Closer is hailed as one of the best plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."

    In the play, Martin—a hugely successful architect who has just turned fifty—leads an ostensibly ideal life with his loving wife and gay teenage son. But when he confides to his best friend that he is also in love with a goat (named Sylvia), he sets in motion events that will destroy his family and leave his life in tatters.The playwright himself describes it this way: “Every civilization sets quite arbitrary limits to its tolerances. The play is about a family that is deeply rocked by an unimaginable event and how they solve that problem. It is my hope that people will think afresh about whether or not all the values they hold are valid."

    The "lower class" but very much up and coming Hopcrofts are in their bright new, gadget filled kitchen anxiously giving a little party for their bank manager and his wife and an architect neighbor. Next there are the architect and his wife in their neglected, untidy flat. Then the bank manager and his wife are in their large, slightly modernized, old Victorian style kitchen. Running like a dark thread through the wild comedy of behind the scenes disasters at Christmas parties is the story of the advance of the Hopcrofts to material prosperity and independence and the decline of the others. In the final stages the little man is well and truly on top, with the others, literally and unnervingly, dancing to his tune.

    The play begins in 1977, with a meeting between adulterous lovers, Emma and Jerry, two years after their affair has ended. During the nine scenes of the play, we move back in time, through the states of their affair, with the play ending in the house of Emma and Robert, her husband, who is Jerry's best friend.The classic dramatic scenario of the love triangle is manifest in a mediation on the themes of marital infidelity, duplicity, and self-deception. Pinter writes a world that simultaneously glorifies and debases love.

    The same family appears in Act Two 25 years older and back in London, only now it’s 1979. Cloud 9 is about relationships between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria, and Sex. Cloud 9 premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979 and has since been staged all over the world.

    A maverick English teacher at odds with the young and shrewd supply teacher. A headmaster obsessed with results; a history teacher who thinks he's a fool.In Alan Bennett's classic play, staff room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.The History Boys premiered at the National in May 2004.

    This latest work from the author of Our Lady of 121st Street "shares many of the traits that have made Mr. Guirgis a playwright to reckon with in recent years: a fierce and questing mind that refuses to settle for glib answers, a gift for identifying with life's losers and an unforced eloquence that finds the poetry in lowdown street talk. [Guirgis brings to the play] a stirring sense of Christian existential pain, which wonders at the paradoxes of faith" (Ben Brantley, The New York Times).

    Clybourne Park is a beautifully structured drama by Bruce Norris that unmasks racial bigotry when a white couple sells their home to a black family.

    The two begin to interlock as the characters make their exits from Nothing On only to find themselves making entrances into the even worse nightmare going on backstage. In the end, at the disastrous final performance, the two plots can be kept separate no longer, and coalesce into a single collective nervous breakdown.

    Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholy riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.

    After a chance meeting at a museum, Evelyn and Adam embark on an intense relationship that causes shy and principled Adam to go to extraordinary lengths, including cosmetic surgery, and a betrayal of his best friend, to improve his appearance and character. In the process, Evelyn's subtle and insistent coaching results in a reconstruction of Adam's fundamental moral character. Only in a final and shocking exhibition does Evelyn reveal the nature of her interest in Adam, of her detached artist's perspective and sense of authority--to her, Adam is no more than "flesh.... one of the most perfect materials on earth. Natural, beautiful, and malleable." Labute's latest work is an intense and disturbing study not only of the uses of power within human relationships, but also of the ethics involved in the relationship of art and life. To what extent is an artist licensed to shape and change her medium or to alter the work of another artist? What is acceptable artistic material? At what point does creation become manipulation, and at what point does creation destroy? Or, is the new Adam, handsome and confident if heart broken, an admirable result of the most challenging artistic endeavor? The Shape of Things challenges society's most deeply entrenched ideas about art, manipulation, and love.

    When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed.

    Skylight premiered at the National Theatre in 1995 and then went on to become one of the most internationally successful plays of recent years.This is the definitive edition of Skylight.

    But this play-within-a-play is not historical drama. Its thought is as modern as today's police states and The Bomb; its theatrical impact has everywhere been called a major innovation. It is total theatre: philosophically problematic, visually terrifying. It engages the eye, the ear, and the mind with every imaginable dramatic device, technique, and stage picture, even including song and dance. All the forces and elements possible to the stage are fused in one overwhelming experience. This is theatre such as has rarely been seen before. The play is basically concerned with the problem of revolution. Are the same things true for the masses and for their leaders? And where, in modern times, lie the borderlines of sanity?

    After a critically acclaimed Broadway premier and successful film adaptation (starring Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, and Diane West), Rabbit Hole has been hailed as an artistic breakthrough for the highly regarded Lindsay-Abaire. A drama of what comes after tragedy, it captures “the awkwardness and pain of thinking people faced with an unthinkable situation—and eventually, their capacity for survival.” -USA TodayDavid Lindsay-Abaire is the Pulitzer-winning author of Rabbit Hole, which was made into a feature film. He is the author of Good People, Fuddy Meers, Wonder of the World, A Devil Inside and Kimberly Akimbo, as well as the book and lyrics to Shrek the Musical. He has written the screenplays for Rabbit Hole, Rise of the Guardians and Oz: The Great and Powerful. Born in South Boston, he now lives in Brooklyn.