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Essential Self-Defense: A Play


Adam Rapp - 2007
    Meanwhile, all's not well on the unassuming Midwestern streets of Bloggs: with local children vanishing at an alarming rate, our hero, his lady friend, and a motley assortment of poets, butchers, and punk librarians prepare to battle the darkness on the edge of town.

hir


Taylor Mac - 2015
    Isaac’s father, who once ruled the family with an iron fist, has had a debilitating stroke; his younger sister, Maxine, is now his brother, Max; and their mother, Paige, is committed to revolution at any cost. Determined to be free of any responsibility toward her formerly abusive husband—or the home he created—Paige fervently believes she can lead the way to a "new world order." Hir, Taylor Mac’s subversive comedy, leaves many of our so-called normative and progressive ideas about gender, families, the middle class—and cleaning—in hilarious and ultimately tragic disarray.

The Language Archive


Julia Cho - 2012
    Closer to home, though, language is failing him. He doesn't know what to say to his wife, Mary, to keep her from leaving him, and he doesn't recognize the deep feelings that his lab assistant, Emma, has for him.

The Shipment and Lear


Young Jean Lee - 2009
    She understands and exploits the unique strengths of her medium: the ability to viscerally connect with an audience.” –The EconomistExperimental Korean American theatre artist Young Jean Lee has been called “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” (Time Out New York). This volume contains two of her recent works:In The Shipment, Lee provides a provocative look at African-American identity in our not-yet post-racial society. The New York Times calls this take on cultural images of black America “a subversive, seriously funny new theater piece… Ms. Lee wields sharp, offbeat humor to point up the clichés, distortions and absurdities” (Charles Isherwood, New York Times).LEAR is Lee’s own version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, focusing on the king’s three daughters. A production in which Lear himself never appears, LEAR is a “wacky blend of ‘To be or not to be,’ Beckett, and Pirandello…full of exhilarating, illuminating moments” (Village Voice).Young Jean Lee has written and directed shows in New York with Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company and toured her work to over twenty cities around the world. Her plays include Straight White Men, We’re Gonna Die, Untitled Feminist Show, The Shipment, Lear and Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. Awards include two Obies, the Festival Prize of the Zuercher Theater Spektakel, a Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award.

Bent


Martin Sherman - 1979
    Martin Sherman's worldwide hit play Bent took London by storm in 1979 when it was first performed by the Royal Court Theatre, with Ian McKellen as Max (a character written with the actor in mind). The play itself caused an uproar. "It educated the world," Sherman explains. "People knew about how the Third Reich treated Jews and, to some extent, gypsies and political prisoners. But very little had come out about their treatment of homosexuals." Gays were arrested and interned at work camps prior to the genocide of Jews, gypsies, and handicapped, and continued to be imprisoned even after the fall of the Third Reich and liberation of the camps. The play Bent highlights the reason why - a largely ignored German law, Paragraph 175, making homosexuality a criminal offense, which Hitler reactivated and strengthened during his rise to power.

Brooklyn Boy


Donald Margulies - 2005
    He explores the queasy relationships between life and art, love and estrangement, and the bane that is American identity drift, with unsparing but compassionate candor.” –Misha Berson, Seattle Times“Margulies’s remarkable gift of building characterization through realistic dialogue is undiminished. Full of aching ruefulness that underlies the comedy, Brooklyn Boy’s scenes are written with precision and humor. The play isn’t about Brooklyn, nor is it about a boy—it’s about a man without a home.” –Don Shirley, Los Angeles TimesThis new play by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dinner with Friends follows the career of Eric Weiss, a writer whose novel hits the bestseller list the same time his life begins to unravel. His wife is out the door, his father is in the hospital, and his childhood friend thinks he has sold himself to the devil. A funny and emotionally rich look at family, friends and fame.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.

