Banner Message
Please note that online availability does not reflect stock in store!
Please contact us via email or phone for immediate stock information.
Plays / Theatre
"Miller takes his rightful place in The Library of America with this volume." --Library Journal (starred review) In the inaugural volume of its collected edition of Miller's plays, The Library of America gathers the works from the 1940s and 1950s that electrified theatergoers and established Miller as one of the indispensable voices of the postwar era. Among the plays included are All My Sons, the story of an industrialist confronted with his moral lapses during World War II; Death of a Salesman, the wrenching tragedy of Willy Loman's demise; The Crucible, at once a riveting reconstruction of the Salem witch trials and a parable of McCarthyism; and A View from the Bridge, Miller's tale of betrayal among Italian immigrants in Brooklyn, presented here in both the original one-act and revised two-act versions. This volume also contains the intriguing early drama The Man Who Had All the Luck, the first of Miller's plays to be produced on Broadway, along with his adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, the autobiographical one-act A Memory of Two Mondays, and Miller's novella The Misfits, based on the screenplay he wrote for Marilyn Monroe. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
This wisely funny comedy, which contains some of Shakespeare's loveliest poetry, contrasts a country's world of envy and rivalry with a forest's world of compassion and harmony. In the Forest of Arden, the banished young heroine, Rosalind, disguised as a gentleman farmer, encounters an extraordinary assemblage of characters, including a fool, a malcontent traveler, her own banished father, and the banished young man she loves. Romantic happiness triumphs, even as we laugh at the excesses of love, at the ways of court and countryside, indeed, at everything, in this masterpiece of comic writing,
The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare's time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
William Shakespeare's As You Like It, the incredible story about love, rebellion, and generosity, now presented by the Folger Shakespeare Library with valuable new tools for educators and dynamic new covers. Readers and audiences have long greeted As You Like It with delight. Its characters are brilliant conversationalists, including the princesses Rosalind and Celia and their Fool, Touchstone. Soon after Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall in love, the princesses and Touchstone go into exile in the Forest of Arden, where they find new conversational partners. Duke Frederick, younger brother to Duke Senior, has overthrown his brother and forced him to live homeless in the forest with his courtiers, including the cynical Jaques. Orlando, whose older brother Oliver plotted his death, has fled there, too. The authoritative edition of As You Like It from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes: -The exact text of the printed book for easy cross-reference
-Hundreds of hypertext links for instant navigation
-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently linked to the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play's famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare expert
-Hundreds of hypertext links for instant navigation
-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently linked to the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play's famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare's language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library's vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare expert
The acclaimed Pelican Shakespeare series edited by A. R. Braunmuller and Stephen Orgel The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare's time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
First presented by the Royal Court Theatre in London in September of 1996, Ashes to Ashes is a triumph of power and concision. In the living room of a pleasant house in a university town outside of London, Devlin, threatened by his wife Rebecca's recollections of an abusive ex-lover, questions her relentlessly in his need for a single truth. In her seamless blending of what she knows of violence with the wider violence of the world, Rebecca reveals an eerie communion with the dead victims of unnamed political barbarities.
"As eccentric as it is cunning, Greenberg's densely packed script sends your mind spinning while you laugh... Diffidence has rarely provided an audience with such enthrallingly readable hidden agendas." - Michael Feingold, Village Voice "The Assembled Parties is Greenberg's most richly emotional work in years, and the most beautifully detailed." - Jesse Green, New York "This tragicomedy shocks us into realizing how hungry we have been for witty and wounded grownups who toss off gorgeously written observations without knowing how little we know about what we think we know." - Linda Winer, Newsday Meet the Bascovs, an Upper West Side Jewish family in 1980. In an opulent apartment overlooking Central Park, former movie star Julie and her sister-in-law Faye bring their families together for a traditional holiday dinner on a night when things don't go as planned. Twenty years later, as 2001 approaches, the Bascovs' life may be about to crumble. An incisive portrait of a family grasping for stability at the dawn of a new millennium, The Assembled Parties premiered on Broadway in 2013 to rave reviews and a Tony Award nomination for Best Play. Richard Greenberg has written two dozen plays, including Take Me Out (Tony Award for Best Play), The Dazzle (Outer Critics Circle Award), Three Days of Rain (L.A. Drama Critics Award, Pulitzer Prize finalist), The American Plan and the book for a musical adaptation of Far from Heaven. He has received the Oppenheimer Award for a new playwright as well as the first PEN/Laura Pels Award for a playwright in midcareer.
Characters: 4 male 3 female
Scenery: Interior
One of the Tonight at 8:30 series produced in London and New York. In psychiatrist Christian Faber's drawing room sits his weeping wife and his sad assistants waiting for the siren Leonora. In four flashbacks the story emerges: Leonora a girlhood chum visited Christian's wife and was introduced to him. She set out to capture her friend's husband but was captured herself. She threw him over because of his jealousy. He jumped out of the window. Leonora has come because Christian calls for her on his death bed. She returns slowly from his room to announce he has died and that his last words were tender ones to his wife for whom he mistook Leonora. Also published in Tonight at 8:30.
