As children, they are cared for by Paddy Button, a portly sailor who drinks himself to death after only two and a half years in paradise. Frightened and confused by the man's gruesome corpse, the children flee to another part of Palm Tree Island. Over a period of five years, they grow up and eventually fall in love. Sex and birth are as mysterious to them as death, but they manage to copulate instinctively and conceive a child. The birth is especially remarkable: fifteen-year-old Emmeline, alone in the jungle, loses consciousness and awakes to find a baby boy on the ground near her. Naming the boy Hannah (an example of Stacpoole's penchant for gender reversals), the Lestranges live in familial bliss until they are unexpectedly expelled from their tropical Eden.

    Baker practices astonishing verbal magic over and over again." - Clancy Martin, Paris Review"Strikingly intimate... Free of the stilted or formal locutions that clutter up some of the more antique-sounding translations... Ms. Baker has given the play a natural but distinctly contemporary American sound." - Charles Isherwood, New York Times"Devastatingly beautiful... People are going to be talking about this one for years." - Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Village Voice"More than a modern-dress treatment of a classic work, it's a fresh rethinking of the material from the perspective of a modern mind." - Marilyn Stasio, VarietyAnnie Baker, one of the most celebrated playwrights in the United States, lends her truthful observation and elegant command of the colloquial to Anton Chekhov's despairing masterpiece Uncle Vanya. A critical hit in its sold-out Off-Broadway premiere, Baker's telling is a refreshingly intimate and modern treatment of a Chekhovian classic.Annie Baker's plays include The Flick (The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Obie Award), The Aliens (Obie Award), Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award) and Body Awareness. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries internationally. Recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwright Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She is a resident playwright at the Signature Theatre.

    Cavendish is the author of many poems, short stories, biographies, memoirs, letters, philosophical and scientific works (including The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing World, the first work of science fiction by a woman), and nineteen plays."The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays collects four of Cavendish's dramatic works that are among the most revealing of her attitudes toward marriage and her desire for fame. Loves Adventures (1662) centers on a woman succeeding in war and diplomacy by passing as a man. Similarly, the heroine of Bell in Campo (1662) rescues her husband at the head of an army of women in this tale of a marriage of near equals. The Convent of Pleasure (1668) proposes a separatist community of women and has received attention for its suggestion of lesbian sexuality. The Bridals (1662), a more typical restoration comedy satirizing marriage, rounds out the collection.Edited with notes and annotation by Anne Shaver, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays also contains a timeline, biography and bibliography of the Duchess, an appreciation of Cavendish's life and work, and a bibliography of critical essays. Also included are all of Cavendish's epistles To the Reader as well as Other Preliminary Matter from Playes (1662), and Cavendish's original preface to Plays Never Before Printed (1668). A valuable collection from an extraordinary writer, "The Convent of Pleasure" and Other Plays raises important issues about women and gender.

    She is in love with young Artashes Otaryan, son of Elizbarov's late companion. Soon Artashes reveals to her the secret that his family has kept for years -- Elizbarov had stolen the fortune of his former companion; as a proof he presents to her Elizbarov's letters to his father. Margarita is appalled by her father's loss of honor, and is torn between her duty as a daughter and her sense of right and wrong.

    And what is more, she is so intensely interesting that the girls admire her above all else. But Miss Brodie is not honest. She prevaricates and then tells the girls to do as she tells them, not as she does herself. She is having an affair with the music teacher and has had one with the art teacher, and this is not the most exemplary conduct. A

    But then an unexpected pregnancy puts everything at risk, and Dorothy is left alone – with Robbie nowhere to be seen.Heartbroken, Dorothy picks up the pieces of her life as a working girl in Battersea helping to support her mother and father. But before long, things start to become difficult. Her father’s health is worsening, money is tight and worst of all, Robbie hasn’t come back for her.Can Dorothy find a way back to happiness in the face of real adversity? Will she have the courage to make it on her own – or is someone else waiting in the wings to save her?Gritty and moving, this is the perfect read for fans of Dilly Court and Maggie Hope.

    'Mother lies prone on an ironing board under a basket of fruit suspended from the ceiling, while a young couple - the girl in a ball dress, the man stripped to the waist in waders - are frantically changing light bulbs; through a street window at the back a policeman spies on this domestic scene in a posture of frozen astonishment...You see the author at full stretch when the police burst in and embark on a lunatic investigation involving four characters who all see the facts in a totally different light, and pounce on every ambiguous word to shoot off in their own direction: the dialogue operates like a railway junction with a madman switching over the points.' Irving Wardle in The Times.

    (doubling possible.) / 5 ints. or unit set. Recently revived on Broadway to great acclaim, this is the rollicking tale of three down and out troupers who decide to head for Hollywood and try their luck with the newly invented talkies. Due to a series of consistent blunders, the most stupid of the three is carried to pinnacles of fame and fortune until he's literally made a god of the industry. It's a fast paced and wild romp and a marvelous spoof of tinsel land.

    It's nothing like the suburb you might live in . . . Unless, that is, an insane, Listerine-guzzling Realtor sold you your house? Or perhaps your postman happens to have a disturbing relationship with his claw hammer? A grieving Dan LaBarbara knows something is different in Helltown as soon as he comes back home. Yeah, sure, the town always been a little off. You can feel that about the place, like if you stepped into a house whose only occupants were freshly murdered corpses in an upstairs bedroom. But this is something else entirely. Standing in his little brother Barbie's basement workshop, holding one of those dioramas Barbie's been building since the accident, the ones that seem to move when you hold them, Dan can feel Barbie's terror. Barbie must know something is coming, something big, something evil. He's trying to warn Dan in the only way he knows. Why else would Barbie build a diorama depicting a man-sized version of a cartoon rabbit with bloody teeth about to devour a trembling teenager? Why else would he spend so much time crafting an intricate model of Death standing over a pimply teenager in the school library? And let's not even talk about that little model of the mob of undead surrounding the massive tower of vicious black spines behind the high school. Hilltown has a story to tell, and the lonely brain-damaged man who builds magical dioramas in his basement workshop has been telling it all along. As the evil closes in around them, Dan and his new love interest Jessica must do the impossible: save everyone one in Hilltown before it's too late.

    Norma Jeane Baker of Troy is a partly spoken, partly sung performance piece by poet, essayist, and scholar Anne Carson, and an exploration of the lives and myths of Marilyn Monroe and Helen of Troy—iconic beauties who lived millennia apart.A thrilling and thoughtful meditation on the destabilising and destructive power of beauty, this had its world premiere at The Shed in New York City, starring Ben Whishaw and Renée Fleming.

    These works, which grew from Hemingway's adventures as a newspaper correspondent in and around besieged Madrid, movingly portray the effects of war on soldiers, civilians, and the correspondents sent to cover it.

    Set in September of 1916, the play combines historical fact and legend, exploring the deep-seated Ameri

    After their mother's death, two estranged half-sisters discover a book of rare stamps that may include the crown jewel for collectors. One sister tries to collect on the windfall, while the other resists for sentimental reasons. In this gripping tale, a seemingly simple sale becomes dangerous when three seedy, high-stakes collectors enter the sisters' world, willing to do anything to claim the rare find as their own.

    Its fourteen-year-old heroine Wendla is killed by abortion pills. The young Moritz terrorized by the world around him and especially by his teachers shoots himself. The ending seems likely to be the suicide of Moritz's friend Melchior but in a confrontation with a mysterious stranger (the famous Masked Man) he finally manages to shed his illusions and face the consequences.

    Ideal for schools and drama groups, this Dracula is all the more chilling for the respect it shows for Stoker's original nightmare creation.