For more than thirty years, Simon's wry and astute observations on life, love, and the human condition have been making audiences laugh uproariously even as his beautifully realized characters touch their hearts. These five plays, including the Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning Lost in Yonkers, show Simon at the pinnacle of his extraordinary career. Rumors Lost in Yonkers Jake's Women Laughter on the 23rd Floor London Suite Including the author's introduction: "How to Stop Writing and Other Impossibilities"

    A mystery, really. A man has been murdered. The mystery is, who he is, who murdered him and what were the circumstances? And to solve it, Wilson looks at the outsides and insides of his tiny, Middle Western town. He looks at a middle-aging woman who falls in love with the young man who comes to work in her cafe. He looks at a coarse, nasty woman mistreating her senile mother, who is obsessed with visions of Eldritch being evil and headed for blood-spilling. He looks at a tender relationship between a young man and a dreamy, crippled girl. But Wilson sees far more than this. He is grasping the very fabric of Bible Belt America, with its catchword morality ("virgin," "God-fearing") and its capability for the vicious. He senses the rhythm of its life and the cruelty it can impose. He understands the speech patterns of its loveless gossips, its sex-hungry boys, its compassionless preachers, its car-conscious blondes." In the end his portrait of Eldritch is full length, and the truth of its revelations will be pondered long after the stage lights have dimmed and the play has ended.

    While some see Burnfield as the suburban ideal of quiet comfort, the suffocating safe world only feeds their frustrations, and a night of drinking and partying careens recklessly toward violence, despair and death.

    The first of the plays, The Real Inspector Hound, is the longer of the two; here the author has created a looking glass comedy of great suspense and intrigue about two drama critics. The second play, After Magritte, is 'a surrealist comedy in detective form-or is it a comedy in surrealist form? A husband and wife argue whether the figure they saw in the street was a one-legged football player with the ball under his arm, or a man in pajamas with a tortoise under his arm. The play shows that Stoppard is as amusing and clever as always.'

    The complete scripts to six Sam Shepard plays: The Unseen Hand, Forensic and the Navigators, The Holy Ghostly, Back Bog Beast Bait, Shaved Splits, 4-H Club.

    At first the Sycamore family seems mad, but it is not long before we realize that if they are mad, the rest of the world is really verklempt.

    He has written to Rick to say that, as long as he is alive, "you will have somebody on Earth who will do anything for you," so Willum is delighted when Rick shows up unexpectedly at his apartment on the night of his thirty-fourth birthday party. But his delight soon fades as it becomes apparent that Rick is a hopeless "nerd," a bumbling oaf with no social sense, little intelligence, and even less tact. Rick stays on and on, his continued presence among Willum and his friends leading to one uproarious incident after another, until the normally placid Willum finds himself contemplating violence, a dire development which, happily, is staved off by the surprising "twist" ending of the play.

    Slob. Pig. How many insults can you hear before you have to stand up and defend the woman you love? Tom faces just that question when he falls for Helen, a bright, funny, sexy young woman who happens to be plus sized-and then some. Forced to explain his new relationship to his shallow (although shockingly funny) friends, finally he comes to terms with his own preconceptions of the importance of conventional good looks. Neil LaBute's sharply drawn play not only critiques our slavish adherence to Hollywood ideals of beauty but boldy questions our own ability to change what we dislike about ourselves.

    His A Life in the Theatre takes us into the lives of two actors: one young and rising into the first full flush of his success; the other older, anxious and beginning to wane. In a series of short, spare, and increasingly raw exchanges, we see the estrangement of youth from age and the wider, inevitable, endlessly cyclical rhythm of the world.

    His female characters especially are engulfed by the bathos of their lives, and Inge capitalizes on this fact in order to heighten dramatically the moment of personal crisis which comes to each of them. In his four major successes--Come Back, Little Sheba; Picnic; Bus Stop; and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs--the play carries the audience through the moment of crisis; and the final curtain falls upon a note of hope and fulfillment.'--R. Baird Shuman

    A masterful poet of the downtrodden, his plays portray life on New York's hardscrabble streets in a manner both tender and unflinching, while continually exploring the often startling gulf between who we are and how we perceive ourselves. Gathered in this volume is his current off-Broadway hit, Our Lady of 121st Street, a comic portrait of the graduates of a Harlem Catholic school reunited at the funeral of a beloved teacher, along with his two previous plays: the philosophical jailhouse drama Jesus Hopped the A Train and In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings, an Iceman Cometh for the Giuliani era that looks at the effect of Times Square's gentrification on its less desirable inhabitants.

    The New York production featured knockout performances by Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Sedaris. Ben Brantley, in the "New York Times" wrote "clearly, Mr. Lindsay-Abaire hasn't lost his playfully wicked eye, equally appalled and affectionate . . . his style both embraces and spoofs the All-American appetite for spiritual lift, sitcom perkiness, and slimy tabloid prurience." A firm believer in destiny-and inspired by a Marilyn Monroe movie-Cass leaves her husband and boards a bus to Niagara Falls, where she hopes to meet the unknown man she believes herself fated to end up with. Along the way toward the inevitable climax on the brink of the waterfall, she checks items off her list of "things to do in life," and takes the audience on an often moving, always hilarious journey.

    It would be about being present and being committed to the artistic process every single day, regardless of the ‘weather.’ It became a daily meditation, a daily prayer celebrating the rich and strange process of a writing life.”—Suzan-Lori Parks On November 13, 2002, the incomparable Suzan-Lori Parks got an idea to write a play every day for a year. She began that very day, finishing one year later. The result is an extraordinary testament to artistic commitment. This collection of 365 impeccably crafted pieces, each with its own distinctive characters and dramatic power, is a complete work by an artist responding to her world, each and every day. Parks is one of the American theater’s most wily and innovative writers, and her “stark but poetic language and fiercely idiosyncratic images transform her work into something haunting and marvelous” (TIME).

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    Though critics reflexively class his work as “magical realism,” Rivera’s extravagant, original imagery always serves to illuminate the gritty realities and touching longings of our daily lives. Also includes: Each Day Dies with Sleep and Cloud Tectonics.