Loot


Joe Orton - 1967
    Dennis is a hearse driver for an undertaker. They have robbed the bank next door to the funeral parlour and have returned to Hal's home to hide-out with the loot. Hal's mother has just died and the pair put the money in her coffin, hiding the body elsewhere in the house. With the arrival of Inspector Truscott, the thickened plot turns topsy-turvy. Playing with all the conventions of popular farce, Orton creates a world gone mad and examines in detail English attitudes of the mid 20th century. The play has been called a Freudian nightmare, which sports with superstitions about death - and life. It is regularly produced in professional and amateur productions. First produced in London in 1966, Loot was hailed as "the most genuinely quick-witted, pungent and sprightly entertainment by a new, young British playwright for a decade" (Sunday Telegraph).The Student Edition offers a plot summary, full commentary, character notes and questions for study, besides a chronology and bibliography.

Three Days of Rain


Richard Greenberg
    He takes up temporary residence in the unused space where thirty-five years earlier, his father Ned, and Ned's late partner Theo, both architects, lived and designed the great house that would make them famous. Sleepless and emotionally jangled, Walker scours the old empty space for clues, evidences or keys to the tortured family history. Discovering his father's journal hidden under the bed, he finds it as unforthcoming as his nearly silent father had been. Walker is joined by his sister, Nan, and their friend from childhood, Pip, Theo's son, to hear the reading of Ned's will. It is there that Walker forces the confrontation that the others need. After an evening of harrowing and sometimes comically inadvertent revelations, Walker disappears once more. This time he returns later that evening with a surprising, but to him, definitive solution to the family puzzle. We travel back to 1960, when Ned's journal begins. We meet the parents at the same age their children are in Act One: Ned, who seems very different from the cold monster the children conjured; the charismatic and putative genius, Theo; and Lena, Walker and Nan's mother, the delightful, troubled "Southern woman who admits to thirty." In the guise of a love story, we are offered all the information needed to devise an alternative reading of the sad, unexpectedly romantic family story."

The Vertical Hour


David Hare - 2006
    With her faith in academia beginning to erode and memories from her time in the Balkans and the Middle East haunting her, Nadia travels with her boyfriend, Philip Lucas, to rural England to visit her father, Oliver, who has his own past to reckon with. The challenge of Nadia's encounter with Oliver forces decisions on her that will affect her for the rest of her life.   For thirty-five years, David Hare has written plays that capture the flavor of our times and address the interconnection between our secret motives and our public politics. In The Vertical Hour, he continues his investigation of the morality of international intervention, and of how the war in Iraq impacts the lives of British and American citizens.

Woman in Mind


Alan Ayckbourn - 1986
    By turns sad and funny, satiric and moving, Alan Ayckbourn's intelligent British comedy Woman in Mind charts, without sentimentality or heartless irony, a frowsy middle-aged Englishwoman's hopeless descent into psychosis.

A Little Night Music


Hugh Wheeler - 1973
    When the traveling actress performs in Fredrik's town, the estranged lovers' passion rekindles. This strikes a flurry of jealousy and suspicion between Desirée; Fredrik; Fredrick's wife, Anne; Desirée's current lover, the Count; and the Count's wife, Charlotte. Both men – as well as their jealous wives – agree to join Desirée and her family for a weekend in the country at Desirée's mother's estate. With everyone in one place, infinite possibilities of new romances and second chances bring endless surprises.

The Revolutionists


NOT A BOOK
    Playwright Olympe De Gouge, assassin Charlotte Corday, and former queen (and fan of ribbons) Marie Antoinette, and Haitian rebel Marianne Angelle hang out, murder Marat, loose their heads, and try to beat back the extremist insanity in revolutionary Paris. This grand and dream-tweaked comedy is about violence and legacy, feminism and terrorism, art and how we actually go about changing the world. It a true story. Or total fiction. Or a play about a play. Or a raucous resurrection that ends in a song and a scaffold.

