Drama / 3m, 3f (w/doubling) / Unit set Newly revised edition! From the author of the best-selling novel, The House of God, this critically acclaimed version which played Off-Broadway in 2007, tells the amazing story of the two men who pioneered Alcoholics Anonymous, and of their wives, who founded Al Anon. During the roaring '20s, New York stockbroker Bill Wilson rides high on money, fame, and booze. In '29, both he and the market crash and he becomes a hopeless drunk. Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon in Akron, Ohio, and a pillar of the community, has been a secret drunk for thirty years, often going into the operating room hungover and high on sedatives. His family has tried everything to no avail. Through an astonishing series of events involving doctors, ministers, the Oxford Group evangelical movement, and Henrietta Sieberling a scion of the Goodyear Rubber fortune, Bill and Bob meet on Mother's Day of 1935. The two men form a relationship which keeps each sober. Fired up, they seek out a third drunk to see if their program will work for others. Richly textured with the ragtime and jazz of the era, the play tells a magnificent American success story. "A deeply human, audience embracing tale." - Variety "One of the best plays of the year." - San Diego Union Tribune "Inspiring." - Boston Globe

As in all hospitals, the medical hierarchy of The House of God was a pyramid - a lot at the bottom and one at the top.Put another way it was like an ice-cream cone...you had to lick your way up! Roy Basch, the 'red-hot' Rhodes Scholar, thought differently - but then he hadn't met Hyper Hooper, out to win the most post-mortems of the year award, nor Molly, the nurse with the crash helmet.He hadn't even met any of the Gomers ('Get Out of My Emergency Room!'), the no-hopers who wanted to die but who were worth more alive!

By turns heartbreaking, hilarious, and utterly human, The House of God is a mesmerizing and provocative novel about what it really takes to become a doctor. "The raunchy, troubling, and hilarious novel that turned into a cult phenomenon. Singularly compelling...brutally honest."-The New York Times Struggling with grueling hours and sudden life-and-death responsibilities, Basch and his colleagues, under the leadership of their rule-breaking senior resident known only as the Fat Man, must learn not only how to be fine doctors but, eventually, good human beings. A phenomenon ever since it was published, The House of God was the first unvarnished, unglorified, and uncensored portrait of what training to become a doctor is truly like, in all its terror, exhaustion and black comedy. With more than two million copies sold worldwide, it has been hailed as one of the most important medical novels ever written. With an introduction by John Updike

""We have to talk."" For many men, these are the four worst words in the English language, especially when they're uttered by a female partner. But it doesn't have to be that way, argue Samuel Shem and Janet Surrey in their pathbreaking and practical new book. "Male relational dread"--that all-too-familiar reaction set off by women's "relational yearnings"--can be tamed, and in its place can emerge true satisfaction for men and women.To demonstrate how this is done, Shem and Surrey take us behind the scenes of their popular workshops. We hear couples speak intimately about anger, guilt, resentment, shame, and sex. We watch them wrestle collectively with the gender divide in their relationships--the deep disconnects, or "impasses," that reflect the vastly different developmental paths men and women have traveled. We see couples learn to bridge the poles of dread and yearning, to emerge from isolation into mutuality. We witness their moments of sadness, humor, and, ultimately, discovery.Filled with moving stories of real people struggling with real problems, "We Have to Talk" shatters the "rules" and offers dramatic proof that men and women are not from different planets after all. It is certain to be seen as "the" relationship book for the new millennium.

Welcome to Mount Misery psychiatric hospital, home of the crazed, the suicidal, the Machiavellian and the wicked. And that's just the doctors. For Dr Roy Basch, proudly starting his residency there, it is a bewildering and nightmarish experience. The different disciplines appear to compete with one another to find the best ways to reduce the patients to gibbering wrecks. As he immerses himself in the system, he discovers that the process of treating the patients has less to do with making them better and more with maintaining the flow of insurance company money. Basch believes that he can find meaning here, but in an enclosed world which has lost its head, he soon finds that survival, not meaning, is the most valuable lesson he will learn. Mount Misery is hilarious, provocative and terrifying. Filled with biting irony and a wonderful sense of the absurd, it is an absorbing and authentic report from within the crumbling fortress of psychiatry and tells you everything you'll never learn in therapy. And it's a hell of a sight funnier too.

Notorious for its Rabelaisian comedy, and celebrated for its humanism, Samuel Shem's The House of God was hailed as troubling and hilarious...brutally honest (The New York Times), a Catch-22 with stethoscopes (Cosmopolitan). Now in his most ambitious novel yet, Shem returns to dissect the complicated relationships between mothers and sons, ghosts and bullies, doctors and patients, the past and the present, and love and death. Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death.
On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and plagued by breakage, he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town. There's one odd catch: he must live in her house for one year and thirteen days. As he struggles with his decision--to stay and meet the terms of the will or return to his life in Italy--Orville reconnects with family, reunites with former friends, and comes to terms with old rivals and bitter memories. In the process he'll discover his own history, as well as his mother's, and finally learn what it really means to be a healer, and to be healed.