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.

Chicago


Fred Ebb - 1981
    In roaring twenties Chicago, chorine Roxie Hart murders a faithless lover and convinces her hapless husband Amos to take the rap...until he finds out he's been duped and turns on Roxie. Convicted and sent to death row, Roxie and another Merry Murderess Velma Kelly, vie for the spotlight and the headlines, ultimately joining forces in search of the American Dream fame, fortune and acquittal. This sharp edged satire features a dazzling score that sparked immortal staging by Bob Fosse. 'A pulse racing revival that flies us right into musical heaven.-The New York Times Wildly entertaining...[with a] dazzling score.-New York Daily News

Plays 1: Shopping and Fucking / Faust is Dead / Handbag / Some Explicit Polaroids


Mark Ravenhill - 2001
    "Ravenhill has more to say, and says it more refreshingly and wittily, than any other playwright of his generation"—Time Out "There are few stage authors writing more interestingly than Mark Ravenhill … He is - it is now yet more evident - a searing, intelligent, disturbing sociologist with a talent for satirical dialogue and a flair for sexual sensationalism."—Financial Times Shopping and Fucking: "is a darkly humorous play for today's twenty-somethings … a real coup de theatre"—Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard Faust: "…an intelligent and witty reappropriation of the legend … alive, pertinent and disturbing"—Michael Coveney, Observer Handbag: "…combines urban grit with sly wit, and reveals Mark Ravenhill as a writer of real daring" —Daily Telegraph Some Explicit Polaroids: "laudably ambitious, pulsates with energy … very funny"—Financial Times

The School for Scandal


Richard Brinsley Sheridan - 1777
    Often referred to as a "comedy of manners", "The School for Scandal" is one Sheridan's most performed plays and a classic of English comedic drama.

Rapture, Blister, Burn


Gina Gionfriddo - 2014
    Men are exfoliating. It's all jumbled: you can't read the signs.Can any woman have it all? After university Catherine and Gwen chose opposite paths: Catherine built a career as a rock-star academic, while Gwen built a home with a husband and children. Decades later, unfulfilled in opposite ways, each woman covets the other's life, and a dangerous game begins as each tries to claim the other's territory. Sparks fly and the age-old question arises: what do women really want?Gina Gionfriddo dissects modern gender politics in this breathtakingly witty and virtuosic comedy, set in a small New England college town. Traversing the experiences of women across the generations, this play is a hugely entertaining exploration of a new style of feminism, ripe for the twenty-first century.Rapture, Blister, Burn was commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, where it premiered, with funds from the Harold and Mim Steinberg Charitable Trust. It received its UK premiere at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in January 2014.

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.

Bus Stop


William Inge - 1955
    All roads are blocked, and four or five weary travelers are going to have to hole up until morning. Cherie, a nightclub chanteuse in a sparkling gown and a seedy fur-trimmed jacket, is the passenger with most to worry about. She's been pursued, made love to and finally kidnapped by a twenty-one-year-old cowboy with a ranch of his own and the romantic methods of an unusually headstrong bull. The belligerent cowhand is right behind her, ready to sling her over his shoulder and carry her, alive and kicking, all the way to Montana. Even as she's ducking out from under his clumsy but confident embraces, and screeching at him fiercely to shut him up, she pauses to furrow her forehead and muse, "Somehow deep inside of me I got a funny feeling I'm gonna end up in Montana " As a counterpoint to the main romance, the proprietor of the cafe and the bus driver at last find time to develop a friendship of their own; a middle-age scholar comes to terms with himself; and a young girl who works in the cafe also gets her first taste of romance.

A Bright New Boise


Samuel D. Hunter - 2011
    Hunter's A Bright New Boise is a earnest comedy about the meager profits of modern faith. In the bleak, corporate break room of a craft store in Idaho, someone is summoning The Rapture. Will, who has fled his rural hometown after a scandal at his Evangelical church, comes to the Hobby Lobby, not only f

Happy Birthday, Wanda June


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1970
    When the great hunter Harold Ryan--missing and presumed dead--returns from Africa after eight years, his wife is aghast and his son is enchanted. Vonnegut's attack on phony heroes and male swagger uses some of the funniest dialogue ever created for the stage.

H.M.S. Pinafore


W.S. Gilbert - 1878
    Popular from its first performance in 1878, this work contains some of Gilbert's most clever flashes of wit and a number of Sullivan's most charming melodies. Music scholars Carl Simpson and Ephraim Hammett Jones have drawn on original manuscripts and early sources to produce handsome, newly engraved plates closest to Gilbert and Sullivan's original intentions. This authoritative and inexpensive edition is sure to delight Gilbert and Sullivan fans, operetta lovers, musicians, and students.

Chewing Gum Dreams


Michaela Coel - 2013
    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

Ubu Roi


Alfred Jarry - 1896
    The audience was scandalized by this revolutionary satire, developed from a schoolboy farce, which began with a four-letter word, defied all the traditions of the stage, and ridiculed the established values of bourgeois society.Barbara Wright’s witty translation of this riotous work is accompanied with drawings by Franciszka Themerson. Two previously untranslated essays in which Jarry explains his theories of the drama have also been included.

To Be or Not To Be: A Chooseable-Path Adventure


Ryan North - 2013
    Play as Hamlet, Ophelia, or King Hamlet--if you want to die on the first page and play as a ghost. It's pretty awesome! Readers can follow Yorick skull markers to stick closely to Shakespeare's plot, or go off-script and explore alternative possibilities filled with puzzles and humor.Each ending in the book is accompanied by a full-color, full-page illustration by one of the 65 most excellent artists working today, so each rereading yields new surprises and rewards. Ryan's prose is, as always, colloquial and familiar but full of clever references, vivid imagination, and only the most choice of jokes. Inventive devices like a book-within-a-book (to mirror Hamlet's play-within-a-play) take full advantage of the gamebook medium and liven up the original story for even the most disinterested of Shakespeare readers!To Be or Not to Be became a sensation when it launched: over 15,000 people backed the book in just one month, and it remains the number-one most funded publishing project ever on Kickstarter.com.To be, or not to be: that is the adventure!

Hurlyburly & Those the River Keeps


David Rabe - 1995
    This edition contains the definitive versions of these works, a foreword in which Rabe examines the interwoven relationship of the plays, and an afterword in which he discusses the process of their construction.

Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feelin' So Sad


Arthur Kopit - 1960
    Wealthy, overbearing Madame Rosepettle with her stuttering, awkward son Jonathan at her heels, arrives at a posh hotel with a man-eating tropical plant, pirahna fish and coffin in tow. Rosalie, a voluptuous babysitter from the couple next door "who never come home" attempts to seduce Jonathan and proves a formidable opponent to Madame herself.