Louis in the mid-thirties––a lovely Sunday for a picnic at Creve Coeur Lake. But Dorothea, one of Tennessee Williams’s most engaging "marginally youthful," forever hopeful Southern belles, is home waiting for a phone call from the principal of the high school where she teaches civics––the man she expects to fulfill her deferred dreams of romance and matrimony. Williams’s unerring dialogue reveals each of the four characters of A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur with precision and clarity: Dorothea, who does even her "setting-up exercises" with poignant flutters; Bodey, her German roommate, who wants to pair Dotty with her beer-drinking twin, Buddy, thereby assuring nieces, nephews, and a family for both herself and Dotty; Helena, a fellow teacher, with the "eyes of a predatory bird," who would like to "rescue" Dotty from her vulgar, common surroundings and substitute an elegant but sterile spinster life; and Miss Gluck, a newly orphaned and distraught neighbor, whom Bodey comforts with coffee and crullers while Helena mocks them both. Focusing on one morning and one encounter of four women, Williams once again skillfully explores, with comic irony and great tenderness, the meaning of loneliness, the need for human connection, as well as the inevitable compromises one must make to get through "the long run of life."

    Its directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, The Metal Children explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death.

    Banks learns that one of the young men he has seen occasionally about the house is about to become his son-in-law. Daughter Kay announces the engagement out of nowhere. Mrs. Banks and her sons are happy, but Mr. Banks is in a dither. The groom-to-be, Buckley Dunstan, appears on the scene and Mr. Banks realizes that the engagement is serious. Buckley and Kay don't want a "big" wedding just a simple affair with a few friends! We soon learn, however, that the "few" friends idea is out. Then trouble really begins. The guest list grows larger each day, a caterer is called in, florists, furniture movers and dressmakers take over, and the Banks household is soon caught in turmoil.

    It has been seven years since he stood in that same spot; seven years since he left his family and their history behind him.As a teenager, Rudi discovered that his father was a doctor at Auschwitz. Trying to reconcile his inherited guilt, Rudi lashed out against his family and his friends, and eventually fled to Germany. While there, he follows in his father's footsteps by studying medicine, and falls in love with Sarah, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.Questioning redemption, love, guilt, and the sins of the father, East of Berlin is a tour de force that follows Rudi's emotional upheaval as he comes to terms with a frightening past that was never his own.

    Hunter's A Bright New Boise is a earnest comedy about the meager profits of modern faith. In the bleak, corporate break room of a craft store in Idaho, someone is summoning The Rapture. Will, who has fled his rural hometown after a scandal at his Evangelical church, comes to the Hobby Lobby, not only f

    Winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Playwright, David Lindsay-Abaire's Kimberly-Akimbo focuses, with uncanny depth and quirky wit, on a sixteen-year-old girl suffering from a disease that causes her body to age nearly five times faster than it should.

    . . . Mr. Eno's voice, which teases out the poetry in the pedestrian and finds glinting humor in the static that infuses our faltering efforts to communicate, is as distinctive as any American playwright's today."—The New York Times"Weird and wonderful . . . Eno's familiar sudden-shifting between profound and playful verbiage is delightfully disarming and sometimes awfully funny."—VarietyA wonderfully moving new play by the Pulitzer Prize–finalist author of Thom Pain (based on nothing).Meet Bob and Jennifer and their new neighbors John and Pony, two suburban couples who have more in common than their identical last names. Boasting the playwright's quintessential existential quirkiness, this new comedy finds poetry in the banal while humorously exploring our ever-floundering efforts at communication. Listed as one of New York Times's Best Plays of 2012, The Realistic Joneses will receive its Broadway premiere in spring 2014 starring Toni Collete, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts and Marisa Tomei.Will Eno is the author of Thom Pain (based on nothing), which ran for a year Off-Broadway and was a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Other works include Middletown, The Flu Season, Tragedy: a tragedy, Intermission, and Gnit, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt. His many awards include the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award, the Horton Foote Prize, and the first-ever Marian Seldes/Garson Kanin Fellowship by the Theater Hall of Fame.

