The superstitious townspeople resent their happiness and their subsequent meddling ends in violence and tragedy. This play was proclaimed a Broadway hit.

    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.

    Due to the scientific manipulation of the world’s crops, a destructive system for which Ben is partly responsible, there is very little nourishment left to be had, except for those most privileged and connected. Despite the dying off of most of the world, these characters manage to survive, at times tasting the good life, admiring the beauties of nature, feasting on animalistic sex, and finding love. The play raises issues of redemption, forgiveness, and responsibility as it recounts a somewhat passionate, erotic adventure story.Wallace Shawn is the author of Our Late Night (winner of the OBIE Award for Best Play), Marie and Bruce, Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Designated Mourner, The Fever, and the screenplay for My Dinner with Andre, in which he starred. Grasses of a Thousand Colors, Shawn’s first full-length play in ten years, will be produced in the United Kingdom and the United States in 2009. Shawn is a well-known film and television actor. He resides in New York City.

    Laugh with the actors, tap your feet to the music, and turn to your neighbor.

    Set in gossipy late 18th-century England, with a fresh female voice, the play is full of humor, emotional depth, and bold theatricality. SENSE AND SENSIBILITY examines our reactions, both reasonable and ridiculous, to societal pressures. When reputation is everything, how do you follow your heart?

    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.

    It was only when Max Ophuls made his famous film in 1950 that the work became better known as La Ronde. Now David Hare has reset these circular scenes of love and betrayal in the present day, with a cast of two actors playing a succession of characters whose sexual lives enmesh like a daisy chain. The Blue Room is a meditation on men and women, sex and social class, actors and the theater. With deft insight about the gap between the sexes, The Blue Room takes the treacherous Freudian subject of projection and desire and reinvents it in a bittersweet landscape that is both eternal and completely up-to-date.

    From the Pulitzer Prize- winning author of Glengarry Glen Ross, here is a collection of thirty-two one-act plays and short dramatic pieces that David Mamet himself considers to be some of the best writing he has ever done.

    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."

    In a series of elegant, nonchronological scenes spanning the years from 1946 to 2015, the play hopscotches through Mary Page Marlowe’s quiet existence as an accountant from Ohio—complicating notions of what it means to lead a “simple life.”

    For each, the chaos of what has come before brings with it a painful legacy.“I have Stayed. I have Stayed – I have Stayed for as long as I possibly can.”

    This volume from one of Ireland's greatest playwrights includes "In the Shadow of the Glen," "Riders to the Sea," and "The Playboy of the Western World."

    Booklet bought for a college class. No internal marking. Looks "like new". Please ask if questions.

    This phenomenon in effect brought the terror, the panic, the horror and the sense of helplessness of the Great War home with the returning soldiers—more people died of this epidemic than had been killed in battle throughout the armed conflict.As fear of the dreaded flu begins to fill the town of Unity with paranoia, drastic measures are taken. The town is quarantined in an attempt to keep the illness out. Trains are forbidden to stop, no one can enter, and the borders are sealed. Mail from overseas, feared to be carrying the deadly virus, is gathered and then burned. But when the disease descends upon the town despite their precautions, the citizens begin to turn on each other as they attempt to find a scapegoat for the crisis.Very little has been written about this worldwide calamity which, more than the war itself, destroyed forever the genteel and naive presumptions of European colonial society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kevin Kerr offers audiences not only an epic chronicle of this forgotten chapter of Canadian history, but a chilling preview of the beginnings of our own new century.The play is a gothic romance, filled with dark comedy and the desperate embrace of life at the edge of death.

    This play by one of India's foremost playwrights and actors is based on a story from the Mahabharata which tellingly illuminates universal themes - alienation, loneliness, love, family, hatred - through the daily lives and concerns of a whole community of individuals.