Book picks similar to
BLKS by Aziza Barnes


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Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street


Stephen Sondheim - 1974
    Dunstan's Church, just a few blocks away from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, they say, he robbed and murdered more than 150 customers. To dispose of their remains, he carried them through underground tunnels to the bakery of one Mrs. Lovett a few blocks away, where they supplied the stuffing for her meat pies, the favorite mid-day repast of the lawyers who worked nearby and got their shaves from Sweeney Todd. The man you lunched with yesterday could be your lunch today!The story first appeared in 1846 as a best-selling "penny dreadful", a sensational thriller published in installments. Before the final chapters even had a chance to hit the stands, the first stage version was packing them in at the Royal Britannia Saloon. Since then, there have been numerous stage and literary versions of the story.This script has been specially commissioned by Blackstone Audio, Inc., based on the original sources of the tale.

The Language Archive


Julia Cho - 2012
    Closer to home, though, language is failing him. He doesn't know what to say to his wife, Mary, to keep her from leaving him, and he doesn't recognize the deep feelings that his lab assistant, Emma, has for him.

Drawer Boy


Michael Healey - 1999
    When a young actor from the big city lives with two aging bachelor farmers to gather stories about rural life, the farmers' lives are irrevocably altered when art attempts to imitate life and the line between truth and fiction is crossed.

We Are Proud To Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 - 1915


Jackie Sibblies Drury - 2014
    As the full force of a horrific past crashes into the good intentions of the present, what seemed a far-away place and time is suddenly all too close to home. Just whose story are they telling?Award-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury collides the political with the personal in a play that is irreverently funny and seriously brave.We Are Proud To Present . . . received its European premiere at the Bush Theatre, London, on 28 February 2014.

The Vagina Monologues


Eve Ensler - 1996
    They were a little shy. But once they got going, you couldn't stop them. Women secretly love to talk about their vaginas. They get very excited, mainly because no one's ever asked them before.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time


Simon Stephens - 2012
    I know all the countries of the world and the capital cities. And every prime number up to 7507. Christopher, fifteen years old, stands beside Mrs Shears's dead dog. It has been speared with a garden fork, it is seven minutes after midnight, and Christopher is under suspicion. He records each fact in the book he is writing to solve the mystery of who murdered Wellington. He has an extraordinary brain and is exceptional at maths, but he is ill-equipped to interpret everyday life. He has never ventured alone beyond the end of his road, he detests being touched and he distrusts strangers. But Christopher's detective work, forbidden by his father, takes him on a frightening journey that turns his world upside-down.Simon Stephens's adaptation of Mark Haddon's bestselling, award-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time offers a richly theatrical exploration of this touching and bleakly humorous tale.

9 Parts of Desire - Acting Edition


Heather Raffo - 2006
    Book annotation not available for this title.

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.

Torch Song Trilogy


Harvey Fierstein - 1978
    The four hour-plus play begins with a soliloquy in which he explains his cynical disillusionment with love.Each act focuses on a different phase in Arnold's life. In the first, Arnold meets Ed, who is uncomfortable with his bisexuality. In the second, one year later, Arnold meets Alan, and the two settle down into a blissful existence that includes plans to adopt a child, until tragedy strikes. In the third, several years later, Arnold is a single father raising gay teenager David. Arnold is forced to deal with his mother's intolerance and disrespect when she visits from Florida.

Moon Over Buffalo


Ken Ludwig - 1995
    This backstage farce by the author of Lend Me a Tenor brought Carol Burnett back to Broadway co-starring with Philip Bosco as her megalomanic, drunken husband and leading man. Fate has given these thespians one more shot at starring roles in The Scarlet Pimpernel epic and director Frank Capra himself is en route to Buffalo to catch their matinee performance. Will Charlotte appear or run off with their agent? Will George be sober enough to emote? Will Capra see Cyrano, Private Lives or a disturbing mixture of the two? Hilarious misunderstandings pile on madcap misadventures, in this valentine to Theatre Hams everywhere.

Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970


Adrienne Rich - 1993
    Her unmistakable voice, speaking even from the earliest poems with rare assurance and precision, wrestles with urgent questions while never failing to explore new poetic territory.In Collected Early Poems, readers will once again bear witness to Rich's triumphant assertion of the centrality of poetry in our intertwined personal and political lives.

Dear Evan Hansen


Steven Levenson - 2017
    Evan is shy, lonely, and bullied for it―teeming with the irrepressible emotions all too familiar with anyone who's ever been a teenager. After a tragedy strikes, Evan's life suddenly gets turned around, but is it ultimately for the better?

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity


Kristoffer Diaz - 2011
    He's a really good professional wrestler. He's not the champion though - that's the impossibly charismatic Chad Deity. When Mace discovers a young Indian-American Brooklyn kid whose charisma rivals that of the champ, Mace decides to get him a job in the company. Only problem is, the boss has a very specific plan for the duo: put them onscreen as terrorists. Kristoffer Diaz's The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity is a serious minded comedy about wrestling, geopolitics, and raisin bread."The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity...has the delicious crackle and pop of a galloping, honest-to-God, all-American satire." - The New York Times"Ladies and Gentlemen, in this corner of Chicago's rich theater scene, weighing in with a unique combo of vigorous physicality and wickedly intelligent humor, please put your hands together for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, a vibrantly entertaining, insightful new play about - wait for it - professional wrestling."- Variety

What's the Story: Essays about Art, Theater and Storytelling


Anne Bogart - 2014
    In this her latest collection of essays she explores the story-telling impulse, and asks how she, as a product of postmodernism, can reconnect to the primal act of making meaning and telling stories. She also asks how theatre practitioners can think of themselves not as stagers of plays but orchestrators of social interactions and participants in an on-going dialogue about the future.We dream. And then occasionally we attempt to share our dreams with others. In recounting our dreams we try to construct a narrative... We also make stories out of our daytime existence. The human brain is a narrative creating machine that takes whatever happens and imposes chronology, meaning, cause and effect... We choose. We can choose to relate to our circumstances with bitterness or with openness. The stories that we tell determine nothing less than personal destiny. (From the introduction)This compelling new book is characteristically made up of chapters with one-word titles: Spaciousness, Narrative, Heat, Limits, Error, Politics, Arrest, Empathy, Opposition, Collaboration and Sustenance. In addition to dipping into neuroscience, performance theory and sociology, Bogart also recounts vivid stories from her own life. But as neuroscience indicates, the event of remembering what happened is in fact the creation of something new."

Harvey


Mary Chase - 1944
    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.