Bitter rivalries. Jealousy. Betrayals. Star-crossed lovers. When you consider all these plot points, it's pretty surprising William Shakespeare didn't write Mean Girls. But now fans can treat themselves to the epic drama--and heroic hilarity--of the classic teen comedy rendered with the wit, flair, and iambic pentameter of the Bard. Our heroine Cady disguises herself to infiltrate the conniving Plastics, falls for off-limits Aaron, struggles with her allegiance to newfound friends Damian and Janis, and stirs up age-old vendettas among the factions of her high school. Best-selling author Ian Doescher brings his signature Shakespearean wordsmithing to this cult classic beloved by generations of teen girls and other fans. Now, on the 15th anniversary of its release, Mean Girls is a recognized cultural phenomenon, and it's more than ready for an Elizabethan makeover.

    It premiered in London, in 1980 and won the Society for West End Theatres (SWET) award for Best Comedy of the Year. It was made into a highly successful film with Michael Caine and Julie Walters and won the 1983 BAFTA award for Best Film.Commentary and notes by Steve Lewis.

    She meets and joins up with Lloyd Bophtelophti, a true "original" who has changed his name to avoid alimony payments and who now lives with a paraplegic named Pootie (who also pretends to be deaf in order to get double disability). Thus begins a series of picaresque escapades involving numerous psychiatrists, a TV game show, and, eventually, an ill-fated reunion with her husband. Filled with bizarre characters and events, the play reflects the fractured lifestyles which have become the norm for so many in our tenuous times.

    Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this powerful drama of ideas, Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society, and his theory of Creative Evolution. As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction, this is "the first great twentieth-century English play" and remains a classic exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes.

    She has access to drugs. They are Martha's. Henry is preparing for art college. He has access to alcohol from Martha. Martha controls their lives. Martha is their mother. "That Face" won the TMA Award 2007 for Best New Play. Polly Stenham received both the Charles Wintour Award 2007 and the Critics' Circle Award 2008 for Most Promising Playwright.

    In doing so, England's reigning man of letters set in motion a series of events that would culminate in his ruin and imprisonment. For within a year the bewildered Wilde himself was on trial for acts of gross indecency and, implicitly--for a vision of art that outraged Victorian propriety. Expertly interweaving courtroom testimony with excerpts from Wilde's writings and the words of his contemporaries, Gross Indecency unveils its subject in all his genius and human frailty, his age in all its complacency and repression. The result is a play that will be read and studied for decades to come.

    At the end of a long day in which the actresses Thomas auditions fail to impress him, in walks Vanda, very late and seemingly clueless, but she convinces him to give her a chance. As they perform scenes from Thomas’s play, and Vanda the actor and Vanda the character gradually take control of the audition, the lines between writer, actor, director, and character begin to blur. Vanda is acting . . . or perhaps she sees in Thomas a masochist, one who desires fantasy in “real life” while writing fantasies for a living.   An exploration of gender roles and sexuality, in which desire twists and turns in on itself, Venus in Fur is also a witty, unsettling look at the art of acting—onstage and off.

    Sweeping all major theater awards, including the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for drama, as well as four 1996 Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Book, and Best Score for a Musical, Rent captures the heart and spirit of a generation, refleting it onstage through the emotion of its stirring words and music, and the energy of its young cast. Now, for the first time, Rent comes to life on the page -- through vivid color photographs, the full libretto, and an utterly compelling behind-the-scenes oral history of the show's creation. Here is the exclusive and absolutely complete companion to Rent, told in the voices of the extraordinary talent behind its success: the actors, the director, the producers, and the librettist and composer himself, Jonathan Larson, whose sudden death, on the eve of the first performance, has made Rent's life-affirming message all the more poignant.

    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.

    Dowd starts to introduce his imaginary friend Harvey, a six and a half foot rabbit, to guests at a dinner party, his sister, Veta, has seen as much of his eccentric behavior as she can tolerate. She decides to have him committed to a sanitarium to spare her daughter, Myrtle Mae, and their family, from future embarrassment. Problems arise, however, when Veta herself is mistakenly assumed to be on the fringe of lunacy when she explains to doctors that years of living with Elwood's hallucination have caused her to see Harvey also! The doctors commit Veta instead of Elwood, but when the truth comes out, the search is on for Elwood and his invisible companion. When he shows up at the sanitarium looking for his lost friend Harvey it seems that the mild-mannered Elwood's delusion has had a strange influence on more than one of the doctors. Only at the end does Veta realize that maybe Harvey isn't so bad after all.

    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.

    The gaucheness, the rush of excitement, and the inarticulate tenderness of young love are beautifully captured in writing of great truth and delicacy. Only the most irrational of homophobes could fail to be moved by it."—Daily Telegraph"Deliciously upbeat ... seldom has there been a play which so exquisitely and joyously depicts what it's like to be sixteen, in the first flush of love and full of optimism. Truly a most unusual and beautiful thing."—Guardian"An unfakeably truthful portrait of adolescent self-discovery, showing sensitivity and fun pushing up like wild flowers through the concrete crevices of a Thamesmead estate. This is the most heartening working-class comedy since A Taste of Honey."—Independent on Sunday

    As a young woman is diagnosed with a mysterious new illness, she and her beloved brother flee to Europe in search of a cure and to escape the pain and uncertainty of the future. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Jenny Bacon, Christopher Donahue and Jerry Saslow.

    He misses the routine of the academic year and has lost his appetite for research. His wife Winifred’s late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on his aged father who stubbornly refuses to leave the house he is patently unable to live in with safety.But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss — a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment, leading Desmond into mistakes, misunderstandings and follies. It might be comic for others, but for the deaf person himself, it is no joke. It is his deafness which inadvertently involves Desmond with a young woman whose wayward behaviour threatens to destabilize his life completely.

    . . [Mart] Crowley's point is about how the humor is shaped and defined by the pain."-The New York TimesThe Boys in the Band was the first commercially successful play to reveal gay life to mainstream America. Alyson is proud to release a special fortieth anniversary edition of the play, which includes an original preface by acclaimed writer Tony Kushner (Angels in America), along with previously unpublished photographs of Mart Crowley and the cast of the play/film.Mart Crowley's other plays include the autobiographical A Breeze from the Gulf (1973) and The Men from the Boys (2002).