Book picks similar to
Wonderful Town: Piano/Vocal Score by Leonard Bernstein
musical
play
plays
realistic-fiction
Everything but the Brain
Jean Tay - 2010
It won Best Original Script in The Straits Times’ Life! Theatre Awards in 2006.“Jean’s adroit handling of themes, from the origins of genius to gene heritage and the tyranny of Time, makes Everything but the Brain one of the best things seen on stage here in a while.” —The Straits Times“One of the more thoughtfully constructed original shows to come out of Singapore in recent times.” —The Business Times
Wit
Margaret Edson - 1995
What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, “The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It’s about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It’s about compassion, but it shows insensitivity.” In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson’s writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.
The Flick
Annie Baker - 2014
With keen insight and a ceaseless attention to detail, The Flick pays tribute to the power of movies and paints a heartbreaking portrait of three characters and their working lives. A critical hit when it premiered Off-Broadway, this comedy, by one of the country's most produced and highly regarded young playwrights, was awarded the coveted 2013 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Doctor Cerberus
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa - 2010
Thirteen-year-old Franklin Robertson is trying to survive adolescence. His parents don't understand him, his brother torments him, he has no friends, and he's more interested in the high school quarterback than any girl. The one bright spot in his life is the glow of the black-and-white TV in his parents' basement. Here, he worships at the altar of the Saturday Night Horror Movie, hosted by the eerie Dr. Cerberus. Before long, Franklin is convinced that only by going on the show will his life be redeemed - by Dr. Cerberus himself! A L.A. Theatre Works full cast performance starring Simon Helberg as Franklin Robertson, Jamison Jones as Doctor Cerberus, Steven Culp as Lawrence Robertson, Pamela J. Gray as Lydia Robertson and Jarrett Sleeper as Rodney Robertson, with original music by Steven Cahill.
The Tale of the Allergist's Wife and Other Plays: The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset
Charles Busch - 2000
Of his latest play, The New York Times has written, "Uproarious ... wall-to-wall laughs ... Mr. Busch has swum straight into the mainstream and stays comfortably afloat there." Busch is the author of such plays as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom -- one of the longest-running plays in Off-Broadway history -- and Psycho Beach Party, a cross between Gidget and Spellbound. After a successful Off-Broadway run at New York City's Manhattan Theater Club, Busch moves to Broadway with The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, a hilarious comedy about a self-absorbed Upper West Side doctor's wife whose life is devoted to mornings at the Whitney, afternoons at the Museum of Modern Art, and evenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her world is shaken and transformed when a childhood friend makes an unexpected visit.
Death and the King's Horseman: A Play
Wole Soyinka - 1975
The king has died and Elesin, his chief horseman, is expected by law and custom to commit suicide and accompany his ruler to heaven. The stage is set for a dramatic climax when Pilkings learns of the ritual and decides to intervene and Elesin's son arrives home.
Man of La Mancha
Dale Wasserman - 1966
That current is best identified by its catch-labels--Theater of the Absurd, Black Comedy, the Theater of Cruelty--which is to say the theater of alienation, of moral anarchy and despair. To the practitioners of those philosophies Man of La Mancha must seem hopelessly naive in its espousal of illusion as man's strongest spiritual need, the most meaningful function of his imagination. But I've no unhappiness about that. "Facts are the enemy of truth," says Cervantes-Don Quixote. And that is precisely what I felt and meant."--Dale Wasserman, from the Preface.
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.
Aria Da Capo
Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1920
Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Choir Boy
Tarell Alvin McCraney - 2012
Not on this earth but elsewhere . . .Determined to make his mark like those before him, Pharus is hell-bent on being the best choir leader in the school's fifty-year history. First he must gain the respect of his peers, but he's an outsider in a world steeped in rites and rituals, a community that demands he conform.Tarell Alvin McCraney's piercing new play set in an all boys, all black American prep school scores a gospel refrain of the politics of minority and masculinity.Choir Boy premiered at the Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, London, in September 2012. It was commissioned by, and is a co-production with Manhattan Theatre Club and was supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Falsettos
William Finn - 1992
Includes: 4 Jews in a Room Bitching * I'm Breaking Down * Marriage Proposal * March of the Falsettos * Making a Home * The Games I Play * I Never Wanted to Love You * Father to Son * The Baseball Game * A Day in Falsettoland * Everyone Hates His Parents * What More Can I Say? * Something Bad Is Happening * Holding to the Ground * Unlikely Lovers * You Gotta Die Sometime * What Would I Do.