Drama: Playwrights and Plays

The volume gathers all of Beckett's texts for theatre, from 1955 to 1984. It includes both the major dramatic works and the short and more compressed texts for the stage and for radio.'He believes in the cadence, the comma, the bite of word on reality, whatever else he believes; and his devotion to them, he makes clear, is a sufficient focus for the reader's attention. In the modern history of literature he is a unique moral figure, not a dreamer of rose-gardens but a cultivator of what will grow in the waste land, who can make us see the exhilarating design that thorns and yucca share with whatever will grow anywhere.' - Hugh Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio,...but the clouds...,A Piece ofMonologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.

This second volume of Brecht's Collected Plays brings together some of his most glittering Berlin successes including The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, The Seven Deadly Sins, Man Equals Man and The Elephant Calf. The Threepenny Opera is the story of the mercurial beggar turned entrepeneur Peachum and his battles with the criminal Mac 'the Knife'; Mahagonny, an operatic satire on the search for an American capitalist utopia; The Seven Deadly Sins is a ballet with songs that predicts the downfall of the petty bourgeosie and was first performed as the Nazis planned their book burning exercise. Man equals Man is an exploration of the theory of equality and The Elephant Calf is a play within a play based on an Indian folk story.

The fifth volume in the Brecht Collected Plays series brings together two of Brecht's best-known and most frequently performed and studied plays: Life of Galileo and Mother Courage and Her Children. Galileo, which examines the conflict between free inquiry and official ideology, contains one of Brecht's most human and complex central characters. Temporarily silenced by the Inquisition's threat of torture, and forced to abjure his theories publicly, Galileo continues to work in private, eventually smuggling his work out of the country. As an examination of the problems that face not only the scientist but also the whole spirit of free inquiry when brought into conflict with the requirements of government or official ideology, Life of Galileo has few equals. Mother Courage is usually seen as Brecht's greatest work. Remaining a powerful indictment of war and social injustice, it is an epic drama set in the seventeenth century during the Thirty Years' War. The plot follows the resilient Mother Courage who survives by running a commissary business that profits from all sides. As the war claims all of her children in turn, the play poignantly demonstrates that no one can profit from the war without being subject to its terrible cost also.

Chekhov's classic tragicomedy. Aristocratic landowner Ranevskaya can no longer afford to keep her childhood home with its beautiful but barren cherry orchard. She rejects the compromise offered by Lopakhin, a local businessman, to cut down the orchard and sell the land for holiday homes. Eventually Ranevskaya and her family are forced to leave the estate which Lopakhin has now bought.

The 5 plays in this collection include The Sea Gull, Uncle Vanya, and The Three Sisters.

Softcops renders the philosophy of Foucault as a music-hall turn and Victorian freakshow "theatre and history combine to give such intelligent fun" (TLS); Top Girls brings five great and less-than-great women from history together for a dinner party and "has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert" (Sunday Times); Fen scrutinises the lives of the low-paid women potato pickers of the fens (in Eastern England) and "the playwright pins down her poetic subject matter in dialogue of impressive vigour and economy" (Financial Times) while Serious Money is a satirical study of the effects of the Big Bang - "Pure genius...the first play about the city to capture the authentic atmosphere of the place." (Daily Telegraph)

In colonial Africa, a Victorian English patrician represses the natives, his wife, his children, homosexuals—and still finds time for an affair with a widowed neighbor. The same family appears in Act Two 25 years older and back in London, only now it’s 1979. Cloud 9 is about relationships between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria, and Sex. Cloud 9 premiered in London at the Royal Court Theatre in 1979 and has since been staged all over the world.

Henrik Ibsen's revolutionary play about a woman's awakening to her need for a life of her own.

In Rhinoceros, as in his earlier plays, Ionesco startles audiences with a world that invariably erupts in explosive laughter and nightmare anxiety. A rhinoceros suddenly appears in a small town, tramping through its peaceful streets. Soon there are two, then three, until the "movement" is universal: a transformation of average citizens into beasts, as they learn to move with the times. Finally, only one man remains. "I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end. I'm not capitulating!" Rhinoceros is a commentary on the absurdity of the human condition made tolerable only by self-delusion. It shows us the struggle of the individual to maintain integrity and identity alone in a world where all others have succumbed to the "beauty" of brute force, natural energy, and mindlessness. Includes Rhinoceros, The Leader, The Future Is in Eggs or It Takes All Sorts to Make a World

The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman's deferred American dream. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity--and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room.

Set in the 1950s on the gritty Brooklyn waterfront, A View from the Bridge follows the cataclysmic downfall of Eddie Carbone, who spends his days as a hardworking longshoreman and his nights at home with his wife, Beatrice, and orphan niece, Catherine. But the routine of his life is interrupted when Beatrice's cousins, undocumented immigrants from Italy, arrive in New York. As one of them embarks on a romance with Catherine, Eddie's envy and delusion plays out with devastating consequences.

This volume contains the complete short plays of Harold Pinter from The Room, first performed in 1960, to Celebration, which premiered in 2000.

This first volume of The Collected Plays of Neil Simon contains the triumphs that put his unique brand of comic genius on the American stage, and made him the most successful playwright of his generation. This volume includes: * Come Blow Your Horn * Barefoot in the Park * The Odd Couple * Plaza Suite * The Star-Spangled Girl * Promises, Promises * Last of the Red Hot Lover * And an Introduction by the author: "Portrait of the Writer as a Schizophrenic" Neil Simon's mixture of verbal wit and beautifully crafted farce, ethnic humor and insight into universal foible, and above all compassion and understanding, make even his sharpest barbs touch the heart as well as the funny bone.

For more than thirty years, Simon's wry and astute observations on life, love, and the human condition have been making audiences laugh uproariously even as his beautifully realized characters touch their hearts. These five plays, including Lost in Yonkers, show Simon at the pinnacle of his extraordinary career. Rumors Lost in Yonkers Jake's Women Laughter on the 23rd Floor London Suite Including the author's introduction: "How to Stop Writing and Other Impossibilities"

Nine books in one. In one volume, nine of George Bernard Shaw's major plays, representing his career from the 1890s through the 1920s. He is best known for his witty and provocative plays such as Pygmalion and Major Barbara. Some of his most famous plays are included Arms and the Man AND Man and Superman. He remains one of the most influential playwrights in English literature, and his works are still widely studied and performed today.

The Theatre of Tennessee Williams brings together in a matching format the plays of one of the America's most influential and innovative dramatists. Arranged in chronological order, this ongoing series includes the original cast listings and production notes.

Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. This is a modern classic, a book that deals with the impossibly difficult themes of race in America, set during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. 

This modern American classic is about family, and the legacy of slavery in America. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned perhaps his most haunting and dramatic work.At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.