Two very different women meet during a long wait to buy subsidized rice and discover they have more in common than their poverty; an old man and a child share a last loving waltz; a cynical, disabled gangster learns humanity from a committed social worker, and a young girl finds her missing father and her role in the political struggle. This collection of stage plays, one radio play and a cinepoem, captures the essence of Zakes Mda’s method as a dramatist- a slow but intimate process of revelation (on the part of the characters). It is an artistic cooperation of the most pleasurable kind.

Sophiatown was the ‘Chicago of South Africa’, a vibrant community that produced not only gangsters and shebeen queens but leading journalists, writers, musicians and politicians, and gave urban African culture its rhythm and style. This play, based on the life history of Sophiatown, opened at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in February 1986 to great acclaim. The play won the AA Life Vita Award for Playwright of the Year 1985/86. This new edition of the play includes an introduction which sets the work in its historical context.

J. M. Synge was one of the key dramatists in the flourishing world of Irish literature at the turn of the century. This volume offers all of Synge's published plays, which range from racy comedy to stark tragedy, all sharing a memorable lyricism. The introduction to this new, definitive edition of Synge's plays sets them--and his other work--in the context of the Irish literary movement, with special attention to his role as one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre and his work alongside W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. Under the General Editorship of Michael Cordner of the University of York, the texts of the plays have been newly edited and are presented with a scholarly introduction and detailed annotation. Riders to the Sea; The Shadow of the Glen; The Tinker's Wedding; The Well of the Saints; The Playboy of the Western World; Deirdre of the Sorrows;This book is intended for students of Irish Literature (especially drama).

Lyssa Dent Hughes is the privileged, well-educated daughter of a Republican senator. She is the wife of a professor and the owner of a lovely house in Georgetown. She is also the president's nominee for Surgeon General. When the media discovers that once, long ago, she failed to respond for jury duty, this relatively minor misstep is portrayed as a serious moral lapse. A good friend uses the incident to make a point, scarcely thinking of the implications, and Lyssa must suffer the consequences. From that moment on, Lyssa Dent Hughes sits helplessly as the press investigates her family and friends, shattering her privacy, her career, and her world. Wendy Wasserstein's trenchant humor and sizzling dialogue combine with biting political commentary to produce a masterful, and topical, drama.

Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, receives a phone call announcing that a young nurse with whom he spent a brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant. She has decided he is the father. And so begins a comedy which, during five madcap days, unfolds with ever-increasing speed. Klima's beautiful, jealous wife, the nurse's equally jealous boyfriend, a fanatical gynaecologist, a rich American, at once Don Juan and saint, and an elderly political prisoner who, just before his emigration, is holding a farewell party at the spa are all drawn into this black comedy, as in A Midsummer Night's Dream. As usual, Milan Kundera poses serious questions with a blasphemous lightness which makes us understand that the modern world has taken away our right to tragedy.

Lorca's Blood Wedding is a classic of twentieth-century theatre. The story is based on a newspaper fragment which told of a family vendetta and a bride who ran away with the son of the enemy family. Lorca uses it to investigate the subjects which fascinated him: desire, repression, ritual, and the constraints and commitments of the rural Spanish community in which the play is rooted. Ted Hughes's version stays close in spirit and letter to the original Spanish. With marvellous directness, he fuses Lorca's vision to his own, and the result is a powerful poetic text which captures all the violence and pathos of the play for an English-speaking audience.

"The Coast of Utopia", which can be enjoyed as a whole or as three separate plays, follows a group of young intellectuals from the country houses and cafes of the 1830s, through the European revolutions of 1848-9, to exile in London in the 1850s. The trilogy as a whole tells an epic story of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in the struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors.

This multi-ethnic volume of five plays looks at the many problems facing South Africa. The stories include Anthony Akerman's "Somewhere on the Border", an anti-war play dealing with the invasion of Angola; "The Hungry Earth" by Maishe Maponya, which dramatises black disabilities and the will to liberation; Susan Pam's "Curl Up and Dye", a story about five women in a hair salon who find the divisions of apartheid stronger than their common interests; Paul Slabolepsky's "Over the Hill" which uses sporting metaphor to anatomize the white middle class and "Just Like Home", a mediation on exile.

This play was written in 1956 but was not produced until 1980. Set in what turns out to be a government-run mental home this play is a black comedy which examines bureaucratic power. This edition includes the revisions made by the author following his own production of the play in Hampstead and the West End. Other plays by this author include "The Caretaker", "The Birthday Party", "No Man's Land" and "Old Times" and his screenplays include "The Servant", "Accident" and "The Go-Between".

The greatest love poetry in the English language provides the springboard for master playwrights' never-before-published works about the triumphs and tragedies of the heart.

The sonnets and plays in Loves' Fire are the seeds and fruit of an extraordinary project: seven sonnets by Shakespeare, newly envisioned for the stage, in one-act plays by seven brilliantly gifted contemporary playwrights.

