The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies [The Shoemaker's Holiday, Every Man In His Humour, Eastward Ho!] (Oxford English Drama)


Thomas Dekker - 2001
    Included are The Roaring Girl, The Shoemaker's Holiday, Eastward Ho!, and Every Man in His Humour. The text is freshly edited using modern spelling. A critical introduction, a wide-ranging annotation, and an informative bibliography illuminate the plays' cultural contexts and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike.

An Experiment with an Air Pump


Shelagh Stephenson - 1998
    1999 - In a world of scientific chaos, cloning and genetic engineering, the cellar of the same house reveals a dark secret buried for 200 years.

Seven Jewish Children: a play for Gaza


Caryl Churchill - 2009
    Structured as the text of seven statements parents might say to their children either in response to the events or attempting to explain them, they express regret, anger, intelligence, blind hatred, fear, and compassion.

The Crucible: Text and Criticism


Arthur MillerAldous Huxley - 1971
    Based on historical people and real events, Miller's drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town's most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence. Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing "Political opposition...is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence." The Viking Critical Library edition of Arthur Miller's dramatic recreation of the Salem witch trials contains the complete text of The Crucible as well as extensive critical and contextual material about the play and the playwright, including:Selections from Miller's writings on his most frequently performed playEssays on the historical background of The Crucible, including personal narratives by participants in the trials and records of witchcraft in Salem from the original documentsReviews of The Crucible, in production by Brooks Atkinson, Walter Kerr, Eric Bentley, and othersExcerpts from Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Sorcières de Salem, a "spin-off" of Miller's play, and three analogous works by Twain, Shaw, and Budd SchulbergCritical essays on the play, on Miller, and on the play in the context of Miller's oeuvreAn introduction by the editor, a chronology, a list of topics for discussion and papers prepared by Malcolm Cowley, and a bibliography

August: Osage County


Tracy Letts - 2008
    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.

Those Who Can’t, Teach


Haresh Sharma - 2010
    As the teachers struggle daily to nurture and groom, the students prefer to hang out and “chillax”. With upskirting and Facebooking, griping and politicking, school takes on a whole new meaning as the colourful characters struggle to prove that those who can, teach.Written by Singapore’s most prolific playwright Haresh Sharma, Those Who Can’t, Teach was first staged by The Necessary Stage in 1990 to critical acclaim. Twenty years later, Sharma revisits this classic to revitalise it for the Singapore Arts Festival 2010, transforming it into a powerful portrayal of the pressures and challenges facing teachers (and students) in schools in the 21st century.“The play throws up questions on the roles of parents, students and teachers, but does not collapse into an impotent tirade against society. The script is joyous. The laughter is warmly wry, not caustic.” —The Straits Times“Those Who Can’t, Teach does much to do away with the stereotypes and fallacies of the teaching profession.” —The Business Times

Antigone - In a Version by Bertolt Brecht


Bertolt Brecht - 1947
    Friedrich Hlderlin translated Sophocles into German, Brecht adapted Hlderlin, and now Judith Malina has rendered Brecht's version into a stunning English incarnation. Available for the first time in English.

Jason and Medea


Apollonius of Rhodes
    But Jason planting his feet apart stood to receive them, as a reef in the sea confronts the tossing billows in a gale.' The tragic, epic love affair that allowed Jason to get the Golden Fleece. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Apollonius of Rhodes (3rd century BCE).

The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Novel for Serious People


Charles Osborne - 2000
    This edition contains substantial excerpts from the original four-act version which was never produed, as well as the full test of the final three-act version, selections from Wilde's correspondence, and commentary by George Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, St. John Hankin, and James Agate.

Goldberg Street: Short Plays and Monologues


David Mamet - 1985
    From the Pulitzer Prize- winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross, here is a collection of thirty-two one-act plays and short dramatic pieces that David Mamet himself considers to be some of the best writing he has ever done.

Plays: One


Arthur Miller - 1988
    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.

Blood Knot and Other Plays


Athol Fugard - 1989
    "A rare playwright, who could be a primary candidate for either the Nobel Prize in Literature or the Nobel Peace Prize."--Mel Gussow, The New Yorker

Juvenal and Persius


Juvenal
    Her notes also give guidance to the literary and historical allusions that pepper Persius's and Juvenal's satirical poems--which were clearly aimed at a sophisticated urban audience. Both poets adopt the mask of an angry man, and sharp criticism of the society in which they live is combined with flashes of sardonic humor in their satires. Whether targeting common and uncommon vices, the foolishness of prayers, the abuse of power by emperors and the Roman elite, the folly and depravity of Roman wives, or decadence, materialism, and corruption, their tone is generally one of righteous indignation.Juvenal and Persius are seminal as well as stellar figures in the history of satirical writing. Juvenal especially had a lasting influence on English writers of the Renaissance and succeeding centuries.

The Dear Departed: A Comedy in One Act


Stanley Houghton - 1963
    Recreation Department twenty-fourth annual one-act play tournament, The Arts Club Players present "The Dear Departed," by Stanley Houghton, directed by Herman P. Riess.

Plays by Susan Glaspell


Susan Glaspell - 1987
    Although long neglected, the four plays collected in this critical edition reveal the thoroughly modern nature of her concerns. Trifles (1916) develops a feminist critique of social role, while The Outside (1917) stages a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In The Verge (1921), Glaspell presented an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill. And though Inheritors (1921) is far more conventional, it nonetheless questions the nature and reality of American pieties. Long known for a single play, Glaspell now emerges as a significant figure in the history of American drama, a woman of genuine creative innovation.