Book picks similar to
subUrbia by Eric Bogosian
plays
drama
theatre
fiction
Crimes of the Heart
Beth Henley - 1982
Set in a small Mississippi town, the play examines the lives of three quirky sisters who have gathered back home. During the course of the week the sisters unearth grudges, criticize each other, reminisce about their family life, and attempt to understand their mother's suicide years earlier.
Lost in Yonkers
Neil Simon - 1990
Debuting at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in 1990, Lost in Yonkers went on to win four Tony Awards, including Best Play, as well as the Pulitzer Prize, and tells the moving drama about the cruelties and painful memories that scar a family.It is New York, 1942. After the death of their mother, two young brothers are sent to stay with their formidable grandmother for the longest ten months of their lives. Grandmother Kurnitz is a one-woman German front—a refugee and a widow who has steeled her heart against the world. Her coldness and intolerance have crippled her own children: the boys' father has no self-esteem . . . their Aunt Gert has an embarrassing speech impediment . . . their Uncle Louie is a small-time gangster . . . and their Aunt Bella has the mentality of a child. But it is Bella's hunger for affection and her refusal to be denied love that saves the boys—and that leads to an unforgettable, wrenching confrontation with her mother. Filled with laughter, tears, and insight, Lost in Yonkers is yet another heartwarming testament to Neil Simon's talent.
Look Back in Anger
John Osborne - 1957
He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England.First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life."
Venus in Fur
David Ives - 2011
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.
The History Boys
Alan Bennett - 2004
A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he's a fool.In Alan Bennett's classic play, staff room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.The History Boys premiered at the National in May 2004.
Marisol and Other Plays
José Rivera - 1997
Though critics reflexively class his work as “magical realism,” Rivera’s extravagant, original imagery always serves to illuminate the gritty realities and touching longings of our daily lives. Also includes: Each Day Dies with Sleep and Cloud Tectonics.
Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays
Steve Martin - 1994
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.
The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O'Neill - 1946
He completed The Iceman Cometh in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a modest run in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O'Neill’s dark play. In the half century since, The Iceman Cometh has gained in stature. Kevin Spacey and James Earl Jones have played Hickey. The Iceman Cometh focuses on a group of alcoholics who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.
Endgame & Act Without Words
Samuel Beckett - 1957
"Endgame, " originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.
Travesties
Tom Stoppard - 1975
Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholy riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.
Dead Man's Cell Phone
Sarah Ruhl - 2008
A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man—with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by playwright Sarah Ruhl, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House. A work about how we memorialize the dead—and how that remembering changes us—it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.
Boy Gets Girl
Rebecca Gilman - 2000
When Theresa goes on an awkward blind date with a friend of a friend, she sees no reason to continue the relationship--but the man, an attractive fellow named Tony, thinks otherwise. While Theresa is at first annoyed yet flattered by his continuing attention, her attitude gradually changes to one of fear and fury when he starts violently to menace her and those around her.In brilliantly delineating the kind of terror a woman in full control of her life feels when everything around her suddenly seems to be a threat, Gilman probes the dark side of relationships in the 1990s with the rich insight and compelling characterizations that have distinguished her earlier plays and made her one of the most exciting young playwrights working today.