His wife despises him for his failures and finds consolation with Frank, a younger teacher. She openly taunts Andrew while Frank watches with disgust and shame. The wife knows she has lost Frank - but even more bitter is the realization he's now Andrew's best friend.

    Jacobs Theater, New York City, in March 2009.

    The scene is Mrs. Orcutt's boarding house, where the hopes and ambitions of sixteen young women are revealed in scenes of entertaining comedy. Contrasted with this are the cases of the girl without talent and the elderly actress whose days are over. The central plot has to do with courageous Terry Randall, who fights against discouragement to a position in the theater where we are sure she will conquer. One of her fellow aspirants gives up in despair, one gets married, and one goes into pictures, but Terry, with the help of idealistic David Kingsley, sticks to her guns.

    But as Moses Hadas writes in his introduction to this volume, 'His true claim upon our attention is as the most brilliant and artistic and thoughtful wit our world has known.' Includes The Acharnians, The Birds, The Clouds, Ecclesiazusae, The Frogs, The Knights, Lysistrata, Peace, Plutus, Thesmophoriazusae, and The Wasps.

    Lyly’s Endymion (1588) represents his famous Euphuistic style at its best and also gives us vintage Lyly as courtier and dramatist. In this love comedy, Lyly retells an ancient legend of the prolonged sleep of the man with whom the moon (Cynthia) fell in love. The fable is piquantly relevant to Queen Elizabeth and her exasperated if adoring courtiers. This edition makes a new and compelling argument for the relevance of Endymion to the threat of the Spanish Armada invasion of 1588 and to the role of the Earl of Oxford in England’s politics of that troubled decade. Full commentary is provided on every aspect of the play, including its philosophical allegory about the relation of the moon to mortal life on earth.

    Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, the play is set in Victorian England's Soho but satirizes the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic through its wry love story of Polly Peachum and "Mack the Knife" Macheath. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, it became a popular hit throughout the Western world.Commissioned and authorized by the Brecht estate, Arcade's definitive edition contains the acclaimed translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett that was first staged at the York Theatre Royal and subsequently at Lincoln Center in New York. Willett and Manheim, the joint editors of Brecht's complete dramatic work in English, also provide Brecht's own notes and discarded songs, as well as extensive editorial commentary on the genesis of his play.

    Friendship. Aaron, Candice, sex and Connor Jones. Chewing Gum Dreams is a one-woman play that recalls those last days of innocence before adulthood.Written and performed by Michaela Coel who spent her childhood in Hackney, London, Chewing Gum Dreams won the 2012 Alfred Fagon Award."Coel is by turns casually cruel, hilariously funny, naïve, wise and vulnerable. Her play tackles some difficult themes, including sexual assault, violence, and underachievement across generations…a serious new talent." Londonist"An engrossing, engaging and compelling one-woman show... nothing short of virtuosic." What's On Stage"A promising, resilient artist." Ché Walker

    It finds in the lives of Maggie, her family and her neighbours not only all the tragedy that appalling housing, massive unemployment and grinding poverty can produce, but alo a rich vein of comedy - the sense of the ridiculous, the need for a good laugh.

    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.

    These “seven stories” lead to a charming and surprising ending.Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

    legal system. The play centers on Juror Eight, who is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal prejudices or biases. Reginald Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture to form of them—and of America, at its best and worst.   After the critically acclaimed teleplay aired in 1954, this landmark American drama went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation. More recently, Twelve Angry Men had a successful, and award-winning, run on Broadway.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    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.

    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.

    Recommended for all collections." - Choice

    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.