What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, “The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It’s about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It’s about compassion, but it shows insensitivity.” In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson’s writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

    Symbolist poets and writers — Stéphane Mallarmé and Maurice Maeterlinck among them — defended the play's literary brilliance. Beyond its notoriety, the drama's haunting poetic imagery, biblical cadences, and febrile atmosphere have earned it a reputation as a masterpiece of the Aesthetic movement of fin de siècle England.Written originally in French in 1892, this sinister tale of a woman scorned and her vengeance was translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas. The play inspired some of Aubrey Beardsley's finest illustrations, and an abridged version served as the text for Strauss' renowned opera of the same name. This volume reprints the complete text of the first English edition, published in 1894, and also includes "A Note on Salomé" by Robert Ross, Wilde's lifelong friend and literary executor. Students, lovers of literature and drama, and admirers of Oscar Wilde and his remarkable literary gifts will rejoice in this inexpensive edition.

    He keeps "one up, one down and one pending" until unexpected schedule changes bring all three to Paris and Bernard's apartment at the same time.

    For each, the chaos of what has come before brings with it a painful legacy.“I have Stayed. I have Stayed – I have Stayed for as long as I possibly can.”

    It was only when Max Ophuls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde. Now David Hare has reset these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day, with a cast of two actors playing a succession of characters whose sexual lives enmesh like a daisy chain. The Blue Room is a meditation on men and women, sex and social class, actors and the theater. With deft insight about the gap between the sexes, The Blue Room takes the treacherous Freudian subject of projection and desire and reinvents it in a bittersweet landscape that is both eternal and completely up-to-date.

    In James Goldman’s classic play The Lion in Winter, domestic turmoil rises to an art form. Keenly self-aware and motivated as much by spite as by any sense of duty, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine maneuver against each other to position their favorite son in line for succession. By imagining the inner lives of Henry, Eleanor, and their sons, John, Geoffrey, and Richard, Goldman created the quintessential drama of family strife and competing ambitions, a work that gives visceral, modern-day relevance to the intrigues of Angevin England. Combining keen historical and psychological insight with delicious, mordant wit, the stage play has become a touchstone of today’s theater scene, and Goldman’s screenplay for the 1968 film adaptation won him an Academy Award. Told in “marvelously articulate language, with humor that bristles and burns” (Los Angeles Times), The Lion in Winter is the rare play that bursts into life on the printed page.

    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.

    This new edition contains the updated book and lyrics from the smash Broadway production starring Neil Patrick Harris of John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s landmark American musical.

    After the murder of her daughter Iphegenia by her husband Agamemnon, Klytaimestra exacts a mother’s revenge, murdering Agamemnon and his mistress, Kassandra. Displeased with Klytaimestra’s actions, Apollo calls on her son, Orestes, to avenge his father’s death with the help of his sister Elektra. In the end, Orestes, driven mad by the Furies for his bloody betrayal of family, and Elektra are condemned to death by the people of Argos, and must justify their actions—signaling a call to change in society, a shift from the capricious governing of the gods to the rule of manmade law.Carson’s accomplished rendering combines elements of contemporary vernacular with the traditional structures and rhetoric of Greek tragedy, opening up the plays to a modern audience. In addition to its accessibility, the wit and dazzling morbidity of her prose sheds new light on the saga for scholars. Anne Carson’s Oresteia is a watershed translation, a death-dance of vengeance and passion not to be missed.

    Ever been racially slurred in the sack? Ever been subjected to strangers yelling at you at 3am about the most intimate details of your life? Ever been to New York? Six characters from wildly different backgrounds make love, war and hysteria late one night in the cultural, sexual and generational smorgasbord that is Manhattan.

    With Steffy, his sometime paramour, at his side, Herb decides to take another stab at fatherhood and hopefully this time, get it right.

    Almost one hundred years later, a groom-to-be prepares for his gay wedding.Queers celebrates a century of evolving social attitudes and political milestones in British gay history, as seen through the eyes of eight individuals.Poignant and personal, funny, tragic and riotous, these eight monologues for male and female performers cover major events - such as the Wolfenden Report of 1957, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the debate over the age of consent - through deeply affecting and personal rites-of-passage stories.Curated by Mark Gatiss, the monologues were commissioned to mark the anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men over the age of twenty-one. They were broadcast on BBC Four in 2017, directed and produced by Gatiss, and starring Alan Cumming, Rebecca Front, Ian Gelder, Kadiff Kirwan, Russell Tovey, Gemma Whelan, Ben Whishaw and Fionn Whitehead. They were staged at The Old Vic in London.This volume includes:The Man on the Platform by Mark GatissThe Perfect Gentleman by Jackie CluneSafest Spot in Town by Keith JarrettMissing Alice by Jon BradfieldI Miss the War by Matthew BaldwinMore Anger by Brian FillisA Grand Day Out by Michael DennisSomething Borrowed by Gareth McLean

    But to the ancient Greeks, the use of heroic legend, the tragic diction and meters, and the tragic actors would have defined it as pure tragedy, the happy ending notwithstanding. While not one of his deep dramatic works, the play is Euripidean in many respects, above all in its recurrent theme of escape, symbolized in the rescue of Iphigeneia by Artemis, to whom she was about to be sacrificed. Richmond Lattimore--who has been called the dean of American translators--has translated Iphigeneia in Tauris with skill and subtlety, revealing it as one of the most delicately written and beautifully contrived of the Euripidean romances.

    The three characters are the eponymous designated mourner, Jack; his wife, Judy; and Judy's erudite father, Howard. Despite a passionate bond with her father, Judy is drawn to Jack, whose taste in cultural forms follows a disturbing path. When Jack abandons both Judy and Howard, he continues his riveting societal free-fall into a world of gleeful savagery. Other works by Wallace Shawn are "A Thought in Three Parts," "Our Late Night," "Marie and Bruce," "My Dinner With Andre" (co-written with Andre Gregory), "Aunt Dan and Lemon," and "The Fever."

    Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longest-running comedy in British Theatre for years. Plotted around the central role of one of Coward's best loved characters, a medium Madame Arcati (originally played by Margaret Rutherford). Coward's play is a spirited charade about a man with 2 wives, one dead and another alive.