Complete Plays


Sarah Kane - 2000
    That play, and the others that followed, have been produced all over the world. This anthology includes Kane's never-before-published Channel 4 screenplay, Skin. Complete Plays include Blasted, Phaedra's Love, Cleansed, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis, and Skin.

Angels in America


Tony Kushner - 1993
    Prior is a man living with AIDS whose lover Louis has left him and become involved with Joe, an ex-Mormon and political conservative whose wife, Harper, is slowly having a nervous breakdown. These stories are contrasted with that of Roy Cohn (a fictional re-creation of the infamous American conservative ideologue who died of AIDS in 1986) and his attempts to remain in the closet while trying to find some sort of personal salvation in his beliefs.

The Member of the Wedding: The Play


Carson McCullers - 1951
    The Member of the Wedding—which became an award-winning play and a major motion picture—showcases McCullers at her most sensitive, astute, and best.

The History of the Devil


Clive Barker - 1999
    He bemoans the loss of his angel-wings, his freedom of flight, his elegance, and grace. And he misses God. So he calls a trial, his appeal, to seek re-admittance into Heaven. As the trial moves through space and time, we revisit scenes of humanity's great failures - or are they the work of the Devil, his own wicked crimes? If Satan wins his day in court, he'll be with his Father in Heaven. And if he loses? He'll spend eternity here with us - on Earth.

Doubt, a Parable


John Patrick Shanley - 2005
    It is an inspired study in moral uncertainty with the compellingly certain structure of an old-fashioned detective drama. Even as Doubt holds your conscious attention as an intelligently measured debate play, it sends off stealth charges that go deeper emotionally. One of the year’s ten best.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times“[The] #1 show of the year. How splendid it feels to be trusted with such passionate, exquisite ambiguity unlike anything we have seen from this prolific playwright so far. Blunt yet subtle, manipulative but full of empathy for all sides, the play is set in 1964 but could not be more timely. Doubt is a lean, potent drama . . . passionate, exquisite, important, and engrossing.”—Linda Winer, NewsdayChosen as the best play of the year by over 10 newspapers and magazines, Doubt is set in a Bronx Catholic school in 1964, where a strong-minded woman wrestles with conscience and uncertainty as she is faced with concerns about one of her male colleagues. This play by John Patrick Shanley—the Bronx-born-and-bred playwright and Academy Award-winning author of Moonstruck—dramatizes issues straight from today’s headlines within a world re-created with knowing detail and a judicious eye. After a stunning, sold-out production at Manhattan Theatre Club, the play has transferred to Broadway.John Patrick Shanley is the author of numerous plays, including Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Dirty Story, Four Dogs and a Bone, Psychopathia Sexualis, Sailor’s Song, Savage in Limbo, and Where’s My Money?. He has written extensively for TV and film, and his credits include the teleplay for Live from Baghdad and screenplays for Congo, Alive, Five Corners, Joe Versus the Volcano (which he also directed), and Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for original screenplay.

Rockaby and Other Short Pieces


Samuel Beckett - 1994
    We find in Beckett's masterful, exquisite prose, the familiar themes from his earlier works here expressed in the anguished murmurings of the solitary human consciousness.

Porcelain and Pink


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1922
    The plot involves a young woman in a bathtub and a case of mistaken identity.

Humble Boy


Charlotte Jones - 2001
    Thirty-five-year-old Felix Humble is a Cambridge astro-physicist in search of a unified field theory. Following the sudden death of his father, Felix returns to his middle England home and his difficult and demanding mother, where he soon realises that his search for unity must include his own chaotic home life.Humble Boy premiered at the Royal National Theatre, London, in August 2001, and transferred to the Gielgud Theatre, London, in 2002. The play was the winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Award 2001, the Critics' Circle Best New Play Award 2002, and the People's Choice Best New Play Award 2002.

The Baltimore Waltz and Other Plays


Paula Vogel - 1995
    The first major collection of plays by leading lesbian playwright Paula Vogel.

Indian Summer


John Knowles - 1966
    Now, a familiar posse runs the town called Marigold and its mining community with their sharp and newly deputized claws. After finding out that this shot of evil has infected her life again and now rules everyone still left on the mountain, she quickly begins to search for the root source of its existence, before it poisons the people and the land itself forever.

