Book picks similar to
Ink by James Graham


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The Sugar Syndrome


Lucy Prebble - 2003
    She's just 17, hates her parents, skives college and prefers life in the chatrooms. What she's looking for is someone honest and direct. Instead she finds Tim, a man twice her age, who thinks she is 11 and a boy.What seems at first to be a case of crossed wires, ends up as an unlikely, and unsettling friendship between the two, which culminates in a shocking, and morally challenging revelation.

Emilia


Morgan Lloyd Malcolm - 2018
    It was one of the first published collections of poetry written by a woman in England. The little we know of Emilia Bassano is restricted to the possibility that she may have been the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's Sonnets - and the rest of HerStory has been erased by History.Commissioned specifically for Shakespeare's Globe, and with an all-female cast, this world premiere will reveal the life of Emilia: poet, mother and feminist. This time, the focus will be on this exceptional woman who managed to outlive all the men the history books tethered her to.

Aunt Dan and Lemon


Wallace Shawn - 1985
    Lemon tells the audience about the overwhelming influence in her life of her parents' friend "Aunt Dan," an eccentric, passionate professor whose stories and seductive opinions enthrall Lemon from the time she is a young girl. The relationship that develops between Lemon and Aunt Dan and the conversations that went on in a small house on the bottom of an English garden form the focus of this play about political orientation and the allure of certain ideas-even if they lead to murder. A forceful play exposing the banality of society's evil, Aunt Dan & Lemon explores the ease with which good and bad become reconciled in the human mind.

Appropriate


Branden Jacobs-Jenkins - 2013
    As his three adult children sort through a lifetime of hoarded mementos and junk, they collide over clutter, debt, and a contentious family history. But after a disturbing discovery surfaces among their father's possessions, the reunion takes a turn for the explosive, unleashing a series of crackling surprises and confrontations.Winner of the 2014–2015 Obie Award for Best New American Play.

The Anarchist


David Mamet - 2011
    With a nod to his mentor, Harold Pinter, Mamet once again employs his signature verbal jousting in this battle of two women over freedom, power, money, religion—and the lack thereof. Broadway premiere, under the direction of the playwright, in fall 2012 starring Patti LuPone and Debra Winger.David Mamet is a playwright, director, author, essayist, screenwriter, and film director. His plays include Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, A Life in the Theatre, Oleanna, The Cryptogram, and Race.

Three Plays: Naga-Mandala; Hayavadana; Tughlaq


Girish Karnad - 1994
    The first play, Tughlaq, is a historical play in the manner of nineteenth-century Parsee theater. The second, Hayavadana was one of the first modern Indian plays to employ traditional theatrical techniques. In Naga-Mandala, the third play, Karnad turns to oral tales, usually narrated by women. This selected work of one of India's best known playwrights should attract the attention of students and scholars of comparative literature, or any reader interested in South Asian literature.

The Teahouse of the August Moon


John Patrick - 1954
    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and the Critics' Circle Award, this is one of the most successful plays of the modern theater.

In the Heights: The Complete Book and Lyrics


Lin-Manuel Miranda - 2013
    During its acclaimed Off-Broadway and Broadway runs, In the Heights became an audience phenomenon and a critical success. It's easy to see why: with an amazing cast, a gripping story, and incredible dancing, In the Heights is an authentic and exhilarating journey into one of Manhattan's most vibrant communities. And with its universal themes of family, community, and self-discovery, In the Heights can be enjoyed by people of all ages and backgrounds. Among the musical's many accolades are two Drama Desk Awards, a Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album, and a nomination for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Find out what it takes to make a living, what it costs to have a dream, and what it means to be home... In the Heights.

Three Days of Rain


Richard Greenberg
    He takes up temporary residence in the unused space where thirty-five years earlier, his father Ned, and Ned's late partner Theo, both architects, lived and designed the great house that would make them famous. Sleepless and emotionally jangled, Walker scours the old empty space for clues, evidences or keys to the tortured family history. Discovering his father's journal hidden under the bed, he finds it as unforthcoming as his nearly silent father had been. Walker is joined by his sister, Nan, and their friend from childhood, Pip, Theo's son, to hear the reading of Ned's will. It is there that Walker forces the confrontation that the others need. After an evening of harrowing and sometimes comically inadvertent revelations, Walker disappears once more. This time he returns later that evening with a surprising, but to him, definitive solution to the family puzzle. We travel back to 1960, when Ned's journal begins. We meet the parents at the same age their children are in Act One: Ned, who seems very different from the cold monster the children conjured; the charismatic and putative genius, Theo; and Lena, Walker and Nan's mother, the delightful, troubled "Southern woman who admits to thirty." In the guise of a love story, we are offered all the information needed to devise an alternative reading of the sad, unexpectedly romantic family story."

