(Vocal Selections). Six has received rave reviews around the world for its modern take on the stories of the six wives of Henry VIII and it's finally opening on Broadway! From Tudor queens to pop princesses, the six wives take the mic to remix five hundred years of historical heartbreak into an exuberant celebration of 21st century girl power! Songs include: All You Wanna Do * Don't Lose Ur Head * Ex-Wives * Get Down * Haus of Holbein * Heart of Stone * I Don't Need Your Love * No Way * Six.
“Mr. Linney continues to be one of our most perceptive chroniclers of the folkways of rural America, finding humanity and nobility in the most remote of places.” –Mel Gussow, New York Times “Linney’s words do it all, summoning up vistas of scary beauty and passions of elemental force.” –David Richards,Washington Post “His output was dazzling in its variety and exceptional for its depth as well as its breadth of scope. Goering at Nuremberg, Lord Byron’s daughter, the Washington novels of Henry Adams: Life, literature, and history were all his materials, not to be milled down into iconic emptiness, but to be explored for the values they might carry…One of America’s best playwrights.” –Michael Feingold, Village Voice Romulus Linney is one of American drama’s best-kept secrets. Uniquely adept at capturing the idiomatic poetry of his native South, he maneuvers with equal grace through the vernacular of New York’s contemporary intelligentsia and the voices of a wide range of historical figures. In Childe Byron, the dying daughter of the notorious Lord Byron conjures a confrontation with the father she never knew. In 2, Linney scrutinizes Hitler’s infamous second-in-command, Hermann Goering, behind the scenes at the Nuremberg trials. Tennessee celebrates the indomitability of early Appalachian mountain settlers, while Heathen Valley reveals the same region’s citizens’ subsequent search for faith. In FM, an authentic genius stumbles into the creative writing course of a small Alabama college. Set among SoHo literati, April Snow is a compassionate study of a world-weary screenwriter. Endowed with Linney’s lyric intensity, augmented by his rich sense of humor, the six plays in this volume illuminate a major talent of the American Theatre.
Collected for the first time in one volume are six inventive theater pieces created by Obie Award-winning theater company The Civilians. Based on the creative investigation of actual experience, and often intertwined with experimental cabaret, their pieces are boldly theatrical and always unique -- from a story about a Hollywood movie and a lost flock of geese (Canard, Canard, Goose?); to a tale about things lost and found, charting a musical landscape of loss (Gone Missing); to a dark ride through the landscape of American public culture, asking a thorny question: how do we know what we know when everyone in power seems to be lying? ((I Am) Nobody's Lunch). Includes the plays Canard, Canard, Goose? by The Civilians, Gone Missing by The Civilians, (I Am) Nobody's Lunch by The Civilians, The Ladies by Anne Washburn, Paris Commune by Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman, Shadow of Himself by Neal Bell. With a foreword by Oskar Eustis, Artistic Director of the Public Theater.
Six Plays for Children by Aurand Harris brings together a variety of dramatic forms that have enormously enriched the literature of children's theatre in this country and around the world. These works by this respected children's theatre playwright show Harris's great versatility: in the commedia dell'arte of Androcles and the Lion; the musical melodrama Rags to Riches; the sober, absurd comedy Punch and Judy; the realistic historical drama Steal Away Home; the farce Peck's Bad Boy; and the musical review Yankee Doodle. Each of the six plays exhibits a vital theatricality which is sure to win a child's attention and response. Editor Coleman A. Jennings traces Harris's development as a playwright in a biographical study based on interviews with Harris. This enlightening section treats Harris's philosophy and teaching methods, as well as his creative process.
Citizens of Tokyo is the first collection in English of plays by one of Japan's most important contemporary playwrights, Oriza Hirata, whose works have been performed all over the world. The first part of Citizens of Tokyo, "At Home and Abroad," presents two plays--Toyko Notes and Kings of the Road--that are exemplary of Hirata's unique neorealist dramaturgy, which created one of the most important trends in Japanese theater since the 1990s: Quiet Theatre. The second part of the book presents two short comedies that satirize the politics of decision-making in Japan and abroad: "Loyal Rōnin: The Working Girls' Version" and "The Yalta Conference." The final part, "Robots and Androids are People Too," presents two short plays created in collaboration with Ishiguro Hiroshi and the Osaka University Robot Theatre Project. The plays are accompanied by a context-setting introduction from editor and cotranslator M. Cody Poulton.
This anthology features six plays by celebrated Chicago playwright Mickle Maher, who has been described by the Houston Chronicle as “one of the most original voices in American theater today,” and by the Chicago Reader as “a master at creating complex, paradoxical works that encompass their own contradictions.” Maher’s plays engage classic literature as a jumping off point for seriously unusual comedic dramas, often dealing with the absurdity, difficulties, and rewards of artistic endeavor. His work has been influenced by or compared to Eugène Ionesco, Maria Irene Fornes, Kenneth Koch, and Edward Albee, among others. This edition is designed to be useful for schools and other organizations that wish to mount productions of Maher’s plays, which generally feature small casts and simple scenery and stagings, and thus can be easy to produce. The anthology includes: An Apology for the Course and Outcome of Certain Events Delivered by Doctor John Faustus on This His Final Evening On the night Faustus concludes his bargain with Mephistopheles, he apologizes to a group of random people for his failure to keep a diary of his fabulous life. The Hunchback Variations Ludwig von Beethoven and Quasimodo present a panel discussion on their failure to create an impossible sound called for in a stage direction in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. Song About Himself In a dystopian future, a woman made extraordinary by her ability to speak relatively clearly tries to connect with others on a mysterious social media site created by a rogue artificial intelligence. There Is a Happiness That Morning Is Having engaged the evening before in a highly inappropriate display of public affection on the main lawn of their rural New England campus, two lecturers on the poems of William Blake must now, in class, either apologize for their behavior or effectively justify it to keep their jobs. It Is Magic Deb and Sandy are auditioning Tim for the role of the Wolf in a production of The Three Little Pigs, but there’s a mysterious haze in the basement of the Mortier Civic Playhouse and that, in addition to interruptions from the director of the Scottish play that’s going on upstairs, is making things difficult. Then, Liz shows up and throws the whole room into (further) chaos. It Is Magic reveals the deep, ancient evil at the heart of the community theater audition process. Spirits to Enforce Twelve telefundraisers with secret identities work to raise money for a superheroic production of The Tempest in a bid to save Fathomtown from Professor Cannibal and his band of evil doers.
A bold and singular collection of six plays by Arab and Jewish playwrights explores the human toll of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Admission by Motti Lerner, Scenes From 70* Years by Hannah Khalil, Tennis in Nablus by Ismail Khalidi, Urge for Going by Mona Mansour, The Victims by Ken Kaissar, and The Zionists by Zohar Tirosh-Polk. Rather than striving to achieve balance and moral equivalency between "competing" narratives, the plays investigate themes of identity, justice, occupation, exile, history and homeland with honesty and integrity. The plays do not "take sides" or adhere to ideological orthodoxies but challenge tribalism and narrow definitions of nationalism, while varying widely in thematic content, dramatic structure, and time and place. Where politicians and diplomats fail, artists and storytellers may yet succeed--not in ratifying a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine, but in building the sort of social and political connectivity that enables resolution.