Copenhagen


Michael Frayn - 1998
    The popular image of the men who made the bomb is of dispassionate intellects who number-crunched their way towards a weapon whose devastating power they could not even imagine. But in his Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn shows us that these men were passionate, philosophical, and all too human, even though one of the three historical figures in his drama, Werner Heisenberg, was the head of the Nazis' effort to develop a nuclear weapon. The play's other two characters, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, are involved with Heisenberg in an after-death analysis of an actual meeting that has long puzzled historians. In 1941, the German scientist visited Bohr, his old mentor and long-time friend, in Copenhagen. After a brief discussion in the Bohrs' home, the two men went for a short walk. What they discussed on that walk, and its implications for both scientists, have long been a mystery, even though both scientists gave (conflicting) accounts in later years. Frayn's cunning conceit is to use the scientific underpinnings of atomic physics, from Schr?dinger's famous cat to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, to explore how an individual's point of view renders attempts to discover the ultimate truth of any human interaction fundamentally impossible. To Margrethe, Heisenberg was always an untrustworthy student, eager to steal from her husband's knowledge. To Bohr, Heisenberg was a brilliant if irresponsible foster son, whose lack of moral compass was part of his genius. As for Heisenberg, the man who could have built the bomb but somehow failed to, his dilemma is at the heart of the play's conflict. Frayn's clever dramatic structure, which returns repeatedly to particular scenes from different points of view, allows several possible theories as to what his motives could have been. This isn't the first play to successfully merge the world

Aepyornis Island


H.G. Wells - 1894
    Born in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, he grew up in the rural community of Hazel Grove. Wells attended high school in Ottawa, Ontario and university in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As an undergraduate, he spent summers working in Iqaluit, Nunavut as an airline cargo handler. After a brief stint at graduate school in Montreal, Quebec, he returned to Iqaluit in 2001 and later that year transferred to the remote settlement of Resolute, on Cornwallis Island, where he worked until 2003, when he moved to Halifax with his wife, Rachel Lebowitz. At this point he started contributing book reviews and essays on Canadian poetry to periodicals including Books in Canada, Quill & Quire and Maisonneuve. In the spring of 2004, his first chapbook of poems, Fool's Errand, appeared. In the fall of that year, Toronto's Insomniac Press published his full-length collection of Arctic poems, Unsettled, under Paul Vermeersch's 4 AM Books imprint. In 2004, Wells started working for Via Rail Canada as a service attendant. In 2006 he became the Reviews Editor for Canadian Notes & Queries. In 2007, after moving to Vancouver, he published Sealift, a CD recording of 24 poems from Unsettled; "Achromatope," a letterpress broadside; and After the Blizzard, a limited edition chapbook. In the spring of 2008, Jailbreaks, his anthology of Canadian sonnets, was published. Anything But Hank!, the children's book he co-wrote with Lebowitz, with illustrations by Eric Orchard, was published in the fall. In 2009, after moving back to Halifax, Wells published Track & Trace, his second trade collection of poems, with illustrations by renowned graphic artist Seth. Track & Trace was shortlisted for the 2010 Atlantic Poetry Prize. In 2010, he published The Essential Kenneth Leslie, the first collection of Leslie's poems to be published since 1972.

The Sorrows of Satan; or, The Strange Experience of One Geoffrey Tempest, Millionaire


Marie Corelli - 1895
    He is searching for someone morally strong enough to resist temptation, but there seems little chance he will succeed. Britain is all but totally corrupt. The aristocracy is financially and spiritually bankrupt; church leaders no longer believe in God; Victorian idealism has been banished from literature and life; and sexual morality is being undermined by the pernicious doctrines of the "New Woman." Everything and everyone is up for sale, and it takes a special kind of moral courage to resist the Devil's seductions.

Three Plays


Ayn Rand - 2005
    The courtroom drama Night of January 16th, famous for its open-ended verdict, is presented here in its definitive text. Also included are two of Rand's unproduced plays, Think Twice, a clever philosophical murder mystery, and Ideal, a bitter indictment of people's willingness to betray their highest values-symbolized by a Hollywood goddess suspected of a crime.

The Pitchfork Disney


Philip Ridley - 1991
    Manifesting Ridley's vivid and visionary imagination and the dark beauty of his outlook, the play resonates with his trademark themes: East London, storytelling, moments of shocking violence, memories of the past, fantastical monologues, and that strange mix of the barbaric and the beautiful he has made all his own.The Pitchfork Disney was Ridley's first play and is now seen as launching a new generation of playwrights who were unafraid to shock and court controversy. This unsettling, dreamlike piece has surreal undertones and thematically explores fear, dreams and story-telling. First produced in 1991, it has gone on to be recognised as the annunciation of Ridley's dark and seductive world.