Young people and improvisational theater should be a natural combination--so why do we so rarely find this combo in today's classrooms? According to Elizabeth Swados--playwright, director, composer, poet, author of children's books and of an acclaimed family memoir--improvisational theater is the perfect creative outlet for junior-high and high-school students . . . if only they can be given the tools and the guidance to make the most of this natural yet rigorous art form.
Drawing on her own experience teaching inner-city children in the groundbreaking musical Runaways and in teaching the techniques of improv theater in schools around the country, as well as on her own background in experimental theater, Swados provides a step-by-step guide to bringing out the natural creativity and enthusiasm key to young people creating--and enjoying--improvisational theater. Covering the basics--from freeing the imagination to learning about how to work with an ensemble, from how to master different forms of movement and sound to how to create different kinds of characters--this is the book for teachers and students eager to learn how to express fully the creative talent that all children are born with.
This book asks that we consider the practices that facilitate audience participation on equal terms with other elements of the theatre maker's art; it offers a theoretical basis for this new approach, illustrated by examples from diverse participatory performances.
A collection of thoughtful and provocative reflections on how theatre practitioners think about and engage with audiences, as well as define and explore sites for performance. Through shared experience and ritual, live performance functions as a catalytic medium for progress and evolution. In the hands of artists and audience, the stage is set for the re-makings of commonwealth, or necessary revolution
"Throughout the pages of this collection, a wide range of voices sound the joy and fury of being in the trenches of the volatile discourse of enacting, staging, and sharing the experience of performance. The cultural workers in this book seek a revolution of heart, mind, and spirit. They question who we are and consistently ask that hospitality and its uses be placed at the center of the shared theatrical experience."--Caridad Svich, from the Introduction Contributors Include:
Tanuja Amarasuriya, Brian Bell, Deborah Brevoort, Alison Carey, Lenora Champagne, Clay McLeod Chapman, Lisa D'Amour, Nathan Alan Davis, J.J. El-Far, Larissa FastHorse, Andy Field, Amparo Garcia-Crow, Jacqueline Goldfinger, Dipika Guha, Juli Hendren, Brian Eugenio Herrera, Melissa Hillman, Simeilia Hodge-Dallaway, Michael Hoyt, Jeff Janisheski, Callie Kimball, Adrianne Krstansky Kevin Lawler, Corey Madden, Ana Margineanu, Diana Damian Martin, Justin Maxwell, Applied Mechanics, Elsa Menéndez, Richard Montoya, Steve Moore, Itamar Moses, Barney Norris, Kira Obolensky, Jules Odendahl-James, Sylvan Oswald, Katie Pearl, Bill Rauch, Thomas Riccio, Jay Ruby Madeline Sayet, Ashley Sparks, Caridad Svich, Carlton Turner, Roberto G. Varea, Dave White, Jake Witlen, Deborah Yarchun TCG Sourcebooks is a new series which gathers resources and field conversations generated from current TCG programs. Each volume is published in both paperback and eBook editions and offers varied perspectives by and for theatre practitioners. Other titles in this series include Innovation in Five Acts: Strategies for Theatre and Performance, edited by Caridad Svich.
Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theater, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award for GUAPA, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based on the Isabel Allende novel.
Based on the popular workshop of the same name, Audition Psych 101 takes a detailed, unvarnished look at the mental gremlins that can make auditioning stressful. With frankness, humor, and a pro-actor sensibility, professional working actor Michael Kostroff (The Wire, The Deuce, Luke Cage, The Blacklist, Law & Order: SVU, etc.) explodes commonly accepted mythologies and offers a fresh, more logical, and more effective approach to the whole process. Speaking directly to other professional actors, Kostroff pulls each step into slow motion, shining a light into the dark corners in search of those little snags that can screw us up.
