Golden Child


David Henry Hwang - 1998
    A “skillfully-told story that engages the emotions as well as the brain,” Golden Child explores the impact of these decisions on each of his great-grandfather’s three wives, and succeeding generations (Entertainment Focus).David Henry Hwang is the author of the Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly, Yellow Face (OBIE Award, 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Golden Child (1997 OBIE Award), FOB (1981 OBIE Award), Family Devotions (Drama Desk nomination), and the books for musicals Aida ( co-author), Flower Drum Song (2002 Broadway revival), and Tarzan, among other works. David Henry Hwang graduated from Stanford University, attended the Yale School of Drama, and holds honorary degrees from Columbia College in Chicago and The American Conservatory Theatre. He lives in New York City with his wife, actress Kathryn Layng, and their children, Noah David and Eva Veanne.

The Matchmaker


Thornton Wilder - 1954
    He employs a matchmaker a woman who subsequently becomes involved with two of his menial clerks, assorted young and lovely ladies, and the headwaiter at an expensive restaurant where this swift farce runs headlong into a hilarious complications. After everyone gets straightened out romantically and has his heart's desire, the merchant finds himself affianced to the astute matchmaker herself. He who was so shrewd in business is putty in the hands of Dolly Levi. He is fooled by apprentices in a series of hilarious hide and seek scenes, and finally has all his bluster explode in his face.

Becket


Jean Anouilh - 1959
    Winner of the Antoinette Perry Award for Best Play of the Season, Anouilh's monumental work—introduced in this edition by the acclaimed writer and critic Andre Aciman—draws from historical events in the Norman conquest of England to paint a profound and enduring portrait of the saint and martyr.

The Apartment


Billy Wilder - 1998
    Jack Lemmon played the 'schnook' who lends out his apartment for his boss's sexual trysts, only to fall in love with the boss's girl - played by Shirey MacLaine. The Apartment is a beautifully judged piece of writing saved from cynicism by Wilder and Diamond's tenderness towards their central characters. This edition of the screenplay includes a specially commissioned introduction by Mark Cousins.

The Philadelphia Story


Philip Barry - 1939
    This Broadway hit starred Katharine Hepburn as Tracy Lord of the Philadelphia Lords, an inhibited and spoiled daughter of the privileged. Divorced from C.J. Dexter Haven, she is engaged to a successful young snob. A gossip weekly sends a reporter and a camera woman to report the wedding arrangements and they are injected into the house by Tracy's brother who hopes to divert their attention from father's romance with a Broadway dancer. Tracy finds herself growing int

Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays


Steve Martin - 1994
    He is also an accomplished screenwriter who has in the past few years turned his hand to writing plays. The results, collected here, hilariously explore serious questions of love, happiness and the meaning of life; they are rich with equal parts of pain and slapstick humour, torment and wit.

4.48 Psychosis


Sarah Kane - 2000
    The struggle of the self to remain intact has moved in her work from civil war, into the family, into the couple, into the individual, and finally into the theatre of phychosis: the mind itself. This play was written in 1999 shortly before the playwright took her own life at age 28. On the page, the piece looks like a poem. No characters are named, and even their number is unspecified. It could be a journey through one person's mind, or an interview between a doctor and his patient.

Sylvia


A.R. Gurney - 1995
    Greg's career as a financial trader is winding down, while Kate's career, as a public-school English teacher, is beginning to offer her more opportunities. Greg brings home a dog he found in the park or that has found him bearing only the name "Sylvia" on her name tag. A street-smart mixture of Lab and Poodle, Sylvia becomes a major bone of contention between husband and wife. She offers Greg an escape from the frustrations of this job and the unknowns of middle age. To Kate, Sylvia becomes a rival for affection. And Sylvia thinks Kate just doesn't understand the relationship between man and dog. The marriage is put in serious jeopardy until, after a series of hilarious and touching complications, Greg and Kate learn to compromise, and Sylvia becomes a valued part of their lives.

