Screenplay to John Lahr's successful dramatization of The Orton Diaries that chronicles the last eight months of Joe Orton's life, his growing theatrical celebrity, and the corresponding punishing effect it had on his relationship with his friend and mentor Kenneth Halliwell, who murdered him on August 9, 1967, and then took his own life.

In 1993, network executives abruptly cut the final appearance of comedian Bill Hicks - a scathing tirade of digs on the Pope and the pro-life movement - from an episode of The Late Show with David Letterman. His banning from the show, along with a profile in The New Yorker by veteran writer John Lahr, catapulted Hicks to national prominence. Just months later, at age 32, he died of pancreatic cancer. Now available for the first time are Hick's most critical and comic observations, gathered from his stand-up routines, diaries, notebooks, letters, and final writings. This collection features his controversial humor and witheringly funny attacks on American culture, from its worship of celebrity and material goods to its involvement in the first Gulf War. Love All the People faithfully traces Hicks's evolution from a funny but conventional stand-up comedian into a fearless and brilliant iconoclast.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION The definitive biography of America's most impassioned and lyrical twentieth-century playwright from acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr 'A masterpiece about a genius' Helen Mirren 'Riveting ... masterful' Sunday Times, Books of the Year On 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the show's thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one paper, 'like a farm boy in his Sunday best'. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain calls and became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an American public, Tennessee Williams's work - blood hot and personal - pioneered, as Arthur Miller declared, 'a revolution' in American theatre. Tracing Williams's turbulent moral and psychological shifts, acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his work, as well as the America his plays helped to define. Williams created characters so large that they have become part of American folklore: Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura transcend their stories, haunting us with their fierce, flawed lives. Similarly, Williams himself swung high and low in his single-minded pursuit of greatness. Lahr shows how Williams's late-blooming homosexual rebellion, his struggle against madness, his grief-struck relationships with his combustible father, prim and pious mother and 'mad' sister Rose, victim to one of the first lobotomies in America, became central themes in his drama. Including Williams's poems, stories, journals and private correspondence in his discussion of the work - posthumously Williams has been regarded as one of the best letter writers of his day - Lahr delivers an astoundingly sensitive and lively reassessment of one of America's greatest dramatists. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is the long-awaited, definitive life and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

A great theater critic brings twentieth-century playwright Arthur Miller's dramatic story to life with bold and revealing new insights "Lahr's cogent analyses are revelatory. . . . He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges."-Willard Spiegelman, Wall Street Journal "New Yorker critic Lahr shines in this searching account of the life of playwright Arthur Miller. . . . It's a great introduction to a giant of American letters."-Publishers Weekly Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915-2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater to a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller's life-his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller's role as a public intellectual-this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller's psychology and his plays. Concentrating largely on Miller's most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller's early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original interpretation of Miller's work and his personality.

The third installment in the Modern Library's Paris Review "Writers at Work" series, this is an all-new gathering of interviews with the most important and compelling playwrights of our time. Their singular takes on their craft, their influences, their lives, the state of contemporary theater, and the tricks of the trade create an illuminating and unparalleled record of the life of the theater itself.

"At its best,  theater is an antidote to the whiff of barbarity in the millennial air. 'My feeling is that people in a group, en masse, watching something, react differently, and perhaps more profoundly, than they do when they're alone in their living rooms,' Arthur Miller says here. In the dark, facing the stage, surrounded by others, the paying customer can let himself go; he is emboldened. The theatrical encounter allows a member of the public to think against received opinions. He can submerge himself in the extraordinary, admit his darkest, most infantile wishes, feel the pulse of the contemporary, hear the sludge of street talk turned into poetry. This enterprise can be joyous and dangerous; when the theater's game is good and tense, it is both."
--from the Introduction by John Lahr

John Lahr, New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton, an extraordinary and anarchic playwright, whose plays scandalised and delighted the public, and whose indecisive loyalty to a friend caused his tragic and untimely death. 'I have high hopes of dying in my prime,' Joe Orton confided to his diary in July, 1967. Less than one month later, Britain's most promising comic playwright was murdered by his lover in the London flat they had shared for fifteen years. In PRICK UP YOUR EARS, originally chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when it first appeared in 1978, Lahr chronicles Orton's working-class childhood and stage struck adolescence, the scandals and disasters of his early professional years, and the brief, glittering success of his blistering comedies, ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE, LOOT, and WHAT THE BUTLER SAW.

Written during the last eight months of his life, these diaries are an unfiltered narration of the life of Joe Orton, the extremely successful and famous British playwright. On August 9, 1967, Orton was murdered in London by Kenneth Halliwell, his lover of 16 years, who bludgeoned him with a hammer and then immediately committed suicide. Halliwell left a note that said that all would be explained if the police read Orton's diaries. In the diaries, Orton narrates his literary success, his sexual escapades--at his mother's funeral, with a dwarf in Brighton, and, extensively, in Tangiers--and the breakdown of his "marriage" to Halliwell, the relationship that transformed his life and ultimately ended it. "Escritos durante los ultimos ocho meses de su vida, estos diarios son una narracion sin restriccion alguna de la vida de Joe Orton, el sumamente exitoso y famoso dramaturgo ingles. El 9 de agosto de 1967, en Londres, Orton fue asesinado a martillazos por Kenneth Halliwell, su amante de 16 anos, quien se suicido inmediatamente despues. Halliwell dejo una nota que decia que todo quedaria explicado cuando la policia leyera los diarios de Orton. En los diarios, Orton narra su exito literario, sus aventuras sexuales--en el funeral de su madre, con un enano en Brighton y, profusamente, en Tanger--y la descomposicion de su "matrimonio" a Halliwell, la relacion que le cambio la vida y que termino por destruirla."

A brilliant and feared critic, Kenneth Tynan was a nabob of the National Theatre alongside Laurence Olivier, and he was also the daring impresario who created "Oh Calcutta". He was a notorious eccentric, a louche sophisticate: connoisseur of cuisine, wine, literature and women. Where else could you find such a judicious blend of aesthetics, theatre lore, love, marriage, sex and politics? These sizzling diaries will remind older readers of a man whose reputation as the greatest critic of the twentieth century is still unchallenged and introduce younger readers to an electrifying writer who simply could not be boring.

This mesmerizing story of playwright and author Joe Orton’s brief and remarkable life was named book of the year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize–winning novelist Patrick White Told with precision and extensive detail, Prick Up Your Ears is the engrossing biography of playwright and novelist Joe Orton. Orton’s public career spanned only three years (1964–1967), but his work made a lasting mark on the international stage. From Entertaining Mr. Sloane to his career-making Loot, Orton’s plays often shocked, sometimes outraged, and always captivated audiences with their dark yet farcical cynicism. A rising star and undeniable talent, Orton left much undone when he was bludgeoned to death by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who had educated Orton and also dreamed of becoming a famous writer.  Prick Up Your Ears was the basis for the distinguished 1987 film of the same name, directed by Stephen Frears, with a screenplay by Alan Bennett, and starring Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave. A brilliant, page-turning examination of the dueling forces behind Orton’s work, Prick Up Your Ears secured the playwright’s reputation as a great twentieth-century artist.