Book picks similar to
The Quality of Life by Jane Anderson
plays
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Leaving Home
David French - 1972
The first part of what has come to be known as the Mercer Series, Leaving Home tells the story of a Newfoundland family that has emigrated and lost all sense of its place in the world.Leaving Home was named one of the "100 Most Influential Canadian Books" by the Literary Review of Canada.
33 Variations
Moisés Kaufman - 2011
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.
Miss Julie and The Stronger
August Strindberg - 1977
There is the very questionable theme in these days of the relationship between masters and servants, which this play tends to undermine.' Lord Cromer, who banned performances of Miss Julie from the English stage in October 1925It's Midsummer's Eve in the kitchen of a nobleman's house and his haughty daughter Julie flirts and plays with Jean, her father's manservant. But it's a dangerous game and once she has been seduced by him he holds the upper hand.Miss Julie, Strindberg's mighty play on power, sex and class is presented here in a coruscating version by Frank McGuinness.
The Hot L Baltimore
Lanford Wilson - 1973
As the action unfolds, the residents, ranging from young to old, from the defiant to the resigned, meet and talk and interact with each other during the course of one day. The drama is of passing events in their lives, of everyday encounters and of the human comedy, with conversations often overlapping into a contrapuntal musical flow. In the resulting mosaic each character emerges clearly and perceptively defined, and the sum total of what they are-or wish they were-becomes a poignant, powerful call to America to recover lost values and to restore itself in its own and the world's eyes.
Independence
Lee Blessing - 1985
Her oldest daughter, Kess, is a university professor in Minneapolis, but she has come home at the request of her sister, Jo who is concerned for Evelyn's mental health. Kess, a professed lesbian, wants to cut her family ties once and for all; Jo, an incurable romantic and longtime virgin, has now become pregnant; while Sherry, salty-tongued and amoral, wants only to finish high school so she can leave home for good. In the end, there is no accommodation possible but, instead, only a kind of arbitrary independence for each of the protagonists, as they come to realize that each must find her own heaven or hell in her own way.
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.
Macbeth
Stephen Haynes - 1623
Prompted by the prophecies of three mysterious witches and goaded by his ambitious wife, the Scottish thane Macbeth murders Duncan, King of Scotland, in order to succeed him on the throne. This foul deed soon entangles the conscience-stricken nobleman in a web of treachery, deceit and more murders that ultimately spells his doom.
York Notes On Shakespeare's "Othello" (York Notes Advanced)
Rebecca Warren - 2003
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman
Harold Bloom - 1949
This play which won the author a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony award presents the lead character, Willy Loman (played over time by Lee J Cobb, George C Scott, Dustin Hoffman, and Brian Dennehy, among others), who has come to represent the middle-class struggle.