Each playlet focuses on a different individual dramatising their life in the run-up to the tragedy.Published to coincide with the English language premiere at the Traverse Theatre in August as part of the International Edinburgh Festival before transferring to the Birmingham Rep, this is the first stage play to confront the London bombings of 7 July 2005.

    Andre Gregory is an intense, highly experimental theater director and playwright in search of life's meanings and spiritual revelations. His friend, Wally Shawn, is an actor and playwright living in New York who is more preoccupied with the search for his next meal. As Andre recounts his global journeys involving esoteric theatrical experiments and mystical adventures, Wally listens with more than skepticism, as his attitudes shift among wonder, puzzlement, admiration, and anger. What finally emerges is a sensitive portrait of a friendship that survives and transcends contransting assumptions about love, death, art, and man's continuing quest for self-fulfillment.

    “If there is a bleaker, funnier or more desperate play in Edinburgh this year, I’ll eat my hat.”—GuardianA brilliant new play by the author of Disco Pigs and this year’s winner of the Edinburgh First Fringe Award for Outstanding New Writing.

    Thirty-five-year-old Felix Humble is a Cambridge astro-physicist in search of a unified field theory. Following the sudden death of his father, Felix returns to his middle England home and his difficult and demanding mother, where he soon realises that his search for unity must include his own chaotic home life.Humble Boy premiered at the Royal National Theatre, London, in August 2001, and transferred to the Gielgud Theatre, London, in 2002. The play was the winner of the Susan Smith Blackburn Award 2001, the Critics' Circle Best New Play Award 2002, and the People's Choice Best New Play Award 2002.

    At the end of a long day in which the actresses Thomas auditions fail to impress him, in walks Vanda, very late and seemingly clueless, but she convinces him to give her a chance. As they perform scenes from Thomas’s play, and Vanda the actor and Vanda the character gradually take control of the audition, the lines between writer, actor, director, and character begin to blur. Vanda is acting . . . or perhaps she sees in Thomas a masochist, one who desires fantasy in “real life” while writing fantasies for a living.   An exploration of gender roles and sexuality, in which desire twists and turns in on itself, Venus in Fur is also a witty, unsettling look at the art of acting—onstage and off.

    The first part of what has come to be known as the Mercer Series, Leaving Home tells the story of a Newfoundland family that has emigrated and lost all sense of its place in the world.Leaving Home was named one of the "100 Most Influential Canadian Books" by the Literary Review of Canada.

    Set in the bohemian art world of downtown New York, this vivid and challenging drama explores the spiritual and emotional isolation of Anna and Pale, two outcasts who meet in the wake of the accidental death by drowning of a mutual friend. Their determined struggle toward emotional honesty and liberation--by no means guaranteed at the play's ambiguous end--exemplifies the strength, humor, and complexity of all of Lanford Wilson's work and confirms his standing as one of America's greatest living playwrights.Lanford Wilson was born in Lebanon, Missouri, in 1938 and attended the University of Chicago. A founding member of the Circle Repertory Company in New York, he has seen many of his plays produced in theaters all over the United States and abroad. He is the recipient of many awards, including a Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and two Obies.

    Dowd starts to introduce his imaginary friend Harvey, a six and a half foot rabbit, to guests at a dinner party, his sister, Veta, has seen as much of his eccentric behavior as she can tolerate. She decides to have him committed to a sanitarium to spare her daughter, Myrtle Mae, and their family, from future embarrassment. Problems arise, however, when Veta herself is mistakenly assumed to be on the fringe of lunacy when she explains to doctors that years of living with Elwood's hallucination have caused her to see Harvey also! The doctors commit Veta instead of Elwood, but when the truth comes out, the search is on for Elwood and his invisible companion. When he shows up at the sanitarium looking for his lost friend Harvey it seems that the mild-mannered Elwood's delusion has had a strange influence on more than one of the doctors. Only at the end does Veta realize that maybe Harvey isn't so bad after all.

    Mama, a sweet and capable manager, sees her children through childhood, manages to educate them and to see one of her daughters begin her career as a writer. Mama's sisters and uncle furnish a rich background for a great deal of comedy and a little incidental tragedy, while the doings of the children manage to keep everyone in pleasant turmoil. No description can do justice to the rich characterizations that fill the author's canvas. A High School version (ISBN 0-8222-0550-5) is also available at the same price. Groups interested should specify which version."

    She is the wife of a professor and the owner of a lovely house in Georgetown. She is also the president's nominee for Surgeon General. When the media discovers that once, long ago, she failed to respond for jury duty, this relatively minor misstep is portrayed as a serious moral lapse. A good friend uses the incident to make a point, scarcely thinking of the implications, and Lyssa must suffer the consequences. From that moment on, Lyssa Dent Hughes sits helplessly as the press investigates her family and friends, shattering her privacy, her career, and her world. Wendy Wasserstein's trenchant humor and sizzling dialogue combine with biting political commentary to produce a masterful, and topical, drama.

    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.

    

    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.

    The aged, abused monarch—a man in his eighties, like Harold Bloom himself—is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare’s most moving, tragic hero. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Emma Bovary or Hamlet when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of Lear, so that this book also explores an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy, pathos, and clarity in Lear.

    Formerly part of the World Dramatists series of play collections by classic and modern playwrights, including foreign works in workable and accurate translations, this title and seven others are reissued in a new format under the heading, World Classics.