Book picks similar to
Three Plays by Mae West: Sex / The Drag / The Pleasure Man by Mae West
plays
theatre
lgbt
fiction
Tom at the Farm
Michel Marc Bouchard - 2011
Arriving at the remote rural farm, and immediately drawn into the dysfunction of the family s relationships, Tom is blindsided by his lost partner s legacy of untruth. With the mother expecting a chainsmoking girlfriend, and the older brother hellbent on preserving a facade of normalcy, Tom is coerced into joining the duplicity until, at last, he confronts the torment that drove his lover to live in the shadows of deceit. The lover the friend, the son, the brother, the nameless dead man has left behind a fable woven of false-truths which, according to his own teenage diaries, were essential to his survival. In this same rural setting, one young man had once destroyed another young man who loved yet another. Like an ancient tragedy, years later, this drama will shape the destiny of Tom. In a play that unfolds with progressively blurred boundaries between lust and brutality, between truth and elaborate ?ction, Bouchard dramatizes how gay men often must learn to lie before they learn how to love. Throughout 2011 and 2012, "Tom at the Farm" was produced in Quebec and France, as "Tom a la ferme," and in Mexico, as "Tom en la granja." Award-winning Quebec director Xavier Dolan adapted the play for the screen in 2013, with Caleb Landry Jones in the leading role."
The Seagull
Anton Chekhov - 1895
Two years later it was revived by Nemirovich-Danchenko at the newly-founded Moscow Art Theatre with Stanslasky as Trigorin and was an immediate success. Checkhov's description of the play was characteristically self-mocking: "A comedy - 3F, 6M, four acts, rural scenery (a view over a lake); much talk of literature, little action, five bushels of love".Michael Frayn's translation was commissioned by the Oxford Playhouse Company.
Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps
Michael Bronski - 2003
Cultural critic Michael Bronski collects a sampling of these now little-known gay erotic writings—some by writers long forgotten, some never known and a few now famous. Through them, Bronski challenges many long-held views of American postwar fiction and the rise of gay literature, as well as of the culture at large.
Things a Bright Girl Can Do
Sally Nicholls - 2017
Enraged that she is expected to marry her childhood sweetheart rather than be educated, she joins the Suffragettes, and vows to pay the ultimate price for women's freedom.May is fifteen, and already sworn to the cause, though she and her fellow Suffragists refuse violence. When she meets Nell, a girl who's grown up in hardship, she sees a kindred spirit. Together and in love, the two girls start to dream of a world where all kinds of women have their place.But the fight for freedom will challenge Evelyn, May and Nell more than they ever could believe. As war looms, just how much are they willing to sacrifice?
A Doll's House
Frank McGuinness - 1996
But as her economic dependence becomes brutally clear, Nora's acceptance of the status quo undergoes a profound change. To the horror of the bewildered Torvald, himself caught in the tight web of a conservative society which demands that he exert strict control, Nora comes to see that only possible true course of action is to leave the family home.Frank McGuinness's version of A Doll's House received its London premiere in October 1996 and opened on Broadway in 1997, where the production won four Tony Awards.
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.
A Feminine Ending
Sarah Treem - 2009
But at the moment, she's living in New York City and writing advertising jingles to pay the rent while her fiancé, Jack, pursues his singing career. So when Amanda's mother, Kim, calls one evening from New Hampshire and asks for her help with something she can't discuss over the phone, Amanda is only too happy to leave New York. Once home, Kim reveals that she's leaving Amanda's father and needs help packing. Amanda balks and ends up (gently) hitting the postman, who happens to be her first boyfriend. They spend the night together in an apple orchard, where Amanda tries to tell Billy how her life got sidetracked. It has something to do with being a young woman in a profession that only recognizes famous men. Billy acts like he might have the answer, but doesn't. Neither does Amanda's mother. Or, for that matter, her father. A Feminine Ending is a gentle, bittersweet comedy about a girl who knows what she wants but not quite how to get it. Her parents are getting divorced, her fiancée is almost famous, her first love reappears, and there's a lot of noise in her head but none of it is music. Until the end. "Ending′ is a promising beginning...the playwright has a sense of humor that brings to mind a budding Wendy Wasserstein and a liberated sense of form that evokes a junior Paula Vogel."-Los Angeles Times "Darkly comic. FEMININE ENDING has undeniable wit." -New York Post. "Appealingly outlandish humor." -The New York Times. "Courageous. The 90-minute piece swerves with nerve and naivete. Sarah Treem has a voice all her own." -Newsday.
My Sister in This House
Wendy Kesselman - 1981
This extraordinary drama, produced to acclaim at the Actors Theatre of Louisville originally, and at NYC's Second Stage is about a celebrated 1930's French murder case, in which two maids sisters were convicted of murdering their employer and her daughter. This very cinematically structured work explores the motivations whi
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Carmen Maria Machado - 2017
While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.The husband stitch --Inventory --Mothers --Especially heinous --Real women have bodies --Eight bites --The resident --Difficult at parties
Wilderness Tips
Margaret Atwood - 1991
In each of these tales Margaret Atwood deftly illuminates the single instant that shapes a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age. By superimposing the past on the present, Atwood paints interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and life's lost chances, endowing even the banal with a sense of mystery. Richly layered and disturbing, poignant at times and scathingly witty at others, the stories in Wilderness Tips take us into the strange and secret places of the heart and inform the familiar world in which we live with truths that cut to the bone.Contents:True trash --Hairball --Isis in darkness --The bog man --Death by landscape --Uncles --The age of lead --Weight --Wilderness tips --Hack Wednesday.
The Rainmaker
N. Richard Nash - 1953
At the time of a paralyzing drought in the West we discover a girl whose father and two brothers are worried as much about her becoming an old maid as they are about their dying cattle. For the truth is, she is indeed a plain girl. The brothers try every possible scheme to marry her off, but without success. Nor is there any sign of relief from the dry heat. When suddenly from out of nowhere appears a picaresque character with a mellifluous t