    Unfortunately, her imaginary friend Mr. Marmalade doesn't have much time for her. Not to mention he beats up his personal assistant, has a cocaine addic-tion, and a penchant for pornography and very long dildos. Larry, her only real friend, is the youngest suicide attempt in the history of New Jersey. MR. MARMALADE is a savage black comedy about what it takes to grow up in these difficult times.

    They are constantly in pursuit of adventure that takes them far away from their homeland of Victorian America. Intelligent, intrepid, and inquisitive, they long for discovery of that which is greater than their own world while still maintaining some sense of gentlewoman decorum. But all good trips start with a purpose and end in a final destination.

    In the earlier play Ostrovsky had adopted a satiric tone that proved him a worthy disciple of Gogol, the great founder of Russian realism. Not one lovable character appears in that gloomy picture of merchant life in Moscow; even the old mother repels us by her stupidity more than she attracts us by her kindliness. No ray of light penetrates the "realm of darkness" -- to borrow a famous phrase from a Russian critic -- conjured up before us by the young dramatist. In Poverty Is No Crime we see the other side of the medal. Ostrovsky had now been affected by the Slavophile school of writers and thinkers, who found in the traditions of Russian society treasures of kindliness and love that they contrasted with the superficial glitter of Western civilization. Life in Russia is varied as elsewhere, and Ostrovsky could change his tone without doing violence to realistic truth. The tradesmen had not wholly lost the patriarchal charm of their peasant fathers. A poor apprentice is the hero of Poverty Is No Crime, and a wealthy manufacturer the villain of the piece. Good-heartedness is the touchstone by which Ostrovsky tries character, and this may be hidden beneath even a drunken and degraded exterior. The scapegrace, Lyubim Tortsov, has a sound Russian soul, and at the end of the play rouses his hard, grasping brother, who has been infatuated by a passion for aping foreign fashions, to his native Russian worth. Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886) was an early Russian Realist whose work led to the founding of the Moscow Arts Theatre and to the career of Stanislavsky. He has been acknowledged to be the greatest of the Russian dramatists.

    A farce with a hilarious drunk scene for two stylish comediennes.

    [MacIvor is a writer with an angular sense of humour and an uncommon knack for probing basic elements and truths of human behaviour." ?Vit Wagner, Toronto StarThis Is a Play is a hilarious postmodern romp through the interior lives of actors in a bad play."Ingenious, whimsical, a lyrical lunacy in the writing, This Is A Play is a theatre experience comedy you might associate with Tom Stoppard." ?Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

    A composer coming to terms with his genius. And, even though they're separated by 200 years, these two people share an obsession that might, even just for a moment, make time stand still. Drama, memory and music combine to transport you from present-day New York to nineteenth-century Austria in this extraordinary American play about passion, parenthood and the moments of beauty that can transform a life.

    Typical except that Cody is black--"rich, black, and different," in the words of Belinda, who finds herself attracted to a former (white) classmate. As the battle for her affections is waged, Belinda and Cody frankly doubt the foundation of their initial attraction, opening the door wide to a swath of bigotry and betrayal. Staged on continually shifting moral ground that challenges our received notions about gender, ethnicity, and even love itself, This Is How It Goes unblinkingly explores the myriad ways in which the wild card of race is played by both black and white in America.

    In this sly critique of contemporary relationships, Reza skillfully picks apart the friendship of three men via a bowl of olives and a white-on-white painting. Now translated into more than 30 languages, Art continues to be performed worldwide, even as Reza's other plays have garnered similar acclaim. Life x 3, Reza's most recent offering, again highlights her satirical wit as two couples face off in three different versions of the dinner from hell. Praised as "compact, cool and clever" by Christopher Isherwood of Variety, Reza uses the acidic exchanges of her characters to illuminate their inner desire for love and acceptance. Also included in this edition are two earlier plays, The Unexpected Man and Conversations After a Burial. Each elucidates the startling difference between public and private life, be it in the confines of a train compartment or a country estate in the aftermath of a loved one's passing.