Talking Heads


Alan Bennett - 1988
    Talking Heads is a series of dramatic monologues written for BBC television by British playwright Alan Bennett and later published as a series of books.

Dangerous Corner


J.B. Priestley - 1932
    Young, beautiful and successful, they have the world at their feet. Then a cigarette box and an ill-considered remark spark off a relentless series of revelations and other more dangerous secrets are painfully exposed. Priestley wrote this play to prove that a novelist could write an effective play using the strict economy of the stage. It was first produced at the Lyric Theatre in May 1932, with Flora Robson in the role of Olwen Peel, Richard Bird as Robert Caplan and Marie Ney as Freda Caplan. In his biography of Priestley, Vincent Brome wrote of Dangerous Corner: "Directed by Tyrone Guthrie, it ran for just five performances, then the backers withdrew their support. Priestley took a cold hard look at the situation, made some swift calculations with his agent A.D. Peters, and plunged in daringly to rescue it. He was by now a relatively rich man and he drew on the accumulatuion of royalties to keep the play running at a loss. In the end his audacity paid off. The destructive notices in the daily press were followed by favourable reviews by Ivor Brown in the Observer and James Agate in the Sunday Times. It became one of the most popular plays Priestley ever wrote."

Master Class


Terrence McNally - 1995
    Inspired by a series of master classes the great diva conducted at Juilliard toward the end of her career, this drama puts Maria Callas at center stage again as she coaxes, prods, and inspires students—"victims" as she calls them—into giving the performances of their lives while revealing her own. As she slips off into memories, we experience her days at La Scala, her marriage to Meneghini, and her great doomed love for Aristotle Onassis. But the dazzling theatricality comes from Callas's emotional explosions, her cutting wit, and the soaring music as each student sings an aria that exposes the Divina's vulnerabilities ... and her genius.

The Deep Blue Sea


Terence Rattigan - 1952
    A play sparked by the suicide of actor, Kenneth Morgan, with whom Rattigan had been in love.

A Day in the Death of Joe Egg


Peter Nichols - 1967
    It's in the collisions between pious and rogue thoughts that the play's energy lies. We don't know what to feel. Which is why, once seen, Joe Egg won't go away.'Robert Butler, Independent on Sunday (1993)

Three Plays: Once in a Lifetime / You Can't Take it With You / The Man Who Came to Dinner


George S. Kaufman - 1980
    "Once in a Lifetime" is a satire about three small-time vaudevillians who set out for Hollywood as films move from silents into sound.The 1936 Pulitzer Prize winner "You Can’t Take It With You" is about a zany family of hobby-horse enthusiasts. For thirty-five years Grandpa has done nothing but hunt snakes, throw darts, and avoid income-tax payments; his son-in-law makes fireworks in the basement, and other assorted family members write plays, operate amateur printing presses, and play the xylophone. They live in playful eccentricity until daughter Alice brings home her Wall Street boyfriend."The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1939) became a long-running hit. It portrays an eminent lecturer (based on Alec Woollcott) who accepts a dinner invite in a small Ohio town, slips on the ice outside his hosts’ home, and is forced to their sickbed. Convalescing he turns the house into bedlam with his wacky friends and diabolic pranks.Also included in this volume are “Men at Work” and “Forked Lightning,” two essays Kaufman and Hart wrote about each other.

The Normal Heart


Larry Kramer - 1985
    It tells the story of very private lives caught up in the heartrendering ordeal of suffering and doom - an ordeal that was largely ignored for reasons of politics and majority morality.Filled with power, anger, and intelligence, Larry Kramer's riveting play dramatizes what actualy happened from the time of the disease's discovery to the present, and points a moral j'accuse in many directions. His passionate indictment of government, the media, and the public for refusing to deal with a national plague is electrifying theater - a play that finally breaks through the conspiracy of silence with a shout of stunning impact. As Douglas Watt summed it up in his review for the New York Daily News,THE NORMAL HEART is "an angry, unremitting and gripping piece of political theater. You are bound to come away moved."