Book picks similar to
Plays 2: The Girl from Maxim's / She's All Yours / A Flea in Her Ear / Jailbird by Georges Feydeau
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The Game's Afoot; Or Holmes for the Holidays (Ludwig)
Ken Ludwig - 2012
But when one of the guests is stabbed to death, the festivities in this isolated house of tricks and mirrors quickly turn dangerous. Then it's up to Gillette himself, as he assumes the persona of his beloved Holmes, to track down the killer before the next victim appears. The danger
The Revisionist
Jesse Eisenberg - 2013
The play had its world premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York in spring 2013, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Vanessa Redgrave and directed by Kip Fagan.In The Revisionist, young writer David arrives in Poland with a crippling case of writer’s block and a desire to be left alone. His seventy-five-year-old second cousin Maria welcomes him with a fervent need to connect with her distant American family. As their relationship develops, she reveals details about her postwar past that test their ideas of what it means to be a family.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennesse Williams (York Notes Advanced)
Steve Roberts - 2007
One of his best-loved and most famous plays, it exposes the lies plaguing the family of a wealthy Southern planter of humble origins.
References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot and Other Plays
José Rivera - 2001
This new volume collects the author’s plays written in the past five years, including References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot ("effortlessly melds otherworldly fantasy with gritty realism to make sparks fly onstage."—The Journal News), Sueño (a reworking for Pedro Calderón’s Life is a Dream) and Sonnets for an Old Century, the author’s most recent work, which recently premiered in Los Angeles.Puerto Rican-born playwright José Rivera plays have been produced all over the world and his work has been translated into seven languages. His best known work includes Marisol and Each Day Dies with Sleep. "Rivera has a messianic mission to replace old and dying creeds with vibrant new visions."—Robert Brustein, New RepublicAlso available by José RiveraMarisol and Other Plays PB $15.95 1-55936-136-0 • USA
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.
Dealer's Choice
Patrick Marber - 1995
It won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and, the Writers' Guild for Best West End Play."An exceptionally accomplished first play . . . though I know nothing about poker, I testify to the compulsive grip this play exerts and to the accumulation of meanings it ignites in your head."—Financial Times"Patrick Marber's enthralling close-up of the demons which drive compulsive gamblers is among the finest new plays in many a year."—Daily Mail
The Autumn Garden
Lillian Hellman - 1951
All of them are in one way or another frustrated and unhappy. Most of them are under the illusion that some day the things from which they suffer will be removed and they will be once more at peace. But when they come to see themselves, they realize that man is the sum of his past life, that they are incapable of any real revolt against their past, and that what they have made of themselves in earlier years is what they are when age approaches. Nor are they tragic figures. All of them are troubled average people, human, commonplace but they are studied with great understanding and a touch of intelligently unsentimental compassion."
Crumbs from the Table of Joy and Other Plays
Lynn Nottage - 1998
Her plays have been produced in many theatres across the U.S. including Second Stage (NY), South Coast Rep (Costa Mesa), Yale Repertory Theatre (New Haven), Alliance Theatre (Atlanta) and Steppenwolf (Chicago). She has won the Heideman and the White Bird awards and was a runner-up for the Susan Blackburn award.
Sons of the Prophet
Stephen Karam - 2012
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.
33 Variations
Moisés Kaufman - 2011
A composer coming to terms with his genius. And, even though they're separated by 200 years, these two people share an obsession that might, even just for a moment, make time stand still. Drama, memory and music combine to transport you from present-day New York to nineteenth-century Austria in this extraordinary American play about passion, parenthood and the moments of beauty that can transform a life.
Amy's View
David Hare - 1997
Esme Allen is a well-known West End actress at just the moment when the West End is ceasing to offer actors a regular way of life. The visit of her young daughter, Amy, with a new boyfriend sets in train a series of events which only find their shape sixteen years later.David Hare's new play, which mixes love, death, and the theatre in a heady and original way, was sold out at the National Theatre, and transferred to the West End in January 1998.This is the definitive version of Amy's View.
Once in a Lifetime
Moss Hart - 1960
(doubling possible.) / 5 ints. or unit set. Recently revived on Broadway to great acclaim, this is the rollicking tale of three down and out troupers who decide to head for Hollywood and try their luck with the newly invented talkies. Due to a series of consistent blunders, the most stupid of the three is carried to pinnacles of fame and fortune until he's literally made a god of the industry. It's a fast paced and wild romp and a marvelous spoof of tinsel land.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays
Molière - 1666
He created a new synthesis from the major comic traditions at his disposal. This collection demonstrates the range of Molière's comic vision, his ability to move between the broad and basic ploys of farce to the more subtle and sophisticated level of high comedy. The Misanthrope appears along with Such Preposterously Precious Ladies, Tartuffe, A Doctor Despite Himself, The Would-Be Gentleman, and Those Learned Ladies.
You Got Older
Clare Barron - 2015
"You Got Older" is a tender and darkly comic new play about family, illness, and cowboys - and how to remain standing when everything you know comes crashing down around you.