Master Class


Terrence McNally - 1995
    Inspired by a series of master classes the great diva conducted at Juilliard toward the end of her career, this drama puts Maria Callas at center stage again as she coaxes, prods, and inspires students—"victims" as she calls them—into giving the performances of their lives while revealing her own. As she slips off into memories, we experience her days at La Scala, her marriage to Meneghini, and her great doomed love for Aristotle Onassis. But the dazzling theatricality comes from Callas's emotional explosions, her cutting wit, and the soaring music as each student sings an aria that exposes the Divina's vulnerabilities ... and her genius.

The Boys Next Door


Tom Griffin - 1988
    Norman, who works in a doughnut shop and is unable to resist the lure of the sweet pastries, takes great pride in the huge bundle of keys that dangles from his waist; Lucien P. Smith has the mind of a five-year-old but imagines that he is able to read and comprehend the weighty books he lugs about; Arnold, the ringleader of the group, is a hyperactive, compulsive chatterer, who suffers from deep-seated insecurities and a persecution complex; while Barry, a brilliant schizophrenic who is devastated by the unfeeling rejection of his brutal father, fantasizes that he is a golf pro. Mingled with scenes from the daily lives of these four, where "little things" sometimes become momentous (and often very funny), are moments of great poignancy when, with touching effectiveness, we are reminded that the handicapped, like the rest of us, want only to love and laugh and find some meaning and purpose in the brief time that they, like their more fortunate brothers, are allotted on this earth.

Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard


James N. Loehlin - 2006
    In the century since its first performance, The Cherry Orchard has undergone a wide range of conflicting interpretations: tragic and comic, naturalistic and symbolic, reactionary and radical. Beginning with the 1904 premiere at Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, this study traces the performance history of one of the landmark plays of the modern theatre. Considering the work of such directors as Anatoly Efros, Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Peter Stein, Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard explores the way different artists, periods and cultures have reinvented Chekhov's poignant comedy of failure and hope.

I Remember Mama: Broadway Version


John Van Druten - 1945
    Mama, a sweet and capable manager, sees her children through childhood, manages to educate them and to see one of her daughters begin her career as a writer. Mama's sisters and uncle furnish a rich background for a great deal of comedy and a little incidental tragedy, while the doings of the children manage to keep everyone in pleasant turmoil. No description can do justice to the rich characterizations that fill the author's canvas. A High School version (ISBN 0-8222-0550-5) is also available at the same price. Groups interested should specify which version."

Abundance


Beth Henley - 1991
    Macon and Bess are two mail-order brides, lured to the West by the promise of new beginnings through marriage to men they have never met. While waiting for their respective husbands-to-be, one bubbling with optimism, the other mousy and plain, the two women become instant best friends. As Abundance follows the two women through their friendship and adventures for the next 25 years, this Western epic unearths the dark underside of American mythology. A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: Ed Begley Jr., Gary Cole, Amy Madigan, Steven Weber and JoBeth Williams.

Unity (1918)


Kevin Kerr - 2002
    This phenomenon in effect brought the terror, the panic, the horror and the sense of helplessness of the Great War home with the returning soldiers—more people died of this epidemic than had been killed in battle throughout the armed conflict.As fear of the dreaded flu begins to fill the town of Unity with paranoia, drastic measures are taken. The town is quarantined in an attempt to keep the illness out. Trains are forbidden to stop, no one can enter, and the borders are sealed. Mail from overseas, feared to be carrying the deadly virus, is gathered and then burned. But when the disease descends upon the town despite their precautions, the citizens begin to turn on each other as they attempt to find a scapegoat for the crisis.Very little has been written about this worldwide calamity which, more than the war itself, destroyed forever the genteel and naive presumptions of European colonial society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kevin Kerr offers audiences not only an epic chronicle of this forgotten chapter of Canadian history, but a chilling preview of the beginnings of our own new century.The play is a gothic romance, filled with dark comedy and the desperate embrace of life at the edge of death.