Book picks similar to
Spinning Into Butter by Rebecca Gilman
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drama
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Detroit
Lisa D'Amour - 2011
The fledgling friendship soon veers out of control, shattering the fragile hold that newly unemployed Ben and burgeoning alcoholic Mary have on their way of life—with unexpected comic consequences. Detroit is a fresh, offbeat look at what happens when we dare to open ourselves up to something new. After premiering at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre last year to rave reviews, Lisa D'Amour's brilliant and timely play moves to Broadway this fall.
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf
Ntozake ShangeNtozake Shange - 1975
Brown.From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the 20th century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Now with new introductions by Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown, and one poem not included in the original, here is the complete text of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
Equus
Peter Shaffer - 1973
Through a psychiatrist's analysis of the events, Shaffer creates a chilling portrait of how materialism and convenience have killed our capacity for worship and passion and, consequently, our capacity for pain. Rarely has a playwrite created an atmosphere and situation that so harshly pinpoint the spiritual and mental decay of modern man.
Dinner with Friends
Donald Margulies - 2000
Through Margulies's flawless use of language and his ability to convey the truest of dialogue and characterization, we watch, as the two couples do, our closest friends going through a wrenching breakup. Not only does he create vivid detail of a marriage in decline, he also brilliantly depicts the couple's closest friends, and how this new mirror to their own marriage sends them through a whirlwind of raw emotion and self-reflection.Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends. The play received numerous awards, including the American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award, the Dramatists Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award and a Drama Desk nomination, and has been produced all over the United States and around the world. In addition to his adaptation of God of Vengeance, his many plays include Collected Stories, The Country House, Sight Unseen, The Model Apartment, The Loman Family Picnic, What’s Wrong with This Picture? and Time Stands Still. Mr. Margulies currently lives with his wife and their son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University.
The Revolutionists
NOT A BOOK
Playwright Olympe De Gouge, assassin Charlotte Corday, and former queen (and fan of ribbons) Marie Antoinette, and Haitian rebel Marianne Angelle hang out, murder Marat, loose their heads, and try to beat back the extremist insanity in revolutionary Paris. This grand and dream-tweaked comedy is about violence and legacy, feminism and terrorism, art and how we actually go about changing the world. It a true story. Or total fiction. Or a play about a play. Or a raucous resurrection that ends in a song and a scaffold.
The Autumn Garden
Lillian Hellman - 1951
All of them are in one way or another frustrated and unhappy. Most of them are under the illusion that some day the things from which they suffer will be removed and they will be once more at peace. But when they come to see themselves, they realize that man is the sum of his past life, that they are incapable of any real revolt against their past, and that what they have made of themselves in earlier years is what they are when age approaches. Nor are they tragic figures. All of them are troubled average people, human, commonplace but they are studied with great understanding and a touch of intelligently unsentimental compassion."
The Elephant Man
Bernard Pomerance - 1979
A horribly deformed young man, who has been a freak attraction in traveling side shows, is found abandoned and helpless and is admitted for observation to Whitechapel, a prestigious London hospital. Under the care of a famous young doctor, who educates him and introduces him to London society, Merrick changes from a sensational object of pity to the urbane and witty favorite of the aristocracy and literati. But his belief that he can become a man like any other is a dream never to be realized.
The Young Man from Atlanta
Horton Foote - 1995
Will and Lily Dale Kidder try to hold onto their beliefs about their son's life and death and the possibilities for their own lives, but both are dealt a shattering blow by the young man of the title, a friend of their son's who never appears in the play. Foote's pitch-perfect characters and sensitive eye for interpersonal relationships continue to place him at the top of playwrights working today.
The Thanksgiving Play
Larissa FastHorse - 2019
How can this wildly diverse quartet—separated by cultural chasms and vastly different perspectives on history—navigate a complicated, hilarious thicket of privilege, representation, and of course school district regulations? The schools are waiting, and the pageant must go on!
Machinal
Sophie Treadwell - 1928
Among her assignments was the sensational murder involving Ruth Snyder, who with her lover, Judd Gray, had murdered her husband and gone to the electric chair. Out of this came MACHINAL, a powerful expressionist drama about the dependent status of women and the living hell of a loveless marriage. Successfully premiered on Broadway in 1928 with Clark Gable as the lover, the play was seen in London two years later, provoked a sensation in Tairov's version in Moscow in 1933, and was then largely forgotten until revivals in New York and London in the 1990s.
The Hot L Baltimore
Lanford Wilson - 1973
As the action unfolds, the residents, ranging from young to old, from the defiant to the resigned, meet and talk and interact with each other during the course of one day. The drama is of passing events in their lives, of everyday encounters and of the human comedy, with conversations often overlapping into a contrapuntal musical flow. In the resulting mosaic each character emerges clearly and perceptively defined, and the sum total of what they are-or wish they were-becomes a poignant, powerful call to America to recover lost values and to restore itself in its own and the world's eyes.
Dutchman & The Slave
Amiri Baraka - 1964
They illuminate as with a flash of lightning a deadly serious problem--and they bring an eloquent and exceptionally powerful voice to the American theatre.Dutchman opened in New York City on March 24, 1964, to perhaps the most excited acclaim ever accorded an off-Broadway production and shortly thereafter received the Village Voice's Obie Award. The Slave, which was produced off-Broadway the following fall, continues to be the subject of heated critical controversy.
The Lion in Winter
James Goldman - 1966
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.