The Tale of the Allergist's Wife and Other Plays: The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset


Charles Busch - 2000
    Of his latest play, The New York Times has written, "Uproarious ... wall-to-wall laughs ... Mr. Busch has swum straight into the mainstream and stays comfortably afloat there." Busch is the author of such plays as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom -- one of the longest-running plays in Off-Broadway history -- and Psycho Beach Party, a cross between Gidget and Spellbound. After a successful Off-Broadway run at New York City's Manhattan Theater Club, Busch moves to Broadway with The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, a hilarious comedy about a self-absorbed Upper West Side doctor's wife whose life is devoted to mornings at the Whitney, afternoons at the Museum of Modern Art, and evenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her world is shaken and transformed when a childhood friend makes an unexpected visit.

The Women of Lockerbie (Acting Edition)


Deborah Brevoort - 2005
    She meets the women of Lockerbie, who are fighting the U.S. government to obtain the clothing of the victims found in the plane s wreckage. The women, determined to convert an act of hatred into an act of love, want to wash the clothes of the dead and return them to the victim s families. THE WOMEN OF LOCKERBIE is loosely inspired by a true story, although the characters and situations in the play are purely fictional. Written in the structure of a Greek tragedy, it is a poetic drama about the triumph of love over hate. Winner of the silver medal in the Onassis International Playwriting Competition and the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award.

Speaking in Tongues


Andrew Bovell - 1998
    Nine parallel lives, interlocked by four infidelities, one missing person and a mysterious stiletto, are woven through a fragmented series of confessionals and interrogations that gradually reveal a darker side of human nature.

All I want for Christmas: A Christmas Medical Romance (Forest Vale Hospital, #6)


Emily Hayes - 2021
    As with all Emily Hayes books, you can guarantee some hot scenes and a Happy Ever After.Dr Nicole Graham is a hardworking Pediatrician at Forest Vale hospital. She meets a beautiful newcomer to Forest Vale at a Christmas party and is immediately drawn to her.But, the newcomer has her own complex story and Nicole doesn't do relationships, so it would never work, right?What will it take for Nicole to finally give her heart to another?Join Nicole and Suzie for Christmas parties, carols and festivities. Will Nicole get all she wants for Christmas?

Chicago


Fred Ebb - 1981
    In roaring twenties Chicago, chorine Roxie Hart murders a faithless lover and convinces her hapless husband Amos to take the rap...until he finds out he's been duped and turns on Roxie. Convicted and sent to death row, Roxie and another Merry Murderess Velma Kelly, vie for the spotlight and the headlines, ultimately joining forces in search of the American Dream fame, fortune and acquittal. This sharp edged satire features a dazzling score that sparked immortal staging by Bob Fosse. 'A pulse racing revival that flies us right into musical heaven.-The New York Times Wildly entertaining...[with a] dazzling score.-New York Daily News

God's Ear: A Play


Jenny Schwartz - 2008
    Through the skillfully disarming use of clichéd language and homilies, the play explores with subtle grace and depth the way the death of a child tears one family apart, while showcasing the talents of a promising young playwright who "in [a] very modern way [is] making a rather old-fashioned case for the power of the written word" (Jason Zinoman, The New York Times).Fresh from its critically acclaimed off-off-Broadway run this past spring, God's Ear moves off-Broadway to the Vineyard Theatre in April 2008.

American Moor


Keith Hamilton Cobb - 2020
    not necessarily in that order.Keith Hamilton Cobb embarks on a poetic exploration that examines the experience and perspective of black men in America through the metaphor of Shakespeare's character Othello, offering up a host of insights that are by turns introspective and indicting, difficult and deeply moving. American Moor is a play about race in America, but it is also a play about who gets to make art, who gets to play Shakespeare, about whose lives and perspectives matter, about actors and acting, and about the nature of unadulterated love.American Moor has been seen across America, including a successful run off-Broadway in 2019. This edition features an introduction by Professor Kim F. Hall, Barnard College.

Exit Through the Wound


North Morgan - 2011
    This includes his Greek parents, who bankroll his glorious isolation in London. This includes his career as a consultant, his clients, his boss, the majority of his colleagues and people he sees on the way to work. This includes the dumb model boyfriend of the American girl that he has decided to fall in love with. This includes her also. When Maine fails to obliterate himself through drug overdoses, the obsessive changing of his legal name and half-hearted thoughts of suicide, it falls to his central nervous system to pick up the challenge of trying to kill him off. Can Maine survive with his lack of values intact?

Aria Da Capo


Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1920
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.