Book picks similar to
Dear Liar by George Bernard Shaw
plays
play
scripts
theatre
The Boys Next Door
Tom Griffin - 1988
Norman, who works in a doughnut shop and is unable to resist the lure of the sweet pastries, takes great pride in the huge bundle of keys that dangles from his waist; Lucien P. Smith has the mind of a five-year-old but imagines that he is able to read and comprehend the weighty books he lugs about; Arnold, the ringleader of the group, is a hyperactive, compulsive chatterer, who suffers from deep-seated insecurities and a persecution complex; while Barry, a brilliant schizophrenic who is devastated by the unfeeling rejection of his brutal father, fantasizes that he is a golf pro. Mingled with scenes from the daily lives of these four, where "little things" sometimes become momentous (and often very funny), are moments of great poignancy when, with touching effectiveness, we are reminded that the handicapped, like the rest of us, want only to love and laugh and find some meaning and purpose in the brief time that they, like their more fortunate brothers, are allotted on this earth.
Tape
Stephen Belber - 2002
Jon's new film is being shown at a festival in Lansing, Michigan, and Vince has come from Oakland to see it. Over the course of the evening, Vince finally gets Jon to admit that ten years ago he date-raped Amy Randall, a girl whom they both dated in high school only then to reveal that he's taped their entire conversation. And not only that, he's invited Amy to have dinner with them that night. Beneath its suspenseful, high-stakes surface, TAPE examines questions of motive, memory, truth and perception.
Kimberly Akimbo
David Lindsay-Abaire - 2003
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.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur
Tennessee Williams - 1979
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."
The Realistic Joneses
Will Eno - 2013
. . . 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.
The Columnist: A Play
David Auburn - 2012
Joe sits at the nexus of Washington life: beloved, feared, and courted in equal measure by the very people whose careers and futures he determines. But as the sixties dawn and America undergoes dizzying change, the intense political dramas Joe has been throwing his weight around in—supporting the war in Vietnam and Soviet containment, criticizing student activism—come to bear a profound personal cost.Based on the real-life story of Joe Alsop, whose columns at the time of his 1974 retirement were running three times a week in more than three hundred newspapers, David Auburn’s The Columnist is a deft blend of history and storytelling. A hilarious, searing portrait of the glorious rewards and devastating losses that accompany ego, ambition, and the pursuit of power, The Columnist pens a vital letter from a radically changing decade to our own turbulent era.
Reckless - Acting Edition
Craig Lucas - 1985
She meets and joins up with Lloyd Bophtelophti, a true "original" who has changed his name to avoid alimony payments and who now lives with a paraplegic named Pootie (who also pretends to be deaf in order to get double disability). Thus begins a series of picaresque escapades involving numerous psychiatrists, a TV game show, and, eventually, an ill-fated reunion with her husband. Filled with bizarre characters and events, the play reflects the fractured lifestyles which have become the norm for so many in our tenuous times.
Gasping
Ben Elton - 1990
A satire on big business, the media and product exploitation. Designer air proves to be the marketing phenomenon of the decade, but as demand outstrips supply, Lockheart Industries plunders the Third World for resources. The world is starting to gasp, and only the biggest suckers survive.Lockheart Industries are making big money - if God wanted to buy into their stock he'd have to think twice and talk to his people. They have a profit curve wound so far round the room that it looks like a "Blue Peter" Christmas appeal. But they want more.
Father of the Bride: A Comedy in Three Acts
Caroline Francke - 1948
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.
Abundance
Beth Henley - 1991
Macon and Bess are two mail-order brides, lured to the West by the promise of new beginnings through marriage to men they have never met. While waiting for their respective husbands-to-be, one bubbling with optimism, the other mousy and plain, the two women become instant best friends. As Abundance follows the two women through their friendship and adventures for the next 25 years, this Western epic unearths the dark underside of American mythology. A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: Ed Begley Jr., Gary Cole, Amy Madigan, Steven Weber and JoBeth Williams.
East of Berlin
Hannah Moscovitch - 2009
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.
Book of Days - Acting Edition
Lanford Wilson - 2000
Nowhere is this more evident than in his latest play, Book of Days, which has won the Best Play Award from the American Theater Critics Association. Book of Days is set in a small town dominated by a cheese plant, a fundamentalist church, and a community theater. When the owner of the cheese plant dies mysteriously in a hunting accident, Ruth, his bookkeeper, suspects murder. Cast as Joan of Arc in a local production of George Bernard Shaw's St. Joan, Ruth takes on the attributes of her fictional character and launches into a one-woman campaign to see justice done. In Book of Days, Lanford Wilson uses note-perfect language to create characters who are remarkable both for their comic turns and for their enormous depth. "Mr. Wilson's cosmic consciousness, intense moral concern, sense of human redemption and romantic effusion have climbed to a new peak." -- Alvin Klein, The New York Times; "A significant addition to the Lanford Wilson canon . . . his best work since Fifth of July . . . Book of Days manages to combine Wilson's signature character-based whimsy with an atypically strong narrative book and politically charged underpinnings." -- Chris Jones, Variety; "Book of Days is lively storytelling by one of our best playwrights." -- Lawrence DeVine, Detroit Free Press.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: Tennesse Williams (York Notes Advanced)
Steve Roberts - 2007
One of his best-loved and most famous plays, it exposes the lies plaguing the family of a wealthy Southern planter of humble origins.
The Tale of the Allergist's Wife and Other Plays: The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, Psycho Beach Party, The Lady in Question, Red Scare on Sunset
Charles Busch - 2000
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.