Shakespeare's sonnets of romantic and sexual love are timeless, for they are not bound to any particular setting or to either sex. These seven plays, each paired with the sonnet that inspired it, are startling not only in the variety of their mood, content, and setting, but also in their unusual interpretation. For example, Wendy Wasserstein's version of Sonnet 94 is a one-act play set in the Hamptons, where a well-to-do couple is getting ready for a society benefit; Eric Bogosian creates a story of sexual jealousy and obsessiveness from Sonnet 118; and composer William Finn has transformed Sonnet 102 into a song about an artist attempting to paint his lover -- and failing.These seven new works, commissioned and produced by the Acting Company, will be performed in June. Brought together in this slender volume with the sonnets, they form a unique tribute to Shakespeare -- a rich and marvelously entertaining celebration of the modern playwrights' adoration of the Bard.

'This remarkable play is about a nightmare all women must have dreamed at some time, and most men...' Ronald Bryden, Observer (1967) 'Joe Egg is unlike any play I've seen; concerns about whether it's dated fade next to the claims that can now be made for it. It's in the collisions between pious and rogue thoughts that the play's energy lies. We don't know what to feel. Which is why, once seen, Joe Egg won't go away.' Robert Butler, Independent on Sunday (1993)

Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
From the Obie Award-winning author of "Quills" comes this acclaimed one-man show, which explores the astonishing true story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. A transvestite and celebrated antiques dealer who successfully navigated the two most oppressive regimes of the past century-the Nazis and the Communists--while openly gay and defiantly in drag, von Mahlsdorf was both hailed as a cultural hero and accused of colluding with the Stasi. In an attempt to discern the truth about Charlotte, Doug Wright has written "at once a vivid portrait of Germany in the second half of the twentieth century, a morally complex tale about what it can take to be a survivor, and an intriguing meditation on everything from the obsession with collecting to the passage of time" (Hedy Weiss, "Chicago Sun-Times").

""Stuff happens . . . And it's untidy, and freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.""
Such was Donald Rumsfeld's response on April 11, 2003, following the infamous looting and pillaging of Baghdad. In David Hare's powerful new play chronicling the extraordinary process leading to the American invasion of Iraq, this statement provides entree into the melee of diplomacy, political power, and terrorist vendetta still making headlines around the world. Using direct quotes meticulously culled from interviews and public appearances, combined with the playwright's nuanced reimagining of what went on behind closed doors, Hare has fashioned a historical narrative and human drama that presents the Iraqi conflict in all of its
haphazard notoriety. "Stuff Happens" uses a uniquely evenhanded approach to a deeply contested invasion--seen from the perspective of international leaders and journalists, as well as Iraqi refugees--and raises a series of provocative questions regarding the most heartfelt and manipulative machinations of domestic and international politik.

The Tony Award-winning drama deals with a psychiatrist's exploration of the psyche of a troubled seventeen-year-old boy who senselessly and systematically blinds six horses.

From novelist and screenwriter Roddy Doyle come these two colorful plays. both set in the North Dublin suburb of Barrytown. In Brownbread, three young men kidnap a bishop but soon come to realize--when the U.S. Marines invade--that their brilliant adventure is nothing more than a colossal mistake. War is set at the Hiker's Rest, a pub where two trivia addicts meet every month to answer questions posed by Denis trhe quizmaster who hates wrong answers and shoots to kill. These earthy, exuberant works show why The New York Times Book Review says Doyle's "versatility and brio...may shock the neighbors, but...you can't take your eyes off him."

All the farces of Russia's greatest dramatist are rendered here in the classic lively translations which audiences and scholars alike applaud on the stage and in the classroom. The blustering, stuttering eloquence of Chekhov's unlikely heroes has endured to shape the voice of contemporary theatre. This volume presents seven minor masterpieces: Harmfulness of Tobacco, Swan Song, The Brute, Marriage Proposal, Summer in the Country, A Wedding, The Celebration.

(Applause Books). The complete scripts to two of Larry Gelbart's most popular and powerful political satires. Review of Mastergate: "If George Orwell were a gag writer, he could have written Mastergate. Larry Gelbart's scathingly funny takeoff on the Iran-Contra hearings is a spiky cactus flower in the desert of American political theatre." Jack Kroll, Newsweek . Review of Power Failure: "There is in his broad etching all the ethical outrage of an Arthur Miller kvetching. And, oh, so much more fun " Carolyn Clay, The Boston Phoenix .

This anthology gathers together recent work by the finest and most controversial contemporary American women dramatists. Collectively, this magnificent seven seeks to break the mold of the well-wrought psychological play and its rigid emphasis on realisticsocio-political drama. Includes: Occupational Hazard (Rosalyn Drexler) * Us (Karen Malpede) * What of the Night? (Maria Irene Forne) * Birth and After Birth (Tina Howe) * and more.

- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from "The Odyssey through modern literature- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index- Introductory essay by Harold Bloom