Just before his works are celebrated at an exhibition in London, Jonathan journeys to the village where his former lover, Patricia, lives with her British husband, Nick. Archaeologists working on a dig, their spare existence is spent sifting through a Roman rubbish heap to discover the past. In their cold, remote house, Jonathan discovers an early painting of Patricia he'd done when they were young lovers. The subsequent struggle for the painting embodies the unreconciled passions of the past. Patricia has never forgiven Jonathan for leaving her, Nick despises Jonathan and the kind of art he produces, and Jonathan has never been able to recapture the inspiration and purity he felt when he painted Patricia. In taut scenes that dart from past to present and back, the characters are forced to deal with the unanswerable question of anti-Semitism, the legacy of the Holocaust and assimilation, the sadness of lost love, the role of the artist and the location of the human soul at the end of a ragged century.

    Frank Rich in "The New York Times" wrote about "Prelude," "It is rare to find a play so suffused with sorrow that sends one home so high." Also included are "Missing Persons," "a truly intelligent play, one that is literary and heartfelt, beautifully written...a well-crafted, moving story, a dramatic rarity in these or any times "("New York Post"), and "Three Postcards," an offbeat and uniquely imaginative free form musical play. Craig Lucas is also the author of "Reckless and Blue Window" and "What I Mean Was." He lives in Putnam Valley, New York.

    But something more “global” appears to be at work, and in any case he is distracted from his dreary rounds of diagnosis-seeking when a more urgent tragedy befalls the family. Joseph’s father, a former steelworker, was driving home from his new maintenance job when he swerved to avoid a deer and crashed his car, landing in the hospital. A week later he died of a heart attack.The deer, it turns out, was a stuffed decoy placed there by a high school student as a prank. This enrages Joseph’s older and ailing uncle, Bill (Yusef Bulos), who is even more disgusted when it is learned that the culprit is the star of the local football team, Vin (Jonathan Louis Dent), a town hero who is given a dispensation by a judge to serve his sentence in juvenile detention after the football season has concluded. Joseph and his younger brother, Charles (Chris Perfetti) — who are both gay — are more sympathetic to Vin, an African-American boy who has grown up in a foster home, and whose chance at a professional career may be jeopardized.Gloria (Joanna Gleason), Joseph’s new boss and a book packaging expert, knows a little about career jeopardy herself. She was run out of the publishing business — and Manhattan — when she sold a memoir by a Holocaust survivor that turned out to be fictionalized. (Gloria’s story and Vin’s are inspired by actual events.)Now she latches on to the discovery that Joseph’s family, of Lebanese extraction, is distantly related to Kahlil Gibran, author of the perennial best-selling spiritual book “The Prophet.” In her hilariously addled mind — complaining about her fall from grace, she defensively remarks, “I wasn’t at the Holocaust” — she decides that a memoir by Joseph about his family’s journey will be her ticket back to the big time.Mr. Karam’s play, which runs a little less than two hours and is performed in one seamless act , may sound top-heavy with plot and character. (Did I mention that Gloria’s emotional frailty also stems from the suicide of her husband?) Some of the relationships would benefit from being fleshed out in greater detail: the integration of Gloria into the lives of Joseph and his family, for example. The play’s climax shoehorns all the elements of the story into a farcical scene that seems a little forced, funny though it is.But one of Mr. Karam’s themes is the indiscriminate nature of misfortune — one calamity does not immunize you from the next, worse one — so the multiplication of disasters roiling the characters’ lives is to the point. And he writes with such precision that even the more peripheral characters emerge as sharply drawn, multifaceted individuals.

    The three are attended and visited by family and close friends: Agnes and her mother Felicity, estranged further by the latter's dementia; Brian and Beverly whose martial complications are exacerbated by Brian's new lover, Mark; and Joe and Maggie, unready for the strain of Joe's impending death and it's effect on their teenage son.

    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.

    . . Dying City is a political play and also a psychodrama about what Arthur Miller called the politics of the soul. It’s about public conscience and private grief, and real and symbolic catastrophes.”?The New York Observer “Anyone who doubts that Mr. Shinn is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today need only experience the . . . sophisticated welding of form and content that is Dying City.”?The New York Times In Christopher Shinn’s new play Dying City, a young therapist, Kelly, whose husband Craig was killed while on military duty in Iraq, is confronted a year later by his identical twin Peter, who suspects that Craig’s death was not accidental. Set in a spare downtown-Manhattan apartment after dark, scenes shift from the confrontation between Peter and Kelly, to Kelly’s complicated farewell with her husband Craig. Shinn’s creepy, sophisticated drama?infused with references to 9/11 and the war in Iraq?explores how contemporary politics and recent history have transformed the lives of these three characters. Christopher Shinn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and lives in New York. His plays include Where Do We Live, Other People, What Didn’t Happen, and On the Mountain, which have been widely produced in New York, across the United States, and in London. He is the recipient of an OBIE Award in Playwriting, as well as the Robert S. Chesney Award. He teaches playwriting at The New School for Drama.

