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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: texts > Drama texts, plays > General
A gang of teenage girls gathers in an abandoned treehouse to summon
the ghost of Pablo Escobar. Are they messing with the actual spirit
of the infamous cartel kingpin? Or are they really just messing
with each other? A roller coaster ride through the danger and
damage of girlhood - the teenage wasteland - has never been so much
twisted fun. Critic's Pick! "Highly entertaining - equally funny
and scary." - The New York TimesFour Stars! "Just when you think
you know where the play is heading, there's a disorienting coup de
theatre that leaves you shaken. Our Dear Dead Drug Lord isn't for
the faint of heart, but neither is coming of age." - Raven Snook,
Time Out Critic's Pick! "Highly entertaining - equally funny and
scary - the play starts off as a hoot and winds up a primal scream.
They're throwing quite a seance at the McGinn/Cazale Theater." -
Ben Brantley, The New York Times "As funny as it is violent and
dark... Our Dear Dead Drug Lord is not quiet, small, or apologetic.
It is loud and messy and truthful. It is incredibly complicated and
a thing of extreme beauty. It is everything in women that society
tells them they need to repress, and in this I found it incredibly
enjoyable and inspiring." - Brittany Crowell, New York Theatre
Guide "The challenges of female adolescence... explored with a
remarkably fresh, honest and sometimes hilarious perspective." -
Brian Scott Lipton, Theater Pizzazz "Unsettling... Scheer's
characters are brilliantly drawn... the work of a born playwright
and a unique new voice... As a story of female empowerment, it is
both scary and revealing." - Victor Gluck, Theater Scene "An
imaginative and ultimately savage new play... An offbeat Mean Girls
sort of dramedy that unexpectedly concludes in a violent burst of
magical realism." - Michael Sommers, New York Stage Review
The Mamalogues portrays what it's like to parent while Black,
unmarried, sand middle class. During a retreat, three single
mothers share their angst about racial profiling on the playground,
navigating social minefields during soccer season, and their child
being the "only one." The satirical comedy follows the agonies and
joys of motherhood as these moms lean in, stress out, and guide
Black children from diapers to college in a dangerous world.
New version approved for virtual performance! What "The Irish
Curse" is - and how it manifests itself - is the raw centerpiece of
this wicked, rollicking and very funny new play. From its
blistering language to its brutally honest look at sex and body
image, The Irish Curse is a revealing portrait of how men, and
society, define masculinity. In doing so, it dares to pose the
fundamental question that has been on the minds of men since the
beginning of time: "Do I measure up to the next guy?" Size matters
to a small group of Irish-American men (all professionally
successful New Yorkers) who meet every Wednesday night, in a
Catholic church basement, at a self-help group for men with small
penises. This alleged Irish trait is the focus of their weekly
sessions, as they all feel this "shortcoming" has ruined their
lives. One evening, when a twentysomething blue-collar guy joins
the group, he challenges everything the other men think about "the
Irish Curse"... tackling their obsession with body image and
unmasking the comical and truthful questions of identity,
masculinity, sex and relationships that men face every day.
Inspired by the writings of Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities and If
on a Winter's Night a Traveler), The Late Wedding is a fractured
portrait of a fractured marriage, as told through a series of
interconnected fables, including an anthropological tour of
fantastical tribes and their marital customs. Christopher Chen's
winking second-person narrative, delivered by a six-person
shape-shifting cast, deftly guides you on a wild and delightful
examination of love and longing. At once an anthropological tour
through marriage customs, a spy thriller, and a sci-fi love story,
the mind-bending The Late Wedding is an inventive and surprising
theatrical experience. "Wild, witty... contemplative and
poignant... you gotta see this funny, brilliant play." - San
Francisco Examiner "A seductive play... a fascinating little gem...
a script about the mystery and challenges of love, in all its
permutations. The play is a provocative one-act composed with a
unique theatrical structure... a swirling nebula of magical notions
put down in a contemporary world." - DC Metro Theatre Arts "A
comic, dramatic inquiry into human relationships - between lovers
or spouses; between playwright and audience - [The Late Wedding] is
another of Chen's slyly metatheatrical, blissfully funny,
whiplash-smart creations... What begins as a look at
anthropological research into the marital arrangements and lore of
a few odd tribes segues without warning into a political drama cum
action thriller." - SF Gate "Bold and brainy... As The Late Wedding
dips in and out of such genres as the spy caper and science
fiction... it blurs the boundaries between its two strands of
Calvino homage, so that the genre-sampling meta-theater begins to
reflect on the bittersweet realities of marriage." - The Washington
Post "[The Late Wedding] is about the vagaries of love and
marriage, both homo- and heterosexual, and the way that we both
cherish and distort the past, and about the creative process
itself... you gotta see this funny, brilliant play." - San
Francisco Examiner
The Underlying Chris is a life-affirming and high-spirited look at
how a person comes into their identity, and how sometimes it's
life's tiniest moments that most profoundly change our lives. In
these divided times, The Underlying Chris serves as a celebration
of our differences, our individuality and the many mysterious,
difficult and beautiful things we share simply by being alive.
A moving, mysterious, at times hilarious story of a tiny plot of
land and some people with grand and incompatible designs on it.
