Inspired by Frank Wedekind’s controversial 1891 play about teenage sexuality and society’s efforts to control it, the piece seamlessly merges past and present, underscoring the timelessness of adolescent angst and the universality of human passion.Steven Sater’s plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize/Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), and a reconceived version of Shakespeare’s Tempest, which played in London.Duncan Sheik is a singer/songwriter who also collaborated with Sater on the musical The Nightingale. He has composed original music for The Gold Rooms of Nero and for The Public Theater’s Twelfth Night in Central Park.

    But that's just the beginning. Greg's best buddy, Kent, and Kent's wife, Carly, also enter into the picture, and the emotional equation becomes exponentially more complicated. As their relationships crumble, the four friends are forced to confront a sea of deceit, infidelity, and betrayed trust in their journey to answer that oh-so-American question: How much is pretty worth?Neil LaBute's bristling new comic drama puts the final ferocious cap on a trilogy of plays that began with The Shape of Things and Fat Pig. America's obsession with physical beauty is confronted headlong in this brutal and exhilarating work.

    A composer coming to terms with his genius. And, even though they're separated by 200 years, these two people share an obsession that might, even just for a moment, make time stand still. Drama, memory and music combine to transport you from present-day New York to nineteenth-century Austria in this extraordinary American play about passion, parenthood and the moments of beauty that can transform a life.

     The League of Youth was Ibsen's first venture into realistic social drama and marks a turning-point in his style. By 1879 Ibsen was convinced that women suffer an inevitable violation of their personalities within the context of marriage. In A Doll's House, Ibsen caused a sensation with the his portrayal of Nora Helmer, a woman who, gradually arriving at an understanding of her own misery, struggles to break free from the stifling confines of her marriage. Continuing the theme of tensions within the family in The Lady from the Sea, Ibsen put forward the view that freedom with responsibility might at least be a step in the right direction. Peter Watts's lively modern translation is accompanied by an introduction examining Ibsen's life and times, with individual discussions of each of the three plays. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Their estate is hopelessly in debt: urged to cut down their beautiful cherry orchard and sell the land for holiday cottages, they struggle to act decisively. Tom Murphy's fine vernacular version allows us to re-imagine the events of the play in the last days of Anglo-Irish colonialism. It gives this great play vivid new life within our own history and social consciousness.

    This new volume collects the author’s plays written in the past five years, including References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot ("effortlessly melds otherworldly fantasy with gritty realism to make sparks fly onstage."—The Journal News), Sueño (a reworking for Pedro Calderón’s Life is a Dream) and Sonnets for an Old Century, the author’s most recent work, which recently premiered in Los Angeles.Puerto Rican-born playwright José Rivera plays have been produced all over the world and his work has been translated into seven languages. His best known work includes Marisol and Each Day Dies with Sleep. "Rivera has a messianic mission to replace old and dying creeds with vibrant new visions."—Robert Brustein, New RepublicAlso available by José RiveraMarisol and Other Plays PB $15.95 1-55936-136-0 • USA

    1999 - In a world of scientific chaos, cloning and genetic engineering, the cellar of the same house reveals a dark secret buried for 200 years.

    Closer is hailed as one of the best plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."

    In the conflict that follows, it is Ruth who becomes the focus of the family's struggle for supremacy.

    It is a revision of Thomas Killigrew's play "Thomaso", or "The Wanderer" (1664), and features multiple plot lines, dealing with the amorous adventures of a group of Englishmen and women in Naples at Carnival time. According to Restoration poet John Dryden, it "lacks the manly vitality of Killigrew's play, but shows greater refinement of expression." The play stood for three centuries as "Behn's most popular and most respected play."

    A young countess saves her tenants from starvation, but only by selling her soul to the Devil. The sleepy parish of Nyadnanave sees a vision of a cockerel that dares the inhabitants to break the shackles of Church and State. All these plays were met with moral outrage and rioting in their native Ireland.Yeats's 'The Countess Cathleen' (1892), J. M. Synge's 'The Playboy of the Western World' (1907) and O'Casey's 'Cock-a-doodle Dandy' (1949) emerged from a period of traumatic change for Ireland. While the plays bear witness to the immmense social upheavals of the turn of the twentieth century, they also represent a new age of Irish drama that rose from the turmoil, and their lessons ring true to this day.

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    It remains one of the world's most widely produced plays. The plot follows a love affair between two people, Doris and George, married to others, who rendezvous once a year. Twenty-five years of manners and morals are hilariously and touchingly played out by the lovers. "Delicious wit, compassion, a sense of humor and a feel for nostalgia."-The New York Times "Genuinely funny and genuinely romantic."-The New York Post

    As Strindberg himself wrote in his Preface, he wanted “to imitate the disjointed yet seemingly logical shape of a dream. Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and place do not exist.”Caryl Churchill’s spare and resonant new version was first staged at the National Theatre, London, in a production by Katie Mitchell, where A Dream Play was called “fresh, new and magical” (Telegraph).Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.August Strindberg (1849-1912) was a novelist and playwright from Stockholm, Sweden. His plays include Miss Julie, The Father, To Damascus, A Dream Play, and The Pelican. In 1912 Strindberg's birthday was marked by a torchlight procession through Stockholm, where his radical journalism had earned him the title of ‘people’s writer.’

    Kate Ryan and her husband, John, have a rollicking pub in the Irish village of Mountfern... lovely twelve-year-old twins... and such wonderful dreams.... It was a summer of innocence... But all that is about to change this fateful summer of 1962 when American millionaire Patrick O'Neill comes to town with his irresistible charm and a pocketful of money... when love and hate vie for a town's quiet heart and old traditions begin to crumble away.... It was a summer of love that would never come again.... A time that has been captured forever in Maeve Binchy's compelling family drama... a novel you will never forget.