They illuminate as with a flash of lightning a deadly serious problem--and they bring an eloquent and exceptionally powerful voice to the American theatre.Dutchman opened in New York City on March 24, 1964, to perhaps the most excited acclaim ever accorded an off-Broadway production and shortly thereafter received the Village Voice's Obie Award. The Slave, which was produced off-Broadway the following fall, continues to be the subject of heated critical controversy.

    THIS 20 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Representative British Dramas Victorian and Modern V2, by William Butler Yeats.

    In fact, Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors and Moliere's the Miser are two subsequent classics directly based on Plautine originals. Plautus himself borrowed from the Greeks, but his jokes, rapid dialogue, bawdy humor, and irreverent characterizations are the original work of an undisputed genius. The comedies printed here show him at his best, and Professor Segal's translations keep their fast, rollicking pace intact, making these the most readable and actable versions available. This volume includes, The Braggart Soldier, e Brothers Menaechmus, The Haunted House, and The Pot of Gold.

    I shall release you -SAKUNTALA When?KING When?When, like a bee, I kiss the bud of your unbruised lipAnd flood my thirsting mouth with nectar.Kalidasa's play about the love of King Dusyanta and Sakuntala, a hermitage girl, their separation by a curse, and eventual reunion, is the supreme work of Sanskrit drama by its greatest poet and playwright (c.4th century CE). Overwhelmingly erotic in tone, in peformance The Recognition of Sakuntala aimed to produce an experience of aesthetic rapture in the audience, akin to certain types of mystical experience.The pioneering English translation of Sakuntala in 1789 caused a sensation among European composers and writers (including Goethe), and it continues to be performed around the world. This vibrant new verse translation includes the famous version of the story from the Mahabharata, a poetic and dramatic text in its own right and a likely source for Kalidasa. The introduction discusses the play in the aesthetic and cultural context of ancient India.

    His images are beautiful and exact, but until now no translator had ever been able to make his characters speak unaffectedly on the American stage. Michael Dewell of the National Repertory Theatre and Carmen Zapata of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts have created these versions expressly for the stage. The result, both performable and readable, has been thoroughly revised for this edition, which is introduced by Christopher Maurer, general editor of the Complete Poetical Works of García Lorca.

    The guide presents the major debates that surround these works as they develop, from Martin Esslin's early appropriation of the plays as examples of the Theatre of the Absurd, to recent poststructuralist and postcolonial readings by critics such as Steven Connor, Mary Bryden and Declan Kiberd. Throughout, Boxall clarifies and contextualizes critical responses to the plays, and considers the difficult relationship between Beckett and his critics.

    Josef won a considerable reputation as a painter of the Cubist school, later developing his own playful primitive style. He collaborated with his brother in composing sketches, stories, and plays, as well as writing two short novels of his own and critical essays in which he defended the art of the unconscious, of children, and of savages. Following Hitler's invasion of 1939, Josef Capek was sent to a German concentration camp. He died at Belsen in April 1945.Karel Capek became a journalist and for a time stage manager of the theatre in Vinohrady. Though a writer of novels, visionary romances, travel books, stories, and essays, Karel is best known for his plays. His last plays, written just before the entry of Hitler into Czechoslovakia, deal with the rise of dictatorship and the terrible consequences of war. Karel Capek died on Christmas day, 1938.After the success of R.U.R. (Rossums' Universal Robots, 1920) seen in London in 1923, the brothers collaborated in their best-known work, The Insect Play (1921). Both plays are satires depicting the horrors of a regimented technical world and the terrible end of the populace if they fail to rise against their oppressors. They reflect the world in which the Capeks lived and give a commentary on its grosser follies.

    King James commissions Shakespeare to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot.

    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."

    It is the first of four connected plays--including 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V--generally considered Shakespeare's finest history plays. The drama of Richard II centers on the power struggle between the grandiloquent King Richard and the plain-spoken, blunt Henry Bolingbroke, who is banished from Britain at the beginning of the play. But when Henry's father John of Gaunt dies, Richard confiscates his property with no regard to his son's rights, and Bolingbroke returns to confront the king, who surrenders his crown and is imprisoned in Pomfret Castle, where he is soon murdered. This new edition in the acclaimed Oxford Shakespeare series features a freshly edited version of the text. The wide-ranging introduction describes the play's historical circumstances, both the period that it dramatizes (the start of the "wars of the roses") and the period in which it was written (late Elizabethan England), and the play's political significance in its own time and our own. It also focuses on the play's richly poetic language and its success over the centuries as a play for the stage. Extensive explanatory notes help readers at all levels understand and appreciate the language, characters, and dramatic action and the book's lively illustrations provide a sense of the historical background and performance of the play.

    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.

    But when one of the guests is stabbed to death, the festivities in this isolated house of tricks and mirrors quickly turn dangerous. Then it's up to Gillette himself, as he assumes the persona of his beloved Holmes, to track down the killer before the next victim appears. The danger

    It is based on the King Arthur legend as adapted from the T. H. White tetralogy novel The Once and Future King.The original 1960 production, directed by Moss Hart, ran on Broadway for 873 performances, winning four Tony Awards and spawning several revivals, foreign productions and a 1967 film version. The original cast album was America's top-selling LP for 60 weeks.

    Allied forces liberate Nazi-occupied Brno, Moravia. For Gerta Schnirch, daughter of a Czech mother and a German father aligned with Hitler, it’s not deliverance; it’s a sentence. She has been branded an enemy of the state. Caught in the changing tides of a war that shattered her family—and her innocence—Gerta must obey the official order: she, along with all ethnic Germans, is to be expelled from Czechoslovakia. With nothing but the clothes on her back and an infant daughter, she’s herded among thousands, driven from the only home she’s ever known. But the injustice only makes Gerta stronger, more empowered, and more resolved to seek justice. Her journey is a relentless quest for a seemingly impossible forgiveness. And one day, she will return.Spanning decades and generations, Kateřina Tučková’s breathtaking novel illuminates a long-neglected episode in Czech history. One of exclusion and prejudice, of collective shame versus personal guilt, all through the eyes of a charismatic woman whose courage will affect all the lives she’s touched. Especially that of the daughter she loved, fought for, shielded, and would come to inspire.

    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.