Louis in the mid-thirties––a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams’s most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics––the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams’s unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."

    Set in gossipy late 18th-century England, with a fresh female voice, the play is full of humor, emotional depth, and bold theatricality. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY examines our reactions, both reasonable and ridiculous, to societal pressures. When reputation is everything, how do you follow your heart?

    Booklet bought for a college class. No internal marking. Looks "like new". Please ask if questions.

    A masterful poet of the downtrodden, his plays portray life on New York's hardscrabble streets in a manner both tender and unflinching, while continually exploring the often startling gulf between who we are and how we perceive ourselves. Gathered in this volume is his current off-Broadway hit, Our Lady of 121st Street, a comic portrait of the graduates of a Harlem Catholic school reunited at the funeral of a beloved teacher, along with his two previous plays: the philosophical jailhouse drama Jesus Hopped the A Train and In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings, an Iceman Cometh for the Giuliani era that looks at the effect of Times Square's gentrification on its less desirable inhabitants.

    Jon's new film is being shown at a festival in Lansing, Michigan, and Vince has come from Oakland to see it. Over the course of the evening, Vince finally gets Jon to admit that ten years ago he date-raped Amy Randall, a girl whom they both dated in high school only then to reveal that he's taped their entire conversation. And not only that, he's invited Amy to have dinner with them that night. Beneath its suspenseful, high-stakes surface, TAPE examines questions of motive, memory, truth and perception.

    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.

    Norman, who works in a doughnut shop and is unable to resist the lure of the sweet pastries, takes great pride in the huge bundle of keys that dangles from his waist; Lucien P. Smith has the mind of a five-year-old but imagines that he is able to read and comprehend the weighty books he lugs about; Arnold, the ringleader of the group, is a hyperactive, compulsive chatterer, who suffers from deep-seated insecurities and a persecution complex; while Barry, a brilliant schizophrenic who is devastated by the unfeeling rejection of his brutal father, fantasizes that he is a golf pro. Mingled with scenes from the daily lives of these four, where "little things" sometimes become momentous (and often very funny), are moments of great poignancy when, with touching effectiveness, we are reminded that the handicapped, like the rest of us, want only to love and laugh and find some meaning and purpose in the brief time that they, like their more fortunate brothers, are allotted on this earth.

    Moving from street corner to living room, from bedroom to kitchen, we meet the inhabitants of young, middle-aged, and old, glimpsing their socially and emotionally wretched lives, in this sharp, sad, funny, and angry play.

    "You Got Older" is a tender and darkly comic new play about family, illness, and cowboys - and how to remain standing when everything you know comes crashing down around you.

    Poetry. Performance Studies. African & African American Studies. California Interest. Hybrid Genre. Winner of the 2016 Relentless Award from the American Playwriting Foundation. Introduction by Dawn Lundy Martin. Aleshea Harris' IS GOD IS is a classic revenge tale about two sisters that blends tragedy, typography, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk. In this necessary new play, emotions are laid bare through gaps in language and characters are a window into the canon as well as our own broken times. A rigorous new work that unearths our deepest fears about humanity and who we think we are in relation to ourselves and the divine.--Dawn Lundy Martin Family, as the old tragedians knew, is our first country. Therefore, it's the earth from which we forge our first weapons, the fields of our first wars, the very turf over which we fight. With IS GOD IS, Aleshea Harris audaciously scours tragedy down with the rough edge of a rock. To read this merciless play is to get blood in your eye--and in Harris' sure grip, you'll recall that blood washes and stains, can run hot or cold, means both violence and family.--Douglas Kearney 3 Hole Press is a small press bringing new audiences to new plays in printed formats. The Press publishes titles that expand notions of what a play is, the possibilities that emerge for drama on the page, and the connection between plays and other mediums. Interdisciplinary by design, these books belong outside the drama section.

    Using the format of an end-of-term play, the new drama teacher's progress through two terms of recalcitrant classes, synical colleagues and obstructive caretakers is reviewed. Disillutioned, he departs for a safer private school.

    Laugh with the actors, tap your feet to the music, and turn to your neighbor.

    [MacIvor is a writer with an angular sense of humour and an uncommon knack for probing basic elements and truths of human behaviour." ?Vit Wagner, Toronto StarThis Is a Play is a hilarious postmodern romp through the interior lives of actors in a bad play."Ingenious, whimsical, a lyrical lunacy in the writing, This Is A Play is a theatre experience comedy you might associate with Tom Stoppard." ?Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

    Winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Playwright, David Lindsay-Abaire's Kimberly-Akimbo focuses, with uncanny depth and quirky wit, on a sixteen-year-old girl suffering from a disease that causes her body to age nearly five times faster than it should.

    He is sent to Italy by a wealthy financier to try and coax home the rich man's son. In the process Ripley becomes both attracted and seduced, finding the murder the only way to deal with the situation. From that point Ripley tries to cover up his crime. Patricia Highsmith's beguiling tale of morality and amorality is given a dramatic rendering by contemporary dramatist Phyllis Nagy, who knew Highsmith in her later years in Paris."Each play I see by Phyllis Nagy confirms me in the belief that she is the finest playwright to have emerged in the 1990s" (Financial Times)