Beautiful Thing


Jonathan Harvey - 1996
    The gaucheness, the rush of excitement, and the inarticulate tenderness of young love are beautifully captured in writing of great truth and delicacy. Only the most irrational of homophobes could fail to be moved by it."—Daily Telegraph"Deliciously upbeat ... seldom has there been a play which so exquisitely and joyously depicts what it's like to be sixteen, in the first flush of love and full of optimism. Truly a most unusual and beautiful thing."—Guardian"An unfakeably truthful portrait of adolescent self-discovery, showing sensitivity and fun pushing up like wild flowers through the concrete crevices of a Thamesmead estate. This is the most heartening working-class comedy since A Taste of Honey."—Independent on Sunday

Confusions


Alan Ayckbourn - 1974
    Ayckbourn's series of plays for 4-5 actors typify his black comedies of human behaviour. The plays are alternately naturalistic, stylised and farcical, but underlying each is the problem of loneliness. The Mother Figure shows a mother unable to escape from baby talk; in The Drinking Companion, an absentee husband attempts seduction without success; in Between Mouthfuls, a waiter oversees a fraught dinner encounter. A garden party gets out of hand in Gosforth's Fete, whilst A Talk in the Park is a revue style curtain call piece for the five actors. Whether the comedies concern marital conflict, infidelity or motherhood and take place on a park bench or at a village fete, the characters are familiar and their cries for help instantly recognisable. Principally he is respected as a radical re-inventor of form - Dominic Dromgoole.

The Book of Will


Lauren Gunderson - 2017
    But without Henry Condell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare’s plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They’ll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.“THE BOOK OF WILL…unequivocally announces Gunderson as a playwright with whom to be reckoned. It is, quite frankly, one of the best plays I have ever seen. It will bring tears of both laughter and sorrow to all but the most jaded audience member’s eyes. It is, in a word, a triumph.” —Boulder Weekly (CO). “[Gunderson] has peopled the stage with lively, historically based characters…She paints a vivid portrait of the times in language sometimes formal, sometimes poetic and often…contemporary…She also gives a real feel for theater life and what it means to be an actor; you sense this is a work of both scholarship and love. …[THE BOOK OF WILL] serves as homage to those who sacrificed to make the first folio happen and to Shakespeare’s magnificent words.” —Westword (Denver, CO).

X


Alistair McDowall - 2016
    This is where they send the new, the under-qualified, the old. And most of all the British. Mars is full of blonde Americans. It's like they're building the master race out there.Billions of miles from home, the lone research base on Pluto has lost contact with Earth. Unable to leave or send for help, the skeleton crew sit waiting.Waiting.Waiting long enough for time to start eating away at them.To lose all sense of it.To start seeing things in the dark outside.Alistair McDowall's play X premiered at the Royal Court on 30 March 2016 in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

The Forest


Aleksandr Ostrovsky - 1859
    It was premiered in Saint Petersburg’s Alexandrinsky Theatre on November 1, 1871, as a benefice for actor Fyodor Burdin.

Love! Valour! Compassion!


Terrence McNally - 1995
    McNally later adapted the script for the 1997 film of the same name.

Tara: A Play In Two Acts


Mahesh Dattani - 1995
    They were, after all, born as conjoined twins. But a horrific revelation drives a wedge between the siblings, plunging Chandan into a cycle of guilt and blame from which he cannot escape. One of Mahesh Dattani's most popular works, Tara was also one of the first Indian plays in English to highlight the dangers of gender discrimination, and the insidious ways in which it operates in our society.

Poor Super Man: A Play With Captions


Brad Fraser - 1995
    "An unflaggingly witty and often moving slice of life . . . Poor Super Man explodes on to the stage like a bold comic strip, complete with snappy captions and hard, bright, witty dialogue," writes the Edmonton Journal.

The Human Voice (La Voix Humaine)


Jean Cocteau - 1924
    "Une femme seule dans une chambre en désordre téléphone à son amant qui vient de la quitter pour une autre.