American Buffalo


David Mamet - 1975
    It received four Drama Desk Award nominations, including Outstanding New American Play. The 1983 revival was nominated for the Tony Award, Best Reproduction & the Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Actor in a Play (Pacino). In 1976 the play won an Obie Award for best new play.

The Illusion


Tony Kushner - 1994
    This adaptation offers readers the exquisite wordplay, beguiling comedy and fierce intelligence found in all of Kushner's work.The Illusion follows a contrite father, Pridamant, seeking news of his prodigal son from the sorcerer Alcandre. The magician conjures three episodes from the young man's life. Inexplicably, each scene finds the boy in a slightly different world: names change, allegiances shift and fairy-tale simplicity evolves into elegant tragedy. Pridamant watches, enthralled by the boy's struggles, but only as the strange tale reaches its conclusion does the father confront the ultimate-and unexpected-truth about his son. An enchanting argument for the power of theatrical imagination over reality, "The Illusion" weaves obsession and caprice, romance and murder, fact and fiction, into an enticing exploration of the greatest illusion of all-love.

Consent (NHB Modern Plays) (Nick Hern Books)


Nina Raine - 2017
    The key witness is a woman whose life seems a world away from theirs. At home, their own lives begin to unravel as every version of the truth is challenged.Consent, Nina Raine’s powerful, painful, funny play, sifts the evidence from every side and puts Justice herself in the dock. It premiered as a co-production between the National Theatre and Out of Joint, directed by Roger Michell at the National Theatre in 2017.

Man Equals Man: And the Elephant Calf


Bertolt Brecht - 1926
    Using Kiplingesque imagery, Brecht explores personality as something that can be dismantled and reassembled like a machine, in a parable that the critic Walter Kerr credited with a "curious foreshadowing of the art of brainwashing." This edition also includes The Elephant Calf, which was originally part of the main play. This translation by Gerhard Nellhaus (and by Brecht himself, who made his own English version of the first scene) has been equipped by the editors, John Willett and Ralph Manheim, with Brecht's own notes and relevant texts as well as with an extensive editorial commentary on the genesis and variant versions of the play.

Frozen


Bryony Lavery - 2002
    Her mother, Nancy, retreats into a state of frozen hope. Agnetha, an academic, comes to England to research a thesis entitled Serial Killings: A Forgivable Act? Then there's Ralph, a loner with a bit of a record who's looking for some distraction . . . Drawn together by horrific circumstances, these three embark upon a long, dark journey that finally curves upward into the light.

We Are Proud To Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 - 1915


Jackie Sibblies Drury - 2014
    As the full force of a horrific past crashes into the good intentions of the present, what seemed a far-away place and time is suddenly all too close to home. Just whose story are they telling?Award-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury collides the political with the personal in a play that is irreverently funny and seriously brave.We Are Proud To Present . . . received its European premiere at the Bush Theatre, London, on 28 February 2014.

Fat Men in Skirts - Acting Edition


Nicky Silver - 1988
    Book annotation not available for this title.

The Columnist: A Play


David Auburn - 2012
    Joe sits at the nexus of Washington life: beloved, feared, and courted in equal measure by the very people whose careers and futures he determines. But as the sixties dawn and America undergoes dizzying change, the intense political dramas Joe has been throwing his weight around in—supporting the war in Vietnam and Soviet containment, criticizing student activism—come to bear a profound personal cost.Based on the real-life story of Joe Alsop, whose columns at the time of his 1974 retirement were running three times a week in more than three hundred newspapers, David Auburn’s The Columnist is a deft blend of history and storytelling. A hilarious, searing portrait of the glorious rewards and devastating losses that accompany ego, ambition, and the pursuit of power, The Columnist pens a vital letter from a radically changing decade to our own turbulent era.

