Classical Tragedy Greek and Roman: Eight Plays with Critical Essays


Robert W. Corrigan - 2000
    Includes: "The Oresteia" - Aeschylus; "Prometheus Bound" - Aeschylus; "Oedipus the King" - Sophocles; "Antigone" - Sophocles; "Medea" - Euripides; "The Bakkhai" - Euripides; "Oedipus" - Seneca; "Medea" - Seneca.

True West


Sam Shepard - 1981
    Sons of a desert dwelling alcoholic and a suburban wanderer clash over a film script. Austin, the achiever, is working on a script he has sold to producer Sal Kimmer when Lee, a demented petty thief, drops in. He pitches his own idea for a movie to Kimmer, who then wants Austin to junk his bleak, modern love story and write Lee's trashy Western tale.

Our Town


Thornton Wilder - 1938
    This Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the small village of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned and most frequently performed play.

The Importance of Being Earnest with Connections


Oscar Wilde - 1999
    This edition contains substantial excerpts from the original four-act version which was never produced, as well as the full text 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.

The Lottery: A play in one act


Brainerd Duffield - 1983
    

Six Characters in Search of an Author


Luigi Pirandello - 1921
    His most celebrated work, Six Characters in Search of an Author, embodies the Nobel Prize-winning playwright's innovations by presenting an open-ended drama on a stage without sets.First performed in 1923, this intellectual comedy introduces six individuals to a stage where a company of actors has assembled for a rehearsal. Claiming to be the incomplete, unused creations of an author's imagination, they demand lines for a story that will explain the details of their lives. In ensuing scenes, these "real-life characters," all professing to be part of an extended family, produce a drama of sorts — punctuated by disagreements, interruptions, and arguments. In the end they are dismissed by the irate manager, their dilemma unsolved and the "truth" a matter of individual viewpoints.A tour de force exploring the many faces of reality, this classic is now available in an inexpensive edition that will be welcomed by amateur theatrical groups as well as by students of drama.

The Lion in Winter


James Goldman - 1966
    In James Goldman’s classic play The Lion in Winter, domestic turmoil rises to an art form. Keenly self-aware and motivated as much by spite as by any sense of duty, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine maneuver against each other to position their favorite son in line for succession. By imagining the inner lives of Henry, Eleanor, and their sons, John, Geoffrey, and Richard, Goldman created the quintessential drama of family strife and competing ambitions, a work that gives visceral, modern-day relevance to the intrigues of Angevin England. Combining keen historical and psychological insight with delicious, mordant wit, the stage play has become a touchstone of today’s theater scene, and Goldman’s screenplay for the 1968 film adaptation won him an Academy Award. Told in “marvelously articulate language, with humor that bristles and burns” (Los Angeles Times), The Lion in Winter is the rare play that bursts into life on the printed page.

A Soldier's Play


Charles Fuller - 1982
    But A Soldier's Play is more than a detective story: it is a tough, incisive exploration of racial tensions and ambiguities among blacks and between blacks and whites that gives no easy answers and assigns no simple blame.

First Project Gutenberg Collection of Edgar Allan Poe


Edgar Allan Poe - 2009
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

On the Razzle


Tom Stoppard - 1981
    The story is basically one long chase, chiefly after two naughty grocer's assistants who, when their master goes off on a binge with a new mistress, escape to Vienna on a spree. "While preserving the beautiful intricacies of this construction, Stoppard has embellished Razzle with a dazzle of verbal wit an unremitting firework display of puns, crossword puzzle tricks and sly sexual innuendos." London Daily Telegraph . "Apart from Jumpers and The Importance of Being Earnest there may be no script in English funnier than On the Razzle." London Observer.

Down at the Dinghy


J.D. Salinger - 1949
    

Le Fanatisme Ou Mahomet Le Prophète: Tragédie


Voltaire - 1741
    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Jingo: The Play


Stephen Briggs - 2005
    As two armies march, Commander Vimes faces unpleasant foes who are out to get him … and that’s just the people on his side. A great stage adaptation by Stephen Briggs of Terry Pratchett’s best-selling novel.Terry Pratchett has sold 27 million books worldwide. Stephen Briggs is his chosen stage adaptor.

Anna in the Tropics


Nilo Cruz - 2003
    . . there are many kinds of light.The light of fires. The light of stars.The light that reflects off rivers.Light that penetrates through cracks.Then there’s the type of light that reflects off the skin.—Nilo Cruz, Anna in the TropicsThis lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of Depression-era America. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new "lector" (who reads Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land.Reviews: "The words of Nilo Cruz waft from the stage like a scented breeze. They sparkle and prickle and swirl, enveloping those who listen in both specific place and time . . . and in timeless passions that touch us all. In Anna in the Tropics, Cruz claims his place as a storyteller of intricate craftsmanship and poetic power."—Miami Herald“Deeply engrossing.” –Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle“Earnestly poetic…Mr. Cruz has created a work as wistful and affectingly ambitious as its characters. Anna in the Tropics reaches for the artistic heavens -- specifically, that corner of eternity occupied by the plays of Anton Chekhov, where yearning is an existential condition.” –Ben Brantley, New York TimesNilo Cruz is a young Cuban-American playwright whose work has been produced widely around the United States, including the Public Theater (New York, NY), South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa, CA), Magic Theatre (San Francisco, CA), Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McCarter Theater (Princeton, NJ) and New Theatre (Coral Gables, FL). His other plays include Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, and Anna in the Tropics (Winner of 2003 Pulitzer Prize). Mr. Cruz teaches playwriting at Yale University and lives in New York City.

Angels in America


Tony Kushner - 1993
    Prior is a man living with AIDS whose lover Louis has left him and become involved with Joe, an ex-Mormon and political conservative whose wife, Harper, is slowly having a nervous breakdown. These stories are contrasted with that of Roy Cohn (a fictional re-creation of the infamous American conservative ideologue who died of AIDS in 1986) and his attempts to remain in the closet while trying to find some sort of personal salvation in his beliefs.