"It has completely changed the way I view auditions." -- Chad Manuel, Chicago
"Want to learn why we constantly get in our own way before we even set foot in the room? Michael has made a detailed, brilliant study of the most common traps, and how to avoid them." -- Peter Van Norden, Los Angeles
"Michael's expertise, sense of humor, and just old-fashioned good sense does the impossible: It actually makes the actor comfortable with the audition process." -- J. R. Orlando, San Jose
"I'm a psychotherapist who specializes in working with creative artists. Among many other issues, we always talk about their audition anxiety. In Audition Psych 101, Michael Kostroff has validated everything I believe about the audition process. Let him save you a lot of disappointment and frustration." -- Lee D. Kassan, psychotherapist/psychoanalyst
"It brought the joy and fun back into the audition process, which ultimately has allowed for more callbacks and many more bookings." -- Mick Guire, New York City
"I can't wait for my next audition. (Holy mackerel, did I just write that?)" -- Deborah Linehan, New York City
Harness your passion and nail your next audition with this "immensely useful" (Variety) playbook from the legendary casting director for Chicago, The Sound of Music, Gypsy, and Jesus Christ Superstar--featuring an introduction from Bob Fosse "A bible for aspiring actors."--The New York Times
When Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Ben Vereen, Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler, and Dustin Hoffman got their first breaks, Michael Shurtleff was there. In Audition, the renowned casting director shares twelve vital guideposts for how to succeed in any audition and offers advice on:
- style
- pacing
- distractions
- risks
- seduction
- drama
- musical theater
- comedy
- self-rescue
- eye contact
- and more! Audition is a seminal guide to finding victory in all the auditions we face in life.
When Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Ben Vereen, Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler, and Dustin Hoffman got their first breaks, Michael Shurtleff was there. In Audition, the renowned casting director shares twelve vital guideposts for how to succeed in any audition and offers advice on:
- style
- pacing
- distractions
- risks
- seduction
- drama
- musical theater
- comedy
- self-rescue
- eye contact
- and more! Audition is a seminal guide to finding victory in all the auditions we face in life.
Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2008 Tony Award for Best New Play. Now a major motion picture! A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and a tougher people. --TimeOut New York Tracy Letts' August: Osage County is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original. --New York magazine "I don't care if August: Osage County is three-and-a-half hours long. I wanted more." -Howard Shapiro, Philadelphia Inquirer This original and corrosive black comedy deserves a seat at the table with the great American family plays.--Time One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent history, August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest--and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed.
August: Osage County has been produced in more than twenty countries worldwide and is now a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepard, Juliette Lewis, and Ewan McGregor. Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.
August: Osage County has been produced in more than twenty countries worldwide and is now a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepard, Juliette Lewis, and Ewan McGregor. Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.
August Wilson's Century Cycle is one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken (The New York Times). With it, Wilson dramatized the African American experience and heritage in the twentieth century, with a play for each decade, almost all set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Wilson's extraordinary lifework--completed just before his death in October 2005--is presented here for the first time in its entirety.
"Art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired. Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American...The cycle of plays that I have been writing since 1979 is my attempt to represent that culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.
The characters in the plays still place their faith in America's willingness to live up to the meaning of her creed. It is this belief in America's honor that allows them to pursue the American Dream even as it remains elusive...They shout, they argue, they wrestle with love, honor, duty, betrayal; they have loud voices and big hearts; they demand justice, they love, they laugh, they cry, they murder, and they embrace life with zest and vigor...In all the plays, the characters remain pointed towards the future, their pockets lined with fresh hope and an abiding faith in their own abilities and their own heroics."--August Wilson
Titles included in the set:
Winner of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2008 Tony Award for Best New Play. Now a major motion picture! "A tremendous achievement in American playwriting: a tragicomic populist portrait of a tough land and a tougher people." --TimeOut New York "Tracy Letts' August: Osage County is what O'Neill would be writing in 2007. Letts has recaptured the nobility of American drama's mid-century heyday while still creating something entirely original." --New York magazine "I don't care if August: Osage County is three-and-a-half hours long. I wanted more." -Howard Shapiro, Philadelphia Inquirer "This original and corrosive black comedy deserves a seat at the table with the great American family plays."--Time One of the most bracing and critically acclaimed plays in recent history, August: Osage County is a portrait of the dysfunctional American family at its finest--and absolute worst. When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed.
August: Osage County has been produced in more than twenty countries worldwide and is now a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepard, Juliette Lewis, and Ewan McGregor. Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.
August: Osage County has been produced in more than twenty countries worldwide and is now a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney, Sam Shepard, Juliette Lewis, and Ewan McGregor. Tracy Letts is the author of Killer Joe, Bug, and Man from Nebraska, which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His plays have been performed throughout the country and internationally. A performer as well as a playwright, Letts is a member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where August: Osage County premiered.
"A compulsive, mesmerizing and thoroughly uncomfortable experience."--Time Out
Aunt Dan & Lemon takes us into the world of a young recluse named Lemon (alias Leonora) who spends her nights reading chronicles of Nazi atrocities. Lemon tells the audience about the overwhelming influence in her life of her parents' friend "Aunt Dan," an eccentric, passionate professor whose stories and seductive opinions enthrall Lemon from the time she is a young girl. The relationship that develops between Lemon and Aunt Dan and the conversations that went on in a small house on the bottom of an English garden form the focus of this play about political orientation and the allure of certain ideas-even if they lead to murder.
A forceful play exposing the banality of society's evil, Aunt Dan & Lemon explores the ease with which good and bad become reconciled in the human mind.