I Hate Hamlet


Paul Rudnick - 1991
    The Story: Andrew Rally seems to have it all: celebrity and acclaim from his starring role in a hit television series; a rich, beautiful girlfriend; a glamorous, devoted agent; the perfect New York apartment; and the chance to play Hamlet in Central Park. There are, however, a couple of glitches in paradise. Andrew's series has been canceled; his girlfriend is clinging to her virginity with unyielding conviction; and he has no desire to play Hamlet. When Andrew's agent visits him, she reminisces about her brief romance with John Barrymore many years ago, in Andrew's apartment. This prompts a seance to summon his ghost. From the moment Barrymore returns, dressed in high Shakespearean garb, Andrew's life is no longer his own. Barrymore, fortified by champagne and ego, presses Andrew to accept the part and fulfill his actor's destiny. The action becomes more hilarious with the entrance of Andrew's deal-making friend from LA, spouting the laid-back hype of the Coast and offering Andrew a fabulous new TV deal worth millions of dollars. The laughs are nonstop as Andrew wrestles with his conscience, Barrymore, his sword, and the fact that he fails as Hamlet in Central Park.

The Real Thing


Tom Stoppard - 1982
    But nothing one sees on a stage is the real thing, and some things are less real than others. Charlotte is an actress who has been appearing in a play about marriage written by her husband Henry. Max, her leading man, is also married to an actress, Annie. Both marriages are at the point of rupture because Henry and Annie have fallen in love. But is it the real thing?The Real Thing was first performed at the Strand Theatre, London, on 16 November 1982.

People, Places and Things


Duncan Macmillan - 2015
    Her first step is to admit that she has a problem. But the problem isn't with Emma, it's with everything else. She needs to tell the truth, but she's smart enough to know that there's no such thing. When intoxication feels like the only way to survive the modern world, how can she ever sober up?

Liliom


Ferenc Molnár - 1949
    He works intermittently as a barker for a merry go round and many servant girls fall victim to his charms. Among these girls is Julie, whom he eventually marries. Learning that he is about to become a father Liliom participates in a robbery to enhance his fortunes. But he is caught and stabs himself rather than submit to arrest. He is tried in the Magistrate's court on high, but they see through him there. They know what repentance is in his heart though he is much too cocky to admit it. He is sentenced to a term of years in the purifying fires with the promise that after that sentence has been served he can go back to earth with a chance to do one good deed there. A tender and moving story told with a master's touch.

Blue Stockings


Jessica Swale - 2013
    Girton College, Cambridge, the first college in Britain to admit women. The Girton girls study ferociously and match their male peers grade for grade. Yet, when the men graduate, the women leave with nothing but the stigma of being a 'blue stocking' - an unnatural, educated woman. They are denied degrees and go home unqualified and unmarriageable.In Blue Stockings, Tess Moffat and her fellow first years are determined to win the right to graduate. But little do they anticipate the hurdles in their way: the distractions of love, the cruelty of the class divide or the strength of the opposition, who will do anything to stop them. The play follows them over one tumultuous academic year, in their fight to change the future of education.

Cooling-Off Day


Alfian Sa'at - 2012
    In the electrifying months leading up to the watershed 2011 General Elections and in the tumultuous months after, playwright Alfian Sa’at interviewed Singaporeans to discover their responses to the elections.Covering a wide social and political spectrum, the candid interviews capture the GE experience through the voices of individual Singaporeans — from election candidates to pro-establishment civil servants; from taxi-drivers to teachers; from diehard opposition supporters to young people casting their virgin votes.These interviews — some hopeful, some fearful, some hilariously frank, some achingly honest — form a portrait of Singaporeans confronting the real meaning of democracy and rediscovering their role in shaping the country’s future.

The Woolgatherer


William Mastrosimone - 1986
    Into her life saunters Cliff, a hard working, hard drinking truck driver. He is rough and witty and just as starved for love as she is. Produced to great success at New York's Circle Repertory, this delicate two-character drama starred Peter Weller and Patricia Wettig. The Woolgatherer features several excellent monologues. "Energy, compassion and theatrical sense are there."-The New York Times "[Mastrosimone] has a knack for composing wildly humorous lines at the same time that he is able to penetrate people's hearts and dreams."-Hollywood Reporter