Emma Duncan, a hypochondriac with memory problems, and her orphaned fianc

    Zany, thought-provoking, and always original, this anthology brings together all the one-acts from the Off-Broadway hit Mere Mortals and from the all-new Lives of the Saints, as well as several new and uncollected plays, including Bolero, Arabian Nights (which premiered at the celebrated Humana Festival in Louisville), The Green Hill, and Captive Audience.

    A stranger at the next table who has had enough. And a dead man—with a lot of loose ends. So begins Dead Man’s Cell Phone, a wildly imaginative new comedy by playwright Sarah Ruhl, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and Pulitzer Prize finalist for her play The Clean House. A work about how we memorialize the dead—and how that remembering changes us—it is the odyssey of a woman forced to confront her own assumptions about morality, redemption, and the need to connect in a technologically obsessed world.

    legal system. The play centers on Juror Eight, who is at first the sole holdout in an 11-1 guilty vote. Eight sets his sights not on proving the other jurors wrong but rather on getting them to look at the situation in a clear-eyed way not affected by their personal prejudices or biases. Reginald Rose deliberately and carefully peels away the layers of artifice from the men and allows a fuller picture to form of them—and of America, at its best and worst.   After the critically acclaimed teleplay aired in 1954, this landmark American drama went on to become a cinematic masterpiece in 1957 starring Henry Fonda, for which Rose wrote the adaptation. More recently, Twelve Angry Men had a successful, and award-winning, run on Broadway.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.

    . . . Lynn Nottage’s beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports.”—Linda Winer, Newsday“An intense and gripping new drama . . . the kind of new play we desperately need: well-informed and unafraid of the world’s brutalities. Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won’t expect.”—David Cote, Time Out New YorkA rain forest bar and brothel in the brutally war-torn Congo is the setting for Lynn Nottage’s extraordinary new play. The establishment’s shrewd matriarch, Mama Nadi, keeps peace between customers from both sides of the civil war, as government soldiers and rebel forces alike choose from her inventory of women, many already “ruined” by rape and torture when they were pressed into prostitution. Inspired by interviews she conducted in Africa with Congo refugees, Nottage has crafted an engrossing and uncommonly human story with humor and song served alongside its postcolonial and feminist politics in the rich theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage.Lynn Nottage’s plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy, Fabulation, and Intimate Apparel, winner of the American Theatre Critics’ Steinberg New Play Award and the Francesca Primus Prize. Her plays have been widely produced, with Intimate Apparel receiving more productions than any other play in America during the 2005-2006 season.

    A nubile young actress wrestles with an aging Hollywood star for the affections of a renowned novelist. And everyone discovers just how disappointing love, art, and growing up can be. In this irreverent, contemporary, and very funny remix of Chekhov’s The Seagull, Aaron Posner stages a timeless battle between young and old, past and present, in search of the true meaning of it all. Original songs composed by James Sugg draw the famously subtextual inner thoughts of Chekhov’s characters explicitly to the surface. STUPID FUCKING BIRD will tickle, tantalize, and incite you to consider how art, love, and revolution fuel your own pursuit of happiness.

    The play is set in a beach bungalow. The young man who lives there has pulled a lost young woman from the ocean. Soon, she finds herself trapped in his life and torn between her need to come to rest somewhere and her certainty that all human relationships turn eventually into nightmares. The struggle between his tolerant and gently ironic approach to life and her strategy of suspicion and attack becomes a kind of war about love and creation which neither can afford to lose. This is an offbeat, wonderful love story. Note: The play contains a wealth of excellent monologue and scene material.

    As the action unfolds, the residents, ranging from young to old, from the defiant to the resigned, meet and talk and interact with each other during the course of one day. The drama is of passing events in their lives, of everyday encounters and of the human comedy, with conversations often overlapping into a contrapuntal musical flow. In the resulting mosaic each character emerges clearly and perceptively defined, and the sum total of what they are-or wish they were-becomes a poignant, powerful call to America to recover lost values and to restore itself in its own and the world's eyes.

    Sweet recollections of driving with her beloved uncle intermingle with lessons about the darker sides of life. Balmy evenings are fraught with danger; seductions happen anywhere. Li'l Bit navigates a narrow path between the demands of family and her own sense of right and wrong.

    Kleinman, a logical man in a mad world, is indecisive and insecure; he doesn't want to get involved but everyone is after him to make a choice. He is even accused of being the culprit. When Kleinman confronts the maniac (who looks no different from anyone els

    His death has brought into her midst both her sister, Claire, who wants to take Catherine back to New York with her, and Hal, a former student of Catherine's father who hopes to find some hint of Robert's genius among his incoherent scribblings. The passion that Hal feels for math both moves and angers Catherine, who, in her exhaustion, is torn between missing her father and resenting the great sacrifices she made for him. For Catherine has inherited at least a part of her father's brilliance -- and perhaps some of his instability as well. As she and Hal become attracted to each other, they push at the edges of each other's knowledge, considering not only the unpredictability of genius but also the human instinct toward love and trust.

    Her boss made a pass at her and she said no so she got a pink slip with her check. Julie's broke and disillusioned, so she drinks and turns on the stereo full blast to make the pain go away. Then her roommate comes home in the midst of an eating frenzy; her boyfriend has gone back to his wife so Alice has turned to food to forget. Julie suggests another way to vent their man

    A "dumb blonde" chorus girl, mistress of a tycoon-gangster diddling in D.C., gets an education from a reporter for The New Republic, and blossoms into a very fair lady.

    Doc and Lola had an indiscreet affair and she became pregnant. Compelled to marry her, he gave up his medical studies, forfeited his future, and settled down to a life of quiet desperation with this simple, homey woman, who lost the child but has remained Doc's steadfast if slatternly wife. Now a chiropractor and recovering alcoholic, Doc's sobriety is tested when Marie, a young college student, becomes their boarder and brings new life and long-dormant hostilities to the surface of Doc and Lola's troubled marriage. Shirley Booth won the Tony, NY Drama Critics Award and later the Oscar as Best Actress of The Year for her compelling performance as Lola.

    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.