miller as a leading voice in the American theater. All My Sons introduced themes that thread through Miller's work as a whole: the relationship between fathers and sons, and the conflict between business and personal ethics.
Unity (1918)
Kevin Kerr - 2002
This phenomenon in effect brought the terror, the panic, the horror and the sense of helplessness of the Great War home with the returning soldiers—more people died of this epidemic than had been killed in battle throughout the armed conflict.As fear of the dreaded flu begins to fill the town of Unity with paranoia, drastic measures are taken. The town is quarantined in an attempt to keep the illness out. Trains are forbidden to stop, no one can enter, and the borders are sealed. Mail from overseas, feared to be carrying the deadly virus, is gathered and then burned. But when the disease descends upon the town despite their precautions, the citizens begin to turn on each other as they attempt to find a scapegoat for the crisis.Very little has been written about this worldwide calamity which, more than the war itself, destroyed forever the genteel and naive presumptions of European colonial society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kevin Kerr offers audiences not only an epic chronicle of this forgotten chapter of Canadian history, but a chilling preview of the beginnings of our own new century.The play is a gothic romance, filled with dark comedy and the desperate embrace of life at the edge of death.
Sense and Sensibility
Kate Hamill - 2016
Set in gossipy late 18th-century England, with a fresh female voice, the play is full of humor, emotional depth, and bold theatricality. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY examines our reactions, both reasonable and ridiculous, to societal pressures. When reputation is everything, how do you follow your heart?
American Moor
Keith Hamilton Cobb - 2020
not necessarily in that order.Keith Hamilton Cobb embarks on a poetic exploration that examines the experience and perspective of black men in America through the metaphor of Shakespeare's character Othello, offering up a host of insights that are by turns introspective and indicting, difficult and deeply moving. American Moor is a play about race in America, but it is also a play about who gets to make art, who gets to play Shakespeare, about whose lives and perspectives matter, about actors and acting, and about the nature of unadulterated love.American Moor has been seen across America, including a successful run off-Broadway in 2019. This edition features an introduction by Professor Kim F. Hall, Barnard College.
In the Event of Contact
Ethel Rohan - 2021
In the Event of Contact chronicles characters profoundly affected by physical connection, or its lack.Among them, a scrappy teen vies to be the next Sherlock Holmes; an immigrant daughter must defend her decision to remain childless; a guilt-ridden woman is haunted by the disappearance of her childhood friend; a cantankerous crossing guard celebrates getting run over by a truck; an embattled priest with dementia determines to perform a heroic, redemptive act, if he can only remember how; and an aspirational, angst-ridden mother captains the skies.Amid backgrounds of trespass and absence, the indelible characters of In the Event of Contact seek renewed belief in recovery, humanity, and the remains of wonder.