Elyot and Amanda, once married and now honeymooning with new spouses at the same hotel, meet by chance, reignite the old spark and impulsively elope. After days of being reunited, they again find their fiery romance alternating between passions of love and anger. Their aggrieved spouses appear and a roundelay of affiliations ensues as the women first stick together, then apart, and new partnerships are formed.

    David Hare's play, which details the struggle of four clergymen to make sense of their mission in South London, opened to universal acclaim.

    There are only three characters: a man named Deeley, his wife Kate, and Anna, a friend of Kate's whom they have not seen for twenty years. Beneath the surface of their taut, witty conversation lurks suggestions of darkness, until the present is overwhelmed with intimations of some frightening past. �

    The popular image of the men who made the bomb is of dispassionate intellects who number-crunched their way towards a weapon whose devastating power they could not even imagine. But in his Tony Award-winning play Copenhagen, Michael Frayn shows us that these men were passionate, philosophical, and all too human, even though one of the three historical figures in his drama, Werner Heisenberg, was the head of the Nazis' effort to develop a nuclear weapon. The play's other two characters, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, are involved with Heisenberg in an after-death analysis of an actual meeting that has long puzzled historians. In 1941, the German scientist visited Bohr, his old mentor and long-time friend, in Copenhagen. After a brief discussion in the Bohrs' home, the two men went for a short walk. What they discussed on that walk, and its implications for both scientists, have long been a mystery, even though both scientists gave (conflicting) accounts in later years. Frayn's cunning conceit is to use the scientific underpinnings of atomic physics, from Schr?dinger's famous cat to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, to explore how an individual's point of view renders attempts to discover the ultimate truth of any human interaction fundamentally impossible. To Margrethe, Heisenberg was always an untrustworthy student, eager to steal from her husband's knowledge. To Bohr, Heisenberg was a brilliant if irresponsible foster son, whose lack of moral compass was part of his genius. As for Heisenberg, the man who could have built the bomb but somehow failed to, his dilemma is at the heart of the play's conflict. Frayn's clever dramatic structure, which returns repeatedly to particular scenes from different points of view, allows several possible theories as to what his motives could have been. This isn't the first play to successfully merge the world

    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.

    With SAINT JOAN (1923) Shaw reached the height of his fame and Joan is one of his finest creations; forceful, vital, and rebelling against the values that surround her. The play distils Shaw's views on the subjects of politics, religion and creative evolution.

    

    This new volume collects the author’s plays written in the past five years, including References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot ("effortlessly melds otherworldly fantasy with gritty realism to make sparks fly onstage."—The Journal News), Sueño (a reworking for Pedro Calderón’s Life is a Dream) and Sonnets for an Old Century, the author’s most recent work, which recently premiered in Los Angeles.Puerto Rican-born playwright José Rivera plays have been produced all over the world and his work has been translated into seven languages. His best known work includes Marisol and Each Day Dies with Sleep. "Rivera has a messianic mission to replace old and dying creeds with vibrant new visions."—Robert Brustein, New RepublicAlso available by José RiveraMarisol and Other Plays PB $15.95 1-55936-136-0 • USA

    The tavern is owned by a tempestuous Irishman who is a s proud as he is ill-tempered and is determined to show his pride and importance to the Yankee townsmen.

    The combatants are a sexy, volatile young woman and three Back Bay types a writer, a lawyer and a fiancee in sensible shoes. The setting is Boston, the ending is happy and laughter abounds."Stinging one liners." N.Y. Daily News."Places a superior wryly pleasing ... fashionable femin

    A masterful poet of the downtrodden, his plays portray life on New York's hardscrabble streets in a manner both tender and unflinching, while continually exploring the often startling gulf between who we are and how we perceive ourselves. Gathered in this volume is his current off-Broadway hit, Our Lady of 121st Street, a comic portrait of the graduates of a Harlem Catholic school reunited at the funeral of a beloved teacher, along with his two previous plays: the philosophical jailhouse drama Jesus Hopped the A Train and In Arabia, We'd All Be Kings, an Iceman Cometh for the Giuliani era that looks at the effect of Times Square's gentrification on its less desirable inhabitants.

    Some of them are Jews. All of them have something to hide—if not from the Nazis, then from their fellow detainees and, inevitably, from themselves. For in this claustrophobic antechamber to the death camps, everyone is guilty. And perhaps none more so than those who can walk away alive.In Incident at Vichy, Arthur Miller re-creates Dante's hell inside the gaping pit that is our history and populates it with sinners whose crimes are all the more fearful because they are so recognizable."One of the most important plays of our time . . . Incident at Vichy returns the theater to greatness." —The New York Times

    But, awaiting his arrival, slowly Beatie realizes he will never come and her famous final speech exults that Ronnie has taught her independence and how to free herself from him.4 women, 5 men

    This short play by Caryl Churchill was an entry in the 1997 London International Festival of Theatre.

    Innocuous remarks suddenly turn damning. Socratic dialogue gives way to heated assault. And the relationship between a somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless pupil turns into a fiendishly accurate X ray of the mechanisms of power, censorship and abuse.