"[Our Town] leaves us with a sense of blessing, and the unspoken but palpable command to achieve gratitude in what remains of our days on earth." -- The New Yorker Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the mythical village of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire--an allegorical representation of all life--is an American classic. It is the simple story of a love affair that asks timeless questions about the meaning of love, life, and death. Our Town explores the relationship between two young neighbors, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship blossoms into romance, and then culminates in marriage. When Emily loses her life during childbirth, the circle of life portrayed in each of the three acts--childhood, adulthood, and death--is fully realized. Widely considered one of the greatest American plays of all time, Our Town debuted on Broadway in 1938 and continues to be performed daily on stages around the world. This special edition includes an afterword by Wilder's nephew, Tappan Wilder, with illuminating documentary material about the playwright and his most famous drama.

Finding the theatre of the 1920s lacking in bite and conviction, Thornton Wilder set out to bring back realism and to celebrate the innocent, simple and religious. Yet he also tried to endow individual experience with cosmic significance and Our Town is both an affectionate portrait of American life and 'an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life'. The Skin of our Teeth deals with human survival in a 'comic strip' way, and The Matchmaker is a hilarious farce which urges rebellion against all the constraints that deny a rich, full life.

Characters: 4 or 5 male, 4 or 5 female, plus many small parts w/doubling

Scenery: Interiors and Exteriors

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is the groundbreaking satiric fantasy follows the extraordinary Antrobus family down through the ages from the time of "The War" surviving flood, fire, pestilence, locusts, the ice age, the pox and the double feature, a dozen subsequent wars and as many depressions. Ultimately, they are the stuff of which heroes and buffoons are made. Their survival is a vividly theatrical testament of faith in humanity.

"Wonderfully wise...A tremendously exciting and profound stage fable."-Herald Tribune

Novela epistolar situada en Roma en el año 45 a.C., un sugestivo acercamiento a la figura de César y su tiempo. Según Gabriel García Márquez es «una fuente deslumbrante de la grandeza y las miserias del poder».

When the bridge over a gorge in Peru breaks, five people are plunged to their deaths. Brother Juniper, a witness, wishing to explain the ways of God to his fellow man, examines the lives of these five, believing that this will lead him to find a reason for the fatal accident. The questions he raises concern life and death; chance and God; faith and unbelief. Whatever answers are to be found contain an affirmation, if not of God, then of the powers of love.

One morning in the late summer of 1930 the proprietor and several guests at the Union Hotel at Crestcrego, Texas, were annoyed to discover Biblical texts freshly written across the blotter on the public writing-desk. George Marvin Brush is a travelling textbook salesman and fervent religious convert, determined to lead the godless to a better life. With sad and sometimes hilarious consequences, his travels take him through smoking cars, bawdy houses, banks and campgrounds from Texas to Illinois and into the soul of 1930s America.

The Author's Own Story Of The 17,000 Miles Flying Tour Of British Oversea Air Stations In Egypt, The Sudan, Transjordania, Iraq, India And Malta.

In this play about the Deadly Sin of Lust, Saint Francis, almost blind and toothless and nearing the end of his life, revisits Assisi, where he encounters Pica, a young girl with the same name as his mother; Mother Clara of Saint Damian's Convent; and Mona Lucrezia (now a mad woman) with whom he had a love affair when he was a wild, willful young man known as Francis the Frenchman, and she was a young married woman. Saint Francis still seeks expiation for the "load of sin" with which he has offended God. The play poses questions about the true meaning of love-and, as Wilder wrote, about "the ideas of the Erotic as Destroyer and the Erotic as Creative."

In New Orleans in 1869, M'su Cahusac, a charlatan of a lawyer, preys on vulnerable women, convincing each one that she is a legitimate descendant of the long-lost Dauphin, who fled Paris for New Orleans at the age of 10 during the French Revolution. Therefore, he tells each victim, she is the rightful Queen of France. Tantalized by visions of wealth, palaces and power, each victim responds in her own fashion to this preposterous revelation, which the lawyer claims is supported by the Historical Society of Paris.

Welcome to a new collection of Thornton Wilder's last plays - a series of one-acts that were part of his extravagantly ambitious project to creat two one-act play cycles based on the Deadly Sins and the Ages of Man. Published for the first time in a single acting edition, Wilder's Ages of Man presents his series of stirring short works that capture four important stages of life.
Contents:
"Infancy"
"Childhood"
"Youth"
"The Rivers Under the Earth "

Thornton Wilder

Comedy

Characters: 2 male, 3 female

In this provocative, sometimes chilling comedy, Wilder renders a child's-eye view of the grown-up world, as a father, a mother and their three children play a revealing game of make-believe in which the children pretend to be orphans. Startling truths emerge on both sides, as pretense challenges the family to discard the traditional roles of parent, spouse, child, and sibling--blurring the lines between perception and reality, artifice and innocence.

"Wilder has a great fit for comic fantasy. Childhood is Wilder at his best." - New York Daily News

The author of such classics as "Our Town" and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," Thornton Wilder was a born storyteller and dramatist--rare talents on glorious display in this volume of more than three hundred letters he penned to a vast array of famous friends and beloved relatives. Through Wilder's correspondence, readers can eavesdrop on his conversations with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, NoEl Coward, Gene Tunney, Laurence Olivier, Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, and Mia Farrow. Equally absorbing are Wilder's intimate letters to his family.

Wilder tells of roller-skating with Walt Disney, remembers an inaugural reception for FDR at the White House, describes his life as a soldier in two World Wars, and recalls dining out with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. In these pages, Thornton Wilder speaks for himself in his own unique, enduring voice--informing, encouraging, instructing, and entertaining with his characteristic wit, heart, and exuberance.

Our Town was first produced and published in 1938 to wide acclaim. This Pulitzer Prize–winning drama of life in the town of Grover's Corners, an allegorical representation of all life, has become a classic. It is Thornton Wilder's most renowned and most frequently performed play.

It is now reissued in this handsome hardcover edition, featuring a new Foreword by Donald Margulies, who writes, "You are holding in your hands a great American play. Possibly the great American play." In addition, Tappan Wilder has written an eye-opening new Afterword, which includes Thornton Wilder's unpublished notes and other illuminating photographs and documentary material.