In the fictional mining town of Greater Clements, Idaho, wealthy
out-of-staters have begun purchasing properties, leaving lifelong
residents - largely blue-collar workers - disenfranchised and
disenchanted. Practical, unpretentious Maggie, the divorced owner
of a failing Mine Tour and Museum business, cares for her troubled
adult son, who has moved back home to recover. As Maggie
contemplates closing her business, an old flame visits and asks her
to join him in a new life beyond the desolate town's limits.
Through quirky humor, keen observation, and deeply sensitive and
idiosyncratic characters, Greater Clements explores just how hard
it can be to leave one's past behind.
Ohio State Murders explores the experiences of Suzanne Alexander, a
fictional Black writer whose life both is, and is not, like her
author's. When Suzanne enters Ohio State University in 1949, she
has no idea what the supposed safe haven of academia holds in
store. Years later, Suzanne returns to the university to talk about
the violence in her writing. A dark mystery unravels. Adrienne
Kennedy's play is an intriguing, unusual and chilling look at the
destructiveness of racism in the U.S.
TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY EDWIN BJORKMAN.
New York City, 1930. Following a decade of explosive creativity,
the Harlem Renaissance is starting to feel the bite of the Great
Depression. In the face of hardship and dwindling opportunity,
Angel and her friends battle to keep their artistic dreams alive.
But, when Angel falls for a stranger from Alabama, their romance
forces the group to make good on their ambitions, or give in to the
reality of the time. Pearl Cleage's Blues for an Alabama Sky was
first performed in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1995. It was revived at the
National Theatre, London, in 2022, directed by Lynette Linton, with
a cast including Samira Wiley and Giles Terera. Pearl Cleage is a
celebrated American playwright, novelist, poet and political
activist, and was one of the first Black women in America to
achieve national recognition as a dramatist. Her plays, also
including Flyin' West and Bourbon at the Border, provide a
remarkable and penetrating look at the African-American experience
over the last century. 'As a woman, as an African-American, her
artistic objectivity and sensitivity to history combine with her
capacity to dig for truth' Ruby Dee 'One of the voices singing in
the wilderness' Ossie Davis
Winner! 1993 Olivier Award, Best Musical Revival Winner! Five 1994
Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical Winner! Three 1994
Drama Desk Awards Nominee: Seven 1994 Drama Desk Awards, including
Outstanding Musical Revival Winner! Two 2018 Tony Awards Nominee:
Eleven 2018 Tony Awards, including Best Revival of a Musical
Winner! Five 2018 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding
Orchestrations Nominee: Twelve 2018 Drama Desk Awards, including
Outstanding Musical Revival In a Maine coastal village toward the
end of the 19th century, the swaggering, carefree carnival barker,
Billy Bigelow, captivates and marries the gentle millworker, Julie
Jordan. Billy loses his job just as he learns that Julie is
pregnant and, desperately intent upon providing a decent life for
his family, he is coerced into being an accomplice to a robbery.
Caught in the act and facing the certainty of prison, he takes his
own life and is sent 'up there.' Billy is allowed to return to
earth for one day fifteen years later, and he encounters the
daughter he never knew. She is a lonely, friendless teenager, her
father's reputation as a thief and bully having haunted her
throughout her young life. How Billy instills in both the child and
her mother a sense of hope and dignity is a dramatic testimony to
the power of love.
Major Barbara, by Shaw, George Bernard - Akasha Classics,
AkashaPublishing.Com - No one writes about social issues as
entertainingly as Shaw, George Bernard. In Major Barbara, he
addresses the problem of poverty and the institutions that are
supposed to help. The play centers on an ideological battle between
father and daughter: Andrew Undershaft is an arms manufacturer who
sees wealth as a social good, his daughter Barbara is a Salvation
Army Major who feels her father's money is tainted. Taking aim at
religion, charities, and the romanticization of the poor, Shaw
makes a case for seeing poverty as a crime and an inexcusable fault
in society. Filled with the clever dialogue for which he is famous,
Major Barbara is engaging and thoughtprovoking throughout.
In this collection of plays from one of our finest dramatists,
Caryl Churchill demonstrates her remarkable ability to find new
forms to express profound truths about the world we live in.
Complete with a new introduction by the author, this volume
contains: Seven Jewish Children (Royal Court Theatre, London,
2009): a short play about seven families wondering how to protect
their children, written at the time of the bombing of Gaza by
Israel in 2008-9. Love and Information (Royal Court, 2012): a
fast-moving kaleidoscope in which more than a hundred characters
try to make sense of what they know. Ding Dong the Wicked (Royal
Court, 2012): two families on opposite sides of a war, locked in
identical hatred. Here We Go (National Theatre, 2015): a play about
dying and being dead. Escaped Alone (Royal Court, 2016): three old
friends and an unexpected neighbour have tea in a sunny back yard,
and face catastrophes. Pigs and Dogs (Royal Court, 2016): a look at
how colonialism crushed the fluidity of sexuality in Africa and
brought a new intolerance, as shown in the Ugandan
Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2014. Also included are three previously
unpublished short plays, each written in response to political
events: War and Peace Gaza Piece (2014), Tickets are Now On Sale
(2015) and Beautiful Eyes (2017). 'The wit, invention and
structural ingenuity of Churchill's work are remarkable... she
never does anything twice' Telegraph 'The most dazzlingly inventive
living dramatist in the English language' New York Times
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