R. Gurney has wittily captured the manners of upper-middle-class WASP America, but never as gracefully or with such dazzling economy as in Love Letters. Tracing the lifelong correspondence of the staid, dutiful lawyer Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and the lively, unstable artist Melissa Gardner, the story of their bittersweet relationship gradually unfolds from what is written--and what is left unsaid--in their letters. A smash hit both off and on Broadway, Love Letters captures Andy and Melissa with a precision of detail and depth of feeling that only Gurney can command. Two other, thematically related plays by Gurney, The Golden Age and What I Did Last Summer, are included, providing a trio of wry and affectionate paeans to love lost, found, and fleetingly glimpsed.

    Premiering at the Royal Court, NSFW is a sharp, biting, satirical new comedy that marks the breakthrough of one of the United Kingdom's most exciting playwrights.

    

    I'm Inspector Carter. Take my case. This must be Charles Haversham! I'm sorry, this must've given you all a damn shock.After benefitting from a large and sudden inheritance, the inept and accident-prone Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society embark on producing an ambitious 1920s murder mystery. They are delighted that neither casting issues nor technical hitches currently stand in their way. However, hilarious disaster ensues and the cast start to crack under the pressure, but can they get the production back on track before the final curtain falls?The Play That Goes Wrong is a farcical murder mystery, a play within a play, conceived and performed by award-winning company Theatre Mischief. It was first published as a one-act play and is published in this new edition as a two-act play.

    A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coastal town, Under Milk Wood is "lyrical, impassioned and funny, an Our Town given universality" (The New Statesman and Nation).

    Both are beautifully crafted dramas that celebrate Irish gifts for lyrical language. They are reprinted here from authoritative editions, complete with Synge's preface to The Playboy of the Western World.

    You’ve never seen anything quite like Caroline, or Change and likely won’t again anytime soon. There’s never a moment that the part-pop, part-opera, part-musical-theater score Jeanine Tesori has conjured up doesn’t ideally match Tony Kushner’s meticulously chosen words with clarion precision.” –Matthew Murray, talkinbroadway.com“A monumental achievement in American musical theater. Joyful, wholly successful, immensely moving, told with abundant wit and generosity of heart.” –John Helipern, New York ObserverLouisiana, 1963: A nation reeling from the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy assassination. Caroline, a black maid, and Noah, the son of the Jewish family she works for, struggle to find an identity for their friendship after Noah's stepmother, unable to give Caroline a raise, tells Caroline that she may keep the money Noah leaves in his pockets. Through their intimate story, this beautiful musical portrays the changing rhythms of a nation. Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori have created a story that addresses contemporary questions of culture, community, race and class through the lens and musical pulse of the 1960s.Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Cornelle; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.Jeanine Tesori composed the scores for Tony Award-winning musicals Thoroughly Modern Millie and Shrek the Musical as well as Violet and Caroline, or Change. She is the recipient of multiple Drama Desk and Obie Awards, and her film composition credits include Nights in Rodanthe, Winds of Change, Show Business, and Wrestling With Angels.

    Visit to a Small Planet was first presented on February 7, 1957 at the Booth Theatre, New York City.The action of the play takes place in the house of Roger Spelding outside Manassas, Virginia.The time is next summer.Act IEarly evening of a summer's day.Act IIScene 1: The next morning.Scene 2: That evening.Act IIIAn hour later.

    With Mirabell? You call my blood into my face with mentioning that traitor. She durst not have the confidence. I sent her to negotiate an affair, in which if I'm detected I'm undone. If that wheedling villain has wrought upon Foible to detect me, I'm ruined. O my dear friend, I'm a wretch of wretches if I'm detected.

    "Endgame, " originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

    Lemon tells the audience about the overwhelming influence in her life of her parents' friend "Aunt Dan," an eccentric, passionate professor whose stories and seductive opinions enthrall Lemon from the time she is a young girl. The relationship that develops between Lemon and Aunt Dan and the conversations that went on in a small house on the bottom of an English garden form the focus of this play about political orientation and the allure of certain ideas-even if they lead to murder. A forceful play exposing the banality of society's evil, Aunt Dan & Lemon explores the ease with which good and bad become reconciled in the human mind.

    What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, “The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It’s about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It’s about compassion, but it shows insensitivity.” In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson’s writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

    Two young women besieged by the demands of mothers, lovers, and careers—not to mention a highly persistent telephone answering machine—as they struggle to have it all. A brilliant feminist art historian trying to keep her bearings and her sense of humor on the elevator ride from the radical sixties to the heartless eighties.Wendy Wasserstein's characters are so funny, so many-sided, and so real that we seem to know them from their Scene One entrances, though the places they go are invariably surprising. And these three plays—Uncommon Women and Others, Isn't It Romantic, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles—manage to engage us heart, mind, and soul on such a deep and lasting level that they are already recognized as classics of the modern theater.

    Features the complete script and song lyrics, with 4-color spot illustrations throughout, an original introduction by the creators, and a foreword by Mark Harris.The Book of Mormon, which follows a pair of mismatched Mormon boys sent on a mission to a place that's about as far from Salt Lake City as you can get, features book, music, and lyrics by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone.Parker and Stone are the four-time Emmy Award–winning creators of Comedy Central's landmark animated series South Park. Tony Award–winner Lopez is co-creator of the long-running hit musical comedy Avenue Q. The Book of Mormon is choreographed by three-time Tony Award–nominee Casey Nicholaw (Monty Python's Spamalot, The Drowsy Chaperone) and is directed by Nicholaw and Parker.The book includes • an original foreword by journalist Mark Harris (author of Pictures at a Revolution) • an original introduction by the authors on the genesis of the show • a production history • the complete book and lyrics, with four-color spot illustrations throughout.

    Jon's new film is being shown at a festival in Lansing, Michigan, and Vince has come from Oakland to see it. Over the course of the evening, Vince finally gets Jon to admit that ten years ago he date-raped Amy Randall, a girl whom they both dated in high school only then to reveal that he's taped their entire conversation. And not only that, he's invited Amy to have dinner with them that night. Beneath its suspenseful, high-stakes surface, TAPE examines questions of motive, memory, truth and perception.