The first scene of the play is a conversation between two lovers, Tommy and Donna, who broke up some time earlier but who are obviously still attracted to each other. Donna is enraged because Tommy, a would-be artist, is now having an affair with her younger sister, but Tommy, stretched out on his recliner (which, apart from a refrigerator full of beer, comprises the entire furnishings of his spartan apartment), is seemingly unmoved by her harangue. In the second scene Donna visits her father, a once successful artist who stopped painting at the death of his wife, whom he had bullied and betrayed despite his professed love for her. Combative and complex (but also very funny) the father sits and drinks and eventually gives in to his daughter's demand that he force Tommy to marry her or beat him up. Then, in the third and final scene, the father and Tommy confront each other, with results that are sometimes menacing, sometimes antic, with a lively discussion about art and women eventually leading to a sort of tenuous truce—and a grudging recognition of the responsibility that love, in its various guises, imposes.

    The first play collection by a young master of razor-sharp wit and black humor.

    Her oldest daughter, Kess, is a university professor in Minneapolis, but she has come home at the request of her sister, Jo who is concerned for Evelyn's mental health. Kess, a professed lesbian, wants to cut her family ties once and for all; Jo, an incurable romantic and longtime virgin, has now become pregnant; while Sherry, salty-tongued and amoral, wants only to finish high school so she can leave home for good. In the end, there is no accommodation possible but, instead, only a kind of arbitrary independence for each of the protagonists, as they come to realize that each must find her own heaven or hell in her own way.

    The play had its world premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in spring 2013, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Vanessa Redgrave and directed by Kip Fagan.In The Revisionist, young writer David arrives in Poland with a crippling case of writer’s block and a desire to be left alone. His seventy-five-year-old second cousin Maria welcomes him with a fervent need to connect with her distant American family. As their relationship develops, she reveals details about her postwar past that test their ideas of what it means to be a family.

    What Rebecca Gilman makes of this familiar scenario is something startlingly real and compelling, delving deeply into the small space that can divide a feeling of hope from one of hopelessness, as Curt and Sandy both try to get a foothold in the American dream of a house, a job, a life, a relationship with another human being.Gilman's previous play, Boy Gets Girl, was acclaimed by Time magazine as the best play of 2000, saying that "with Spinning into Butter, her play about race relations on campus, Rebecca Gilman gave notice that she was a playwright to watch. And with this intense drama of a woman's encounter with a stalker, she became one to hail . . . It's not just a gripping play but also an important one." Marked by Gilman's characteristically sharp delineation of character, pitch-perfect dialogue, and effortless use of humor that is both biting and silly, Blue Surge is a worthy successor to these plays--an intimate look at the class struggle in America today as well as a brilliant example of the dramatic craft from one of today's most accomplished practitioners. It will have its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in the spring of 2001.

    Gathered here are three of his latest works: Faster, in which two young grifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record; Finer Noble Gases, a lament for a band of arrested thirty-year-olds slouching toward adulthood amid East Village decay; and the Off-Broadway hit Stone Cold Dead Serious. An honest, strange, and humorous look at a blue-collar family struggling to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths their teenage son will go to save them from themselves, the play prompted Bruce Weber to rave in The New York Times: "Rapp is very gifted, and, even rarer, he has something to say . . . Stone Cold Dead Serious [is] brave, compassionate, and . . . breathtakingly moving. It is the work of a playwright who is forging a real voice . . . Its rendering of the shared language of loved ones illustrates how families can remain intimate even when they are in shards. Its depiction of a working-class America that is unable to dream of anything beyond enduring is as sincerely sad a commentary on our culture as I've seen in recent memory. And its fear for young people is, unfortunately, deeply convincing."

    He explores the queasy relationships between life and art, love and estrangement, and the bane that is American identity drift, with unsparing but compassionate candor.” –Misha Berson, Seattle Times“Margulies’s remarkable gift of building characterization through realistic dialogue is undiminished. Full of aching ruefulness that underlies the comedy, Brooklyn Boy’s scenes are written with precision and humor. The play isn’t about Brooklyn, nor is it about a boy—it’s about a man without a home.” –Don Shirley, Los Angeles TimesThis new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dinner with Friends follows the career of Eric Weiss, a writer whose novel hits the bestseller list the same time his life begins to unravel. His wife is out the door, his father is in the hospital, and his childhood friend thinks he has sold himself to the devil. A funny and emotionally rich look at family, friends and fame.Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends. The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. In addition to his adaptation of God of Vengeance, his many plays include Collected Stories, The Country House, Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment, The Loman Family Picnic, What’s Wrong with This Picture? and Time Stands Still. Mr. Margulies currently lives with his wife and their son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.

    But it's a dark and stormy night and his sister has a secret.I know it can't be that bad, whatever was the reason this guy left here in such a hurry...In a Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil LaBute premiered at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, in March 2011.

    Someone - or something - is leaving bite marks in the avocados, Clay and Kelly's little daughter has an itch, and Carol can't remember who played Gandhi. This work takes a look at phoney liberal values.

    This short play by Caryl Churchill was an entry in the 1997 London International Festival of Theatre.

    Albee there is a theme beneath the surface, in this case the corruption of money and the rottenness of this bigoted exurbia where conformity to its illiberal standards and its hypocritical show of respectability is all that counts. The scene is the suburban home of Jenny and Richard, beautifully played by Barbara Bel Geddes and Barry Nelson. The only thing that seems to stand in the way of their happiness is a lack of money. The action starts in an entertaining comedy of manners style. Then abruptly there enters a Mrs. Toothe in the menacing and fascinating person of Beatrice Straight who offers Jenny the opportunity to make more money than they have ever had, to buy a greenhouse and all the other luxuries that they require for their garden and their lives. Richard's realization that their newfound money is being earned by his wife's whoring comes almost simultaneously with the return of their fourteen-year-old son from school and a champagne cocktail party which they are giving to impress their country club friends. As a result, his horror, disgust and rage has to be kept under wraps in order to keep up essential appearances until tragedy strikes, and Richard realizes that the assembled wives are all involved and their husbands are aware and condoning." More than that, they are prepared not merely to justify but defend the ends through which their means are attained and the devastated Richard, left in agonized despair by the ironic events that charge the final moments of the play, must face the fact of his own share in their communal guilt.

    In Eyes for Consuela, based on Octavio Paz’s classic story “The Blue Bouquet,” a vacationing American encounters a knife-toting Mexican bandit on a gruesome quest. And in When the World Was Green, cowritten with Joseph Chaikin, a journalist in search of her father interviews an old man who resolved a generations-old vendetta by murdering the wrong man. Together, these plays form a powerful trio from an enduring force in American theater.

    Only two characters appear on stage; Hughie, the third and most important one, is dead. It is Hughie's innocence, gullibility, and need to believe in a far more exciting existence than he ever knew which gives some kind of purpose to the shabby lives of the two who remain. O'Neill here again writes of the defeated and the courage that comes by way of illusions reflecting still other illusions in a world that needs them all.Hughie, the only surviving manuscript from a series of eight one-act monologue plays that O'Neill planned in 1940, was completed in 1941.

    At first, the new doctor cures anything

    The first of the plays, The Real Inspector Hound, is the longer of the two; here the author has created a looking glass comedy of great suspense and intrigue about two drama critics. The second play, After Magritte, is 'a surrealist comedy in detective form-or is it a comedy in surrealist form? A husband and wife argue whether the figure they saw in the street was a one-legged football player with the ball under his arm, or a man in pajamas with a tortoise under his arm. The play shows that Stoppard is as amusing and clever as always.'