    Set to open in New York in the fall of 2001, this work focuses on fifteen-year-old Lisa, the daughter of a prostitute, and Clint, the car thief she runs away with to escape the misery of life with her mother. But the happier times that sullenly childlike Lisa yearns for never materialize, as Clint orders her to procure young runaways for him. No one notices that these teenage girls are missing until an anonymous call to the police reports their murders. Could the caller--and the killer--be Lisa? Rebecca Gilman has created a riveting, unsentimental portrait of a young woman whose most striking quality is not her capacity for evil but the depth of her emptiness, in an environment as harsh and unyielding as the contours of her life

    Escaping their lives in Manhattan, former college buddies Matt and Davis take off to the Netherlands and find themselves thrown into a bizarre love triangle with a beautiful young prostitute named Christina. But the romance they find in Europe is eventually overshadowed by the truth they discover at home. Written with an unflinching poetic beauty, Red Light Winter is a play of sexual intrigue that explores the myriad and misguided ways we seek to fill the empty spaces inside us.

    The play explores her fight to retain her independence and the subsequent effect of her decline on her family, especially her grandson. Inspired by Lonergan's own grandmother, it's an ode to an extraordinary woman, and to the humor and strength of a family in crisis. Kenneth Lonergan once again shows himself to have one of the keenest ears of any working playwright. Also the screenwirter of the deeply funny Analyze This, he's known for his incisive humor and brilliant knack for capturing the heart and soul of human interaction.

    The newest play by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Driving Miss Daisy.

    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.

    The Russian, Botvinnik, a seasoned veteran who has mastered the Soviet "hard line," is urbane and humorous but, at the same time, profoundly cynical about what the current sessions can accomplish. His young American counterpart, Honeyman, a newcomer to the arms-control talks, is a bit stuffy and pedantic, but also fervently idealistic about what can and must be achieved through perseverance and honest bargaining. They continue their informal meetings as the talks drag on and the seasons change, and through their absorbing and revealing conversations we become aware both of the deepening understanding between these two wise and decent men and also of the profound frustration that they increasingly feel. In the end, when Botvinnik announces that he is leaving his post, Honeyman is genuinely regretful, not only because of the friendship that has grown between them but also because he knows that he must now confront again the deep-seated mistrust and misconceptions which a "new man" will bring with him and that the elemental differences in their two systems of government will continue to exacerbate as long as the real power rests in the hands of those burdened by the bitterness of the past.

    Men are exfoliating. It's all jumbled: you can't read the signs.Can any woman have it all? After university Catherine and Gwen chose opposite paths: Catherine built a career as a rock-star academic, while Gwen built a home with a husband and children. Decades later, unfulfilled in opposite ways, each woman covets the other's life, and a dangerous game begins as each tries to claim the other's territory. Sparks fly and the age-old question arises: what do women really want?Gina Gionfriddo dissects modern gender politics in this breathtakingly witty and virtuosic comedy, set in a small New England college town. Traversing the experiences of women across the generations, this play is a hugely entertaining exploration of a new style of feminism, ripe for the twenty-first century.Rapture, Blister, Burn was commissioned by Playwrights Horizons, where it premiered, with funds from the Harold and Mim Steinberg Charitable Trust. It received its UK premiere at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in January 2014.

    Clybourne Park is a beautifully structured drama by Bruce Norris that unmasks racial bigotry when a white couple sells their home to a black family.

    Weller Martin is playing solitaire on the porch of a seedy nursing home. Enter Fonsia Dorsey, a prim, self righteous lady. They discover they both dislike the home and enjoy gin rummy so they begin to play and to reveal intimate details of their lives. Fonsia wins every time and their secrets become weapons used against one another. Weller longs for a victory to counter a lifetime of defeats but it doesn't happen. He leaves the stage a broken man and Fonsia realizes her self-righteous rigidity has led to an embittered, lonely old age. "A thoroughly entertaining lesson in the fine art of theatrical finesse. The closest thing the theatre offers to a duel at 10 paces."-The New York Times"Extremely intelligent..fine bittersweet comedy...Funny, sad, profane, eloquent, touching, beautiful."-WABC-TV"Perfect...A vibrant study on loneliness, disillusion, old age and death yet fiercely funny."-The Boston Globe