Book picks similar to
Four Plays for Dancers by W.B. Yeats
theater
poetry
irish
plays
You Got Older
Clare Barron - 2015
"You Got Older" is a tender and darkly comic new play about family, illness, and cowboys - and how to remain standing when everything you know comes crashing down around you.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
Tennessee Williams - 1979
Louis in the mid-thirties––a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams’s most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics––the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams’s unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."
Plays: One
Arthur Miller - 1988
Formerly part of the World Dramatists series of play collections by classic and modern playwrights, including foreign works in workable and accurate translations, this title and seven others are reissued in a new format under the heading, World Classics.
The Cenci
Percy Bysshe Shelley - 1819
It was inspired by a real Italian family, the Cencis (especially Beatrice Cenci). Due to its theme of incest the play was considered unperformable in its day, and it was not performed in London until 1922. Later it was included in the Harvard Classics as one of the most important and representative works of the western canon
Faust
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1832
The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seeks to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last forever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephisto and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe’s great work, the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a rejuvenated life and winning the love of the beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire, and self-delusion, Faust heads inexorably toward an infernal destruction.The best translation of Faust available, this volume provides the original German text and its English counterpart on facing pages. Walter Kaufmann's translation conveys the poetic beauty and rhythm as well as the complex depth of Goethe's language. Includes Part One and selections from Part Two.
Kimberly Akimbo
David Lindsay-Abaire - 2003
Winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Playwright, David Lindsay-Abaire's Kimberly-Akimbo focuses, with uncanny depth and quirky wit, on a sixteen-year-old girl suffering from a disease that causes her body to age nearly five times faster than it should.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
John Cameron Mitchell - 1998
In 2001, the mesmerizing film adaptation was released to equally glowing reviews. Brilliantly innovative and oddly endearing, Hedwig and the Angry Inch—inspired by Plato’s Symposium—is the story of “internationally ignored song stylist” Hedwig Schmidt, the victim of a gruesomely botched sex-change operation, as dazzlingly recounted by Hedwig (née Hansel) herself in the form of a lounge act, backed by the rock band The Angry Inch.
Dealer's Choice
Patrick Marber - 1995
It won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and, the Writers' Guild for Best West End Play."An exceptionally accomplished first play . . . though I know nothing about poker, I testify to the compulsive grip this play exerts and to the accumulation of meanings it ignites in your head."—Financial Times"Patrick Marber's enthralling close-up of the demons which drive compulsive gamblers is among the finest new plays in many a year."—Daily Mail
Hamilton: The Revolution
Lin-Manuel Miranda - 2015
Fusing hip-hop, pop, R&B, and the best traditions of theater, this once-in-a-generation show broadens the sound of Broadway, reveals the storytelling power of rap, and claims our country's origins for a diverse new generation.Hamilton: The Revolution gives readers an unprecedented view of both revolutions, from the only two writers able to provide it. Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, a cultural critic and theater artist who was involved in the project from its earliest stages--"since before this was even a show," according to Miranda--trace its development from an improbable performance at the White House to its landmark opening night on Broadway six years later. In addition, Miranda has written more than 200 funny, revealing footnotes for his award-winning libretto, the full text of which is published here.Their account features photos by the renowned Frank Ockenfels and veteran Broadway photographer Joan Marcus; exclusive looks at notebooks and emails; interviews with Questlove, Stephen Sondheim, leading political commentators, and more than 40 people involved with the production; and multiple appearances by President Obama himself. The book does more than tell the surprising story of how a Broadway musical became a national phenomenon: It demonstrates that America has always been renewed by the brash upstarts and brilliant outsiders, the men and women who don't throw away their shot.
Mr. Marmalade
Noah Haidle - 2006
Unfortunately, her imaginary friend Mr. Marmalade doesn't have much time for her. Not to mention he beats up his personal assistant, has a cocaine addic-tion, and a penchant for pornography and very long dildos. Larry, her only real friend, is the youngest suicide attempt in the history of New Jersey. MR. MARMALADE is a savage black comedy about what it takes to grow up in these difficult times.
The Confidential Clerk
T.S. Eliot - 1950
The Confidential Clerk was first produced at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1953.'The dialogue of The Confidential Clerk has a precision and a lightly felt rhythm unmatched in the writing of any contemporary dramatist.' Times Literary Supplement'A triumph of dramatic skill: the handling of the two levels of the play is masterly and Eliot's verse registers its greatest achievement on the stage - passages of great lyrical beauty are incorporated into the dialogue.' Spectator
Exiles
James Joyce - 1914
In the characters and their circumstances details of Joyce's life are evident. The main character, Richard Rowan, the moody, tormented writer who is at odds with both his wife and the parochial Irish society around him, is clearly a portrait of Joyce himself. The character of Rowan's wife, Bertha, is certainly influenced by Joyce's lover and later wife, Nora Barnacle, with whom he left Ireland and lived a seminomadic existence in Zurich, Rome, Trieste, and Paris. As in real life, the play depicts the couple with a young son and, like Joyce, Rowan has returned to Ireland because of his mother's illness and subsequent death.One can also detect hints of Joyce's interest in Nietzsche in Rowan's flawed pursuit of total individual freedom despite the stifling morals of Irish society. Though wrestling with guilt over his own infidelities, Rowan insists on this personal liberty, not only for himself but for his wife as well, who he knows is tempted by his cousin's amorous overtures.Joyce's decision to express himself in the form of a play no doubt reflects his long admiration of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. In the tense dialogue, the largely interior drama focused on the characters' relationships, the undertones of guilt, and the longing for freedom one sees similarities with Ibsen's themes. Also the spare, understated writing style - so unlike Joyce's exuberant, playful, and experimental use of language in his novels - shows the influence of Ibsen's "naked drama" (as Joyce described Ibsen's style in a published review). Above all, Joyce emulated the Scandinavian master in making the central issue of his drama the conflict between individual freedom and a demanding, judgmental society. In Exiles the protagonists struggle with the choice between living in defiance of the rigid conventions of Irish society or exile from their homeland.Though lesser-known, Exiles, written after Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and while Joyce was working on Ulysses, provides interesting insights into the development of the creative gifts of a literary genius.
The Essential Pinter: Selections from the Work of Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter - 2005
The Essential Pinter, which includes key plays, poetry, essays, and screenplays, is an indispensable companion for anyone wishing to delve into the astonishingly dazzling and frequently ominous world of Harold Pinter. In voyaging in, we not only come to fully appreciate the breadth of a body of work spanning over fifty years, but acquire a better understanding of human interaction.