Someone - or something - is leaving bite marks in the avocados, Clay and Kelly's little daughter has an itch, and Carol can't remember who played Gandhi. This work takes a look at phoney liberal values.

    "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.

    His wife Edna takes a job to tide them over, then she too is sacked. Compounded by the air-pollution killing his plants, and with the walls of the apartment paper-thin, allowing him a constant earfull of his neighbors private lives things can't seem to get any worse...then he's robbed and his psychiatrist dies with $23,000 of his money. Mel does the only thing left for him to do-he has a nervous breakdown and it's the best thing that ever happened to him..."A gift for taking a grave subject and, without losing sight of its basic seriousness, treating it with hearty but sympathetic humor...A talent for writing a wonderful funny line...full of humor and intelligence. Fine fun."-New York Post "Creates an atmosphere of casual cataclysm, an everyday urban purgatory of copelessness from which laughter seems to be released like vapor from the city's manholes."-Time

    Several years later, the whole world is at war - including birds and animals. The girl has returned to her aunt to take refuge and begins to describe her journey: "There were piles of bodies and if you stopped to find out there was one killed by coffee or one killed by pins, they were killed by heroin, petrol, chainsaws, hairspray, bleach, foxgloves, the smell of smoke was where we were burning the grass that wouldn't serve..."

    When she reluctantly agrees to care for Addie, a young Native Alaskan girl, she discovers she must seek help from the family she’s kept at arm’s length for years, and returns to the big home on Looking Lake and all her memories there.Her sister Tillie, the gardener, the artist, still has unspoken questions about the teenage accident with Emerson that claimed her legs from the knee down. Their aging mother Eve spreads her joy for life indiscriminately and wonders how she could ever have failed her daughters. Their neighbor Henry, the handsome sculptor, has his own silent history with Emerson, and knows more than he’s telling about her husband’s suicide.And ten-year-old Addie has come into this house full of strangers, bringing her own grief over her mother's illness, and an uncanny ability to recognize the aches these grown-ups carry inside themselves. As the five come together, new alliances are forged and old secrets are forced to the surface, weaving together questions of identity, forgiveness, and the bravery it takes to open our true selves to the ones we love.

    Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. With contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story.

    Over the course of a single month, these unlikely roommates infuriate, bewilder, and ultimately reach each other. 4000 Miles looks at how two outsiders find their way in today's world.

    More than a mere set of guidelines, Thinking Like a Director details a technique that covers every facet of theatrical production, from first reading through final rehearsals. The key to directorial thinking, Bloom asserts, is a dual perspective--an ability to focus on both the internal lives of the play's characters and the external elements of the play's structure. In this illuminating, engaging, and accessible handbook, the art of dramatic interpretation and the craft of working with actors are integrated into a single, unified method.

    It provides scriptural solutions to life altering problems such as low self-esteem, abuse, and depression. Black Girls Don’t Cry frees us from the bondage of regrets, encourages us to drop the baggage from our past, and moves us forward towards a renewed strength in Christ.

    He will learn to face himself, to hide nothing from himself -- and to do so takes an insatiable curiosity about the human condition. from the Prologue Uta Hagen, one of the world's most renowned stage actresses, has also taught acting for more than forty years at the HB Studio in New York. Her first book, Respect for Acting, published in 1973, is still in print and has sold more than 150,000 copies. In her new book, A Challenge for the Actor, she greatly expands her thinking about acting in a work that brings the full flowering of her artistry, both as an actor and as a teacher. She raises the issue of the actor's goals and examines the specifics of the actor's techniques. She goes on to consider the actor's relationship to the physical and psychological senses. There is a brilliantly conceived section on the animation of the body and mind, of listening and talking, and the concept of expectation. But perhaps the most useful sections in this book are the exercises that Uta Hagen has created and elaborated to help the actor learn his craft. The exercises deal with developing the actor's physical destination in a role; making changes in the self serviceable in the creation of a character; recreating physical sensations; bringing the outdoors on stage; finding occupation while waiting; talking to oneself and the audience; and employing historical imagination. The scope and range of Uta Hagen here is extraordinary. Her years of acting and teaching have made her as finely seasoned an artist as the theatre has produced.

    Upon its publication in 1963, An Actor's Handbook quickly established itself as an essential guide for actors and directors. Culling key passages from Stanislavski's vast output, this book covers more than one hundred and fifty key concepts, among them 'Improvisation', 'External Technique', 'Magic If', 'Imaginary Objects', 'Discipline', 'What Is My System?' and 'Stage Fright'.This reissued, attractively packaged edition will be an essential book for any performer.

    But when he meets Sylvia, who is going deaf, he decides he finally wants to be heard. With excoriating dialogue and sharp, compassionate insights, Nina Raine crafts a penetrating play about belonging, family and the limitations of communication.Nominated for both the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Play, Tribes premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2011. Under the direction of David Cromer, the comic drama is currently receiving its North American premiere in New York City at Barrow Street Theatre through June 3, 2012.

    Her foils and rapt listeners are the other integral and re-imagined women of this Shakespeare tragedy: Emilia, Desdemona's servant and the wife of Iago, and Bianca, now a majestic whore of Cyprus. The reluctantly loyal Emilia pesters Desdemona about a military promotion for her husband. Her motive, however, is that he leave her a wealthy widow, preferably sooner than later. Bianca, now a street-wise, yet painfully naive prostitute, visits Desdemona thinking she is a very good friend and fellow hooker (at least one night a week). Bianca thinks the worst when she soon discovers that Desdemona knows intimate details of the life of her lover, Cassio. Though Desdemona has never been intimate with Cassio, her life is soon in danger when her husband, Othello, also suspects her of infidelity.

    In an unprecedented (for him) run of promiscuity, Ty has managed to impregnate three women in the span of one week: His ex-girlfriend, his 40-something married next-door neighbor, and his 18 year-old student. In this edgy comedy by playwright Rajiv Joseph, Ty's problems illuminate every triumph and failure of his life, and as the women

    Founder and long-time general director of the acclaimed American Conservatory Theatre, Bill Ball engages his audience in a wide-ranging discussion of the director's process from first reading through opening night. Speaking as a director's director, Ball offers a candid, personal account of his method of working including the choice of a play's essential elements, preproduction homework, casting, and rehearsal techniques. Throughout, his discovering and insights guide the director in building the world of the play and bringing it to life.