He is also an accomplished screenwriter who has in the past few years turned his hand to writing plays. The results, collected here, hilariously explore serious questions of love, happiness and the meaning of life; they are rich with equal parts of pain and slapstick humour, torment and wit.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    Baker practices astonishing verbal magic over and over again." - Clancy Martin, Paris Review"Strikingly intimate... Free of the stilted or formal locutions that clutter up some of the more antique-sounding translations... Ms. Baker has given the play a natural but distinctly contemporary American sound." - Charles Isherwood, New York Times"Devastatingly beautiful... People are going to be talking about this one for years." - Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Village Voice"More than a modern-dress treatment of a classic work, it's a fresh rethinking of the material from the perspective of a modern mind." - Marilyn Stasio, VarietyAnnie Baker, one of the most celebrated playwrights in the United States, lends her truthful observation and elegant command of the colloquial to Anton Chekhov's despairing masterpiece Uncle Vanya. A critical hit in its sold-out Off-Broadway premiere, Baker's telling is a refreshingly intimate and modern treatment of a Chekhovian classic.Annie Baker's plays include The Flick (The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Obie Award), The Aliens (Obie Award), Circle Mirror Transformation (Obie Award) and Body Awareness. Her work has been produced at more than a hundred theaters in the U.S. and in more than a dozen countries internationally. Recent honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Steinberg Playwright Award and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. She is a resident playwright at the Signature Theatre.

    "Ravenhill has more to say, and says it more refreshingly and wittily, than any other playwright of his generation"—Time Out "There are few stage authors writing more interestingly than Mark Ravenhill … He is - it is now yet more evident - a searing, intelligent, disturbing sociologist with a talent for satirical dialogue and a flair for sexual sensationalism."—Financial Times Shopping and Fucking: "is a darkly humorous play for today's twenty-somethings … a real coup de theatre"—Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard Faust: "…an intelligent and witty reappropriation of the legend … alive, pertinent and disturbing"—Michael Coveney, Observer Handbag: "…combines urban grit with sly wit, and reveals Mark Ravenhill as a writer of real daring" —Daily Telegraph Some Explicit Polaroids: "laudably ambitious, pulsates with energy … very funny"—Financial Times

    . . . A tragic and hilarious vision of life in an English country community. Butterworth’s new work was the most talked about new work of the season."—The London Paper

    platforms Winner of the American College Theatre Festival, this marvelously theatrical play is the story of a disturbed young man and his friendship with a disenchanted preacher in southern Indiana in the early 1930s. When the boy was young he almost drowned. This trauma and the loss of his mother in the same accident has left him deathly afraid of water. The preacher, set on breaking away from a long line of Kentucky family preachers, is determined not to do what h

    It's about each and every club in the League and about soccer, rugby and baseball too," writes the Melbourne Sun's football commentator, Lou Richards, himself a former Aussie Rules champion who has seen it all. He and fellow fanatic, Professor Ian Turner of Monash University, introduce David Williamson's latest probe into the confrontations of Australian life. If you have ever belonged to a sports club, if you have ever been part of any organisation in which the will to win prevails and the trial of strength goes on in the clubroom long after the players have left the field - then you will know the men of The Club.

    Of his latest play, The New York Times has written, "Uproarious ... wall-to-wall laughs ... Mr. Busch has swum straight into the mainstream and stays comfortably afloat there." Busch is the author of such plays as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom -- one of the longest-running plays in Off-Broadway history -- and Psycho Beach Party, a cross between Gidget and Spellbound. After a successful Off-Broadway run at New York City's Manhattan Theater Club, Busch moves to Broadway with The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, a hilarious comedy about a self-absorbed Upper West Side doctor's wife whose life is devoted to mornings at the Whitney, afternoons at the Museum of Modern Art, and evenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her world is shaken and transformed when a childhood friend makes an unexpected visit.

    Three plays from Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright August Wilson: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, and Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

    A highly engaging comedy of intrigue, The Barber of Seville portrays the resourceful Figaro foiling a jealous old man's attempts to keep his beautiful ward from her lover. The Marriage of Figaro — condemned by Louis XVI for its daring satire of nobility and privilege — depicts a master and servant set in opposition by their desire for the same woman. With characteristic lightness of touch, Beaumarchais created an audacious farce of disguise and mistaken identity that balances wit, frivolity and seriousness in equal measure.John Wood's lively translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the author's turbulent life and multifarious careers, and examines each play in detail. This edition also includes Beaumarchais's notes on the characters and costumes.'He has everything — pleasantry, seriousness, reason, vigour, pathos, eloquence of every kind' VOLTAIRE

    Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, the play is set in Victorian England's Soho but satirizes the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic through its wry love story of Polly Peachum and "Mack the Knife" Macheath. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, it became a popular hit throughout the Western world.Commissioned and authorized by the Brecht estate, Arcade's definitive edition contains the acclaimed translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett that was first staged at the York Theatre Royal and subsequently at Lincoln Center in New York. Willett and Manheim, the joint editors of Brecht's complete dramatic work in English, also provide Brecht's own notes and discarded songs, as well as extensive editorial commentary on the genesis of his play.

    

    Presents the script of a 1988 play about a group of women in Chinquapin, Louisiana, who learn to draw upon their underlying strength and love to meet the challenges of life.

    Set in September of 1916, the play combines historical fact and legend, exploring the deep-seated Ameri

    She doesn’t go to school and never leaves the flat by day. Sensing in each other a kindred spirit, the two become devoted friends. What Oskar doesn’t know is that Eli has been a teenager for a very long time…Jack Thorne's adaptation of Let The Right One In premiered in June 2013 at the Dundee Rep Theatre in a production by the National Theatre of Scotland, before transferring to London's Royal Court Theatre in November 2013.