Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke's first full-length drama, hailed in Europe as "the play of the decade" and compared in importance to Waiting for Godot Kaspar is the story of an autistic adolescent who finds himself at a complete existential loss on the stage, with but a single sentence to call his own. Drilled by prompters who use terrifyingly funny logical and alogical language-sequences, Kaspar learns to speak "normally" and eventually becomes creative--"doing his own thing" with words; for this he is destroyed. In Offending the Audience and Self-Accusation, one-character "speak-ins," Handke further explores the relationship between public performance and personal identity, forcing us to reconsider our sense of who we are and what we know.
Set in a rural pub in western Ireland, "The weir" is a drama of interwoven stories as told by the locals about how they comfort and distract one another in the midst of desolation and grief.
This critically acclaimed play by Luis Valdez cracks open the depiction of Chicanos on stage, challenging viewers to revisit a troubled moment in our nationÕs history. From the moment the myth-infused character El Pachuco burst onto the stage, cutting his way through the drop curtain with a switchblade, Luis Valdez spurred a revolution in Chicano theater. Focusing on the events surrounding the Sleepy Lagoon Murder Trial of 1942 and the ensuing Zoot Suit Riots that turned Los Angeles into a bloody war zone, this is a gritty and vivid depiction of the horrifying violence and racism suffered by young Mexican Americans on the home front during World War II. ValdezÕs cadre of young urban characters struggle with the stereotypes and generalizations of AmericaÕs dominant culture, the questions of assimilation and patriotism, and a desire to rebel against the mainstream pressures that threaten to wipe them out. Experimenting with brash forms of narration, pop culture of the war era, and complex characterizations, this quintessential exploration of the Mexican-American experience in the United States during the 1940Õs was the first, and only, Chicano play to open on Broadway. This collection contains three of playwright and screenwriter Luis ValdezÕs most important and recognized plays: Zoot Suit, Bandido! and I DonÕt Have to Show You No Stinking Badges. The anthology also includes an introduction by noted theater critic Dr. Jorge Huerta of the University of California-San Diego. Luis Valdez, the most recognized and celebrated Hispanic playwright of our times, is the director of the famous farm-worker theater, El Teatro Campesino.
Three new works by Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Patrick Shanley, one of our country's most politically current and theatrically elastic playwrights. In Dirty Story, a couple of sadomasochistic writers fight over rights to their New York City loft. In this sexy satire of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that is ''astonishing,'' says Tony Kushner, ''the analysis of the Middle East in this play is dead on, exactly perfectly pitched. ''In his dark comedy Where's My Money?, Shanley takes on marriage, infidelity, and divorce lawyers in a play that is ''so harsh, it's funny - terrifying, but funny'' (The New York Times).And in his Sailor's Song, love becomes an act of courage, in a seaside romance about the certainty of death, the brevity of youth, and the importance of now.
This volume of Lee Blessing's most recent and some of his best work, includes: Patient A - a rethinking of the Kimberly Bergalis AIDS case; Two Rooms - the strain on families of hostages in the Middle East; Down the Road - a tale of a serial killer concerned with image; Fortinbras - a hilarious reexamination of Hamlet in a contemporary political context; and Lake Street Extension - an exploration of the dark theme of child molestation. All of these plays resonate with Blessing's characteristic depth of human feeling and his insistence that the personal is the political.
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Four seminal plays by one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. An existential portrayal of Hell in Sartre's best-known play, as well as three other brilliant, thought-provoking works: the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict, and an arresting attack on American racism.
This volume combines some of Craig Lucas’ best known work, including Reckless ("a bittersweet fable for our time"—Frank Rich, The New York Times) and Blue Window ("…the clarity of a Mozart quintet. And it is faultlessly spun."—Dan Sullivan, The Los Angeles Times) with his newest play, Stranger. The three plays continue the author’s exploration of the nature of relationships in an ever increasingly distant society. Craig Lucas is the author of Prelude to a Kiss, both a success on Broadway and as a motion picture, The Dying Gaul, God’s Heart, Missing Persons and Longtime Companion. He is currently at work on numerous projects for theatre and film. Also available by Craig Lucas What I Meant Was: New Plays and Selected One Acts PB $17.95 1-55936-159-X • USA Prelude to a Kiss and Other Plays PB $16.95 1-55936-193-X • USA
Four plays by playwright/theatre-maker Caridad Svich (OBIE for Lifetime Achievement) - The Hour of All Things, The Breath of Stars, Upon the Fragile Shore and Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge) - explore the rough and necessary waters of citizenship under the effects of globalization and threads of human connection across multiple geographic landscapes. The Hour of All Things tells the story of an ordinary person trying to figure out how to take a stand against systemic oppression; The Breath of Stars is a radical, atomized reconfiguration of Shakespeare's The Tempest seen through the lens of global capitalism in the digital age. Upon the Fragile Shore spans the stories of individuals in eighteen countries to focus on human-made environmental and human tragedies and their effects. Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge) looks at the tough and tender lives of immigrants and their adult children in Detroit as they struggle to relocate the power of myth in their everyday lives. With an introduction by Welsh playwright and director Ian Rowlands and essays by practitioners Zac Kline, Blair Baker, Neil Scharnick, Carla Melo and Sherrine Azab, this wide-ranging, daring collection of plays refuses to settle the complex and thorny questions of existence.
The master of ancient Greek comic drama, Aristophanes combined slapstick, humour and cheerful vulgarity with acute political observations. In The Frogs, written during the Peloponnesian War, Dionysus descends to the Underworld to bring back a poet who can help Athens in its darkest hour, and stages a great debate to help him decide between the traditional wisdom of Aeschylus and the brilliant modernity of Euripides. The clash of generations and values is also the object of Aristophanes’ satire in The Wasps, in which an old-fashioned father and his loose-living son come to blows and end up in court. And in The Poet and the Women, Euripides, accused of misogyny, persuades a relative to infiltrate an all-women festival to find out whether revenge is being plotted against him.
