Collects over twenty short plays published by the Nobel Prize winning playwright Samuel Beckett. Includes his mimes, radio and television plays, screenplay, and adaptations of other's works.
O'Neill's themes and concerns find expression in his one-act plays which are the dramatic equivalent of short stories. Here are nine one-act plays that span the playwright's career.
THE STORIES: CAMBERWELL HOUSE by Amelia Roper. Elderly neighbors Annie and Olive have been friends since they were children. At twenty, they agreed to "knock each other off" if they were still alive at seventy-five. Now they are seventy-five and one of them has changed her mind. A tale of old age, murder, and ginger nut biscuits. (1 woman.) THE CLOSET by Aoise Stratford. Kevin's dad has thrown his favorite toy, Bart Sponge, into the back of a closet. There, Bart meets a toy dinosaur and another toy he can't even begin to identify. Does a supposedly gay toy have a chance of making it out of the closet? (2 men, 1 woman or man.) CLOSING COSTS by Arlene Hutton. After viewing four hundred apartments, has Harris finally found the right co-op, or simply the right real estate agent—Alice? Harris must decide if it's time to trade in his artificial fish—and finally grow up. (1 man, 1 woman.) FREEFALLING by Aurin Squire. Two passengers and a stewardess on a falling plane give their moment-by-moment account of what happens when tomorrow is no longer certain. (2 men, 1 woman.) POISON by John Patrick Shanley. Kenny has seen the depths of Kelly's self-hatred, and he'll never date her again—unless he drinks a fortune-teller's mysterious potion, which will kill his soul as dead as Kelly's. Can Kelly convince him to drink the potion? Can she convince herself? (1 man, 2 women.) SELF-TORTURE AND STRENUOUS EXERCISE by Harry Kondoleon. Carl tells Alvin that he's in love with another woman. "Good for you," says Alvin, who refuses to accept that Carl's, Adel, wife only attempted suicide—she's still alive. The woman Carl loves is Alvin's wife, Beth. But right now, Beth is so drunk she can't get up off the floor, much less run off with Carl, and Adel comes in with bandaged wrists saying Carl has been trying to kill her. These four have some issues to work out. (2 men, 2 women.) A SINGULAR KINDA GUY by David Ives. Mitch is a young guy talking to a girl in a bar. She's nice, but he's got this sort of confession, see. There's something she ought to know—on the inside, he isn't really a guy at all. He's an Olivetti electric self-correcting typewriter. (1 man.) SOMETHING FROM NOTHING by David Riedy. A stranger's intimate gesture on a New York subway causes a couple to reexamine their relationship, and it causes one person to get punched in the face. Told from all three characters' wildly different perspectives. (2 men, 1 woman.) THERE'S NO HERE HERE by Craig Pospisil. Lance moves to Paris to follow his dream of becoming a writer, but his work goes badly. As does his relationship with Juliette, a beautiful Parisian. But a strangely familiar woman at their local bistro forces Lance to dig deeper into himself. (2 men, 2 women.) YOU HAVE ARRIVED by Rob Ackerman. Dan and Kristin are navigating their first date, and fortunately, the other woman with them knows the way through the confusion into Brooklyn. That would be Cyndi, the GPS system in Dan's car. (1 man, 2 women.)
Volume II of Wilder's collected plays includes "The Angel That Troubled the Waters, Our Century, The Unerring Instinct", and "The Alcestiad, or a Life in the Sun", a little-known retelling of an ancient Greek legend.
Drawing from his own, specific experience, Margulies has indeed created what he calls "a window to the world" at large. The bits and pieces and detritus of our culture have been used to construct a powerful drama about a new and devastating age of anxiety in the United States. July 7, 1994 ranks as an important work by a gifted and growing American playwright."-Chicago Tribune This new anthology by Donald Margulies collects his best short plays and monologues written over the past 24 years. Taken as a whole, the work is an extraordinary representation of a particularly American reality of the twentieth century. His language is exquisite and deceptive in its simplicity, wherein the larger questions of our daily existence emerge and are clarified. The volume contains three major one-act plays including July 7, 1994, the hit of the 1995 Humana Festival at the Actors Theatre of Louisville; Pitching to the Stars, a darkly comic look at the writers lot in Hollywood; and Luna Park, an elegiac look at the American past and the immigrant experience, based on a short story by Delmore Schwartz. The volume also includes fifteen other short plays and monologues. Donald Margulies is the author of numerous plays, including Dinner with Friends and Collected Stories, both being filmed for television by HBO and PBS. Mr. Margulies lives with his wife and son in New Haven, Connecticut, where he teaches playwriting at Yale University. Also available by Donald Margulies Dinner with Friends PB $11.95 1-55936-194-8 a_? USA Collected Stories PB $11.95 1-55936-152-2 a_? USA Sight Unseen and Other Plays PB $16.95 1-55936-103-4 a_? USA
Samuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, has produced some of his most widely praised work for the stage in the form of the shorter play. This complete and definitive collection of twenty-five plays and "playlets" includes Beckett's celebrated Krapp's Last Tape, Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, Not I, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, all his radio and television plays, his screenplay for Film, his adaptation of Robert Pignet's The Old Tune, and more recent Catastrophe, What Where, Quad, and Night and Dreams. Includes: All That Fall Act Without Words I Act Without Words II Krapp's Last Tape Rough for Theatre I Rough for Theatre II Embers Rough for Radio I Rough for Radio II Words and Music Cascando Play Film The Old Tune Come and Go Eh Joe Breath Not I That Time Footfalls Ghost Trio …but the clouds… A Piece of Monologue Rockaby Ohio Impromptu Quad Catastrophe Nacht und Träume What Where
THE STORIES: NAOMI IN THE LIVING ROOM. Naomi, when visited by John and Johnna, her son and daughter-in-law, is alternately friendly and insulting. Johnna copes her best, but when John changes his clothes to look like Johnna, things start to unravel
From the mind of the writer of The House of Yes and Juvenilia comes this exciting new collection of short plays. With characters ranging from a smooth talking salesman (Snake Oil) to a group of downtrodden college baseball players (Division III), each play features the unique wit and wordplay of celebrated playwright Wendy MacLeod.
A collection of short plays by Zhu Yi that have been performed in New York between 2008-2015. Elegant and gritty, poetic and mundane, fantastical and ordinary.