Three plays from Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright August Wilson: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

    

    Told by an eclectic group of historical and modern characters in a continuous conversation across ages and generations, Top Girls was hailed as 'the best British play ever from a woman dramatist' by The Guardian.

    The combination of dazzling wit, subtle social criticism, sumptuous settings and the theme of a guilty secret proved a winner, both here and in his next three plays, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and his undisputed masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. This volume includes all Wilde's plays from his early tragedy Vera to the controversial Salome and the little known fragments, La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy. The edition affords a rare chance to see Wilde's best known work in the context of his entire dramatic output, and to appreciate plays which have hitherto received scant critical attention.

    The 'scholars' are a cross-section of the local community, from a semi-literate young farmer to and elderly polygot autodidact who reads and quotes Homer in the orginal.In a nearby field camps a recently arrived detachment of the Royal Engineers, engaged on behalf of the Britsh Army and Government in making the first Ordnance Survey. For the purposes ofr cartography, the local Gaelic place names have to be recorded and transliterated - or translated - into English, in examining the effects of this operation on the lives of a small group of people, Irish and English, Brian Friel skillfully reveals the unexperctedly far-reaching personal and cultural effects of an action which is at first sight purely administrative and harmless. While remaining faithful to the personalities and relationshiops of those people at that time he makes a richly suggestive statement about Irish - and English - history.

    Although long neglected, the four plays collected in this critical edition reveal the thoroughly modern nature of her concerns. Trifles (1916) develops a feminist critique of social role, while The Outside (1917) stages a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In The Verge (1921), Glaspell presented an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill. And though Inheritors (1921) is far more conventional, it nonetheless questions the nature and reality of American pieties. Long known for a single play, Glaspell now emerges as a significant figure in the history of American drama, a woman of genuine creative innovation.

    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?

    The monkey's cruel incarceration in a cage is avenged when the birds trick the Twits into believing the world has turned upside-down. The Twits join in, aided by the birds who drop glue on their hair, and the audience is encouraged to play their part in freeing the monkeys.

    Moving from street corner to living room, from bedroom to kitchen, we meet the inhabitants of young, middle-aged, and old, glimpsing their socially and emotionally wretched lives, in this sharp, sad, funny, and angry play.

    Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. With contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story.

    Elyot and Amanda, once married and now honeymooning with new spouses at the same hotel, meet by chance, reignite the old spark and impulsively elope. After days of being reunited, they again find their fiery romance alternating between passions of love and anger. Their aggrieved spouses appear and a roundelay of affiliations ensues as the women first stick together, then apart, and new partnerships are formed.

    But for the people of Laramie–both the friends of Matthew and those who hated him without knowing him–the tragedy was personal. In a chorus of voices that brings to mind Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, The Laramie Project allows those most deeply affected to speak, and the result is a brilliantly moving theatrical creation.

    S. Eliot's verse dramatization of the murder of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, winner of the Nobel Prize for LiteratureThe Archbishop Thomas Becket speaks fatal words before he is martyred in T. S. Eliot's best-known drama, based on the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170. Praised for its poetically masterful handling of issues of faith, politics, and the common good, T. S. Eliot's play bolstered his reputation as the most significant poet of his time.

    The playtext is reproduced here with footnotes which will be of no help to anyone and a letter from the authors to the Queen.

    He created a new synthesis from the major comic traditions at his disposal. This collection demonstrates the range of Molière's comic vision, his ability to move between the broad and basic ploys of farce to the more subtle and sophisticated level of high comedy. The Misanthrope appears along with Such Preposterously Precious Ladies, Tartuffe, A Doctor Despite Himself, The Would-Be Gentleman, and Those Learned Ladies.