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Trust / Nothing hurts by Falk Richter
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Over the River and Through the Woods
Joe DiPietro - 1999
His parents retired and moved to Florida. That doesn't mean his family isn't still in Jersey. In fact, he sees both sets of his grandparents every Sunday for dinner. This is routine until he has to tell them that he's been offered a dream job. The job he's been waiting for - marketing executive - would take him away from his beloved, but annoying, grandparents. He tells them. The news doesn't sit so well. Thus begins a series of schemes to keep Nick around. How could he betray his family's love to move to Seattle for a job, wonder his grandparents? Well, Frank, Aida, Nunzio, and Emma do their level best, that includes bringing the lovely - and single - Caitlin O'Hare as bait.
Celebration & The Room
Harold Pinter - 2000
In his newest play, Celebration, he continues to examine the darker places of relationships. Celebration is an acerbic portrait of a sated culture choking on its own material success. Startling, full of black humor and wicked satire, Celebration displays a vivid zest for life. Also included in this volume is Pinter's classic play The Room. Both plays are invested with the elements that make Pinter's work unique: the disturbingly familiar dialogue, subtle characterization, and abrupt mood and power shifts among characters, which can be by turns terrifying, moving, and wildly funny.
The Invisible Hand
Ayad Akhtar - 2015
In remote Pakistan, Nick Bright awaits his fate. A successful financial trader, Nick is kidnapped by an Islamic militant group, but with no one negotiating his release, he agrees to an unusual plan. He will earn his own ransom by helping his captors manipulate and master the world commodities and currency markets. "[A] tense, provocative thriller about the unholy nexus of international terrorism and big bucks...."-Seattle Times "Ahktar again turns hypersensitive subjects into thought-provoking and thoughtful drama"-Newsday "The prime theme is pulsing and alive: when human lives become just one more commodity to be traded, blood eventually flows in the streets"-Financial Times "Whip-smart and twisty"-Time Out New York "The Invisible Hand offers genuine insight into the future of the West" (Village Voice).
The Real Inspector Hound & After Magritte
Tom Stoppard - 1969
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.'
To Kill a Mockingbird (The Screenplay): And Related Readings
Horton Foote - 1900
She Kills Monsters: Young Adventurers Edition
Qui Nguyen - 2012
When Agnes finds Tilly's Dungeons & Dragons notebook, however, she stumbles into a journey of discovery and action-packed adventure in the imaginary world that was Tilly's refuge. In this high-octane dramatic comedy laden with homicidal fairies, nasty ogres, and 90s pop culture, acclaimed young playwright Qui Nguyen offers a heart-pounding homage to the geek and warrior within us all.
Lorca Plays: One: Blood Wedding, Doña Rosita the Spinster, and Yerma
Federico García Lorca - 1935
Blood Wedding tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage; Doña Rosita the Spinster follows the appalling fate of a young woman beguiled into the expectation of marriage and left stranded for a lifetime whilst Yerma is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean struggle against the curse of infertility. Set in and around his home territory, Granada, the plays return again and again to the lives of passionate individuals, particularly women, trapped by the social conventions of narrow peasant communities. The plays appear here in new playable translations.
Hughie
Eugene O'Neill - 1958
Only two characters appear on stage; Hughie, the third and most important one, is dead. It is Hughie's innocence, gullibility, and need to believe in a far more exciting existence than he ever knew which gives some kind of purpose to the shabby lives of the two who remain. O'Neill here again writes of the defeated and the courage that comes by way of illusions reflecting still other illusions in a world that needs them all.Hughie, the only surviving manuscript from a series of eight one-act monologue plays that O'Neill planned in 1940, was completed in 1941.
A Feminine Ending
Sarah Treem - 2009
But at the moment, she's living in New York City and writing advertising jingles to pay the rent while her fiancé, Jack, pursues his singing career. So when Amanda's mother, Kim, calls one evening from New Hampshire and asks for her help with something she can't discuss over the phone, Amanda is only too happy to leave New York. Once home, Kim reveals that she's leaving Amanda's father and needs help packing. Amanda balks and ends up (gently) hitting the postman, who happens to be her first boyfriend. They spend the night together in an apple orchard, where Amanda tries to tell Billy how her life got sidetracked. It has something to do with being a young woman in a profession that only recognizes famous men. Billy acts like he might have the answer, but doesn't. Neither does Amanda's mother. Or, for that matter, her father. A Feminine Ending is a gentle, bittersweet comedy about a girl who knows what she wants but not quite how to get it. Her parents are getting divorced, her fiancée is almost famous, her first love reappears, and there's a lot of noise in her head but none of it is music. Until the end. "Ending′ is a promising beginning...the playwright has a sense of humor that brings to mind a budding Wendy Wasserstein and a liberated sense of form that evokes a junior Paula Vogel."-Los Angeles Times "Darkly comic. FEMININE ENDING has undeniable wit." -New York Post. "Appealingly outlandish humor." -The New York Times. "Courageous. The 90-minute piece swerves with nerve and naivete. Sarah Treem has a voice all her own." -Newsday.
Wasted
Kate Tempest - 2013
I'm changing things. This is it.Three old friends in their mid-twenties. One remarkable day. For Ted, Danny and Charlotte, it’s time to seize control. Make a difference. Change things. This is it.A day trip through the parks and raves and cafes of South London, where life is what you make it. The rapid fire words of Kate Tempest paint a picture of lives less ordinary in an unforgiving world, sound-tracked by an exhilarating score.The drama mixes rap-style poetry delivered with microphones and self-reflexive addresses to the audience.A play about love, life and losing your mind, and the first play from one of the UK’s most exciting performance poets, Kate Tempest.
Bravely Fought The Queen
Mahesh Dattani - 2003
The family in focus is that of two brothers, Jiten and Nitin, who run an advertising agency and are married to sisters: Dolly and Alka. Their mother, Baa, moves between the two households, attached more to her memories of the past than to any present reality. Marital friction, sibling rivalry, the traditional tension between mother-in-law and daughters-in-law, the darker moments of business and personal dealings, the play takes us through the entire gamut of emotional experience as it winds to a climactic finish. With its relentless pace, crisp idiom and unflinching insight into the urban milieu, this is a play that confirms Mahesh Dattani's reputation as India's most influential playwright.
The Shoe-Horn Sonata
John Misto - 1996
Now, after a half-century separation, the filming of a TV documentary forces them to relive the past. Woven into their 50 years of separation are a shoe-horn and the threads of loyalty and love which form their 'uncommon bond'.
All New People
Zach Braff - 2012
Away from the rest of the world, this perfect escape is interrupted by a motley parade of misfits who show up and change his plans. A hired beauty, a fireman, and an eccentric British real estate agent desperately trying to stay in the country all suddenly find themselves tangled together in a beach house where the mood is anything but sunny.This pithy piece portrays a scenario of attempted suicide with mordant humour, where a basis of social alienation leads to unexpected connections. The richly-drawn characters are quick-witted and narcissistic yet self-aware and the dialogue is fluid and witty."All New People" is centred around a clever concept which works as a catalyst for both angst-fuelled scrutiny and morbid humour.