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Plays / Theatre
From celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Thornton Wilder, three of the greatest plays in American literature together in one volume.
This omnibus edition brings together Wilder's three best-known plays: Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker. Includes a preface by the author, as well as a foreword by playwright John Guare.
Our Town, Wilder's timeless Pulitzer Prize-winning look at love, death, and destiny, opened on Broadway in 1938 and continues to be celebrated and performed around the world.
The Skin of our Teeth, Wilder's 1942 romp about human follies and human endurance starring the Antrobus family of Excelsior, New Jersey, earned Wilder his third Pulitzer Prize.
The Matchmaker, Wilder's brilliant 1954 farce about money and love starring that irrepressible busybody Dolly Gallagher Levi. This play inspired the Broadway musical Hello, Dolly!
Despite being widely acknowledged as one of the most important German dramatists since Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller (1929-95) still remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This collection of plays aims to change that, presenting new translations and opening up his work to a larger audience.
Collected here are three of his plays--Philoctetes, The Horatian, and Mauser--whose poetic texts evidence the influence of Shakespeare, classical Greek tragedy, and avant-garde political theater on his works. Together they constitute what Müller called an experimental series, which both develops and critiques Brecht's theory of the Lehrstück, or learning play.
Based on a tragedy by Sophocles, Philoctetes dramatizes the confrontation between politics, morality, and the desire for revenge. The Horatian uses an incident from ancient Rome as an example of ways of approaching the moral ambiguity of the past. Finally, Mauser, set during the Russian civil war, examines the nature and ethics of revolutionary violence. The plays are accompanied by supporting materials written by Müller himself, as well as an introduction by Uwe Schütte that contextualizes the plays and speaks of their continued relevance today.
Three sisters, Orla, Marianne and Erin, dream of escaping their tedious suburban lives for a fresh start in America. It is Erin's eighteenth birthday and, as the sun shines and guests assemble, everything for a fleeting moment feels possible.
Relocated from a Russian provincial town in 1900 to East Belfast in the 1990s, Lucy Caldwell's new version of Chekhov's Three Sisters opened at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast in October 2016.
Zestier and more colloquial than most translations . . . Letts' main achievement here is to make Chekhov more emotional, accessible and active.--Chicago Tribune
I've seen over a dozen Three Sisters, but never has the final scene . . . registered so hard. It's the cumulative effect of . . . searing truth-telling--from Letts, who knows family dysfunction as only the author of August: Osage County can, and Chekhov, the good doctor who diagnoses all our weaknesses that are so strong.--Chicago Theater Beat
When the champion of modern family drama takes on the genre's patriarch, the result is an energetic and vitalizing adaptation of one of Anton Chekhov's most beloved plays. A cruder, gruffer outline of the plight of the wistful Prozorov sisters serves to emphasize the anguish of their Chekhovian stagnation. This latest work from Letts envisions the revered classic through a fresh lens that revives the passionate characters and redoubles the tragic effect of their stunted dreams.
Tracy Letts was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play for August: Osage County. His other plays include Superior Donars; Pulitzer Prize-finalist Man from Nebraska; Killer Joe, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed film; and Bug, which has played in New York, Chicago and London and was adapted into a film. Letts garnered a Tony Award for his performance in the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
First performed at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901, The Three Sisters probes the lives and dreams of Olga, Masha, and Irina, former Muscovites now living in a provincial town from which they long to escape. Their hopes for a life more suited to their cultivated tastes and sensibilities provide a touching counterpoint to the relentless flow of compromising events in the real world.
In this powerful play, a landmark of modern drama, Chekhov masterfully interweaves character and theme in subtle ways that make the work's climax seem as inevitable as it is deeply moving. It is reprinted here from a standard text with updated transliteration of character names and additional explanatory footnotes.
You'd be hard put to find a better script to work with than this translation by Michael Frayn . . . It sticks rigorously to the inner thrust of the play while giving it a fresh, crisp clarity that makes it not just accessible but compelling to watch. The underlying tragedy . . . is intact. It is made more moving, not less, by the way Frayn's ineffably light touch has caught too the comedy of Andrey and his three sisters.' GUARDIAN
'Frayn puts well the central statement of this most moving of dramas: it is about the irony of the hopes by which people live and the way their destiny mocks them. Chekhov shows how life is both nourished and poisoned by the act of hope itself' DAILY TELEGRAPH Following their father's death, life for sisters Olga, Masha and Irina in a Russian provincial garrison town has become unbearably dull. They feel they have become culturally, romantically and intellectually starved. To these sisters, Moscow, where they once lived and in spite of its sad memories, has become a symbol of unfulfilled hope, promises and opportunity, and one which contrasts with the tedium of their own lives and circumstances. The sisters' main hope of moving to Moscow depends on their brother, Andrey, with his ambitions to work in academia in Moscow. Set over three and a half years at the turn of the twentieth century, and premiered at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1901, Chekhov's play has become among the most iconic in modern theatre. This translation is by Michael Frayn, one of today's most eminent British playwrights and translators of Russian drama. Commentary and notes by Nick Worrall.
What makes good drama? How does drama matter in our lives? In Three Uses of the Knife, one of America's most respected writers reminds us of the secret powers of the play. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and director, David Mamet celebrates the absolute necessity of drama--and the experience of great plays--in our lurching attempts to make sense of ourselves and our world.
In three tightly woven essays of characteristic force and resonance, Mamet speaks about the connection of art to life, language to power, imagination to survival, the public spectacle to the private script.
It is our fundamental nature to dramatize everything. As Mamet says, "Our understanding of our life, of our drama.... resolves itself into thirds: Once Upon a Time.... Years Passed.... And Then One Day." We inhabit a drama of daily life--waiting for a bus, describing a day's work, facing decisions, making choices, finding meaning. The essays in the book are an eloquent reminder of how life is filled with the small scenes of tragedy and comedy that can be described only as drama.
First-rate theater, Mamet writes, satisfies the human hunger for ordering the world into cause-effect-conclusion. A good play calls for the protagonist "To create, in front of us, on the stage, his or her own character, the strength to continue. It is her striving to understand, to correctly assess, to face her own character (in her choice of battles) that inspires us--and gives the drama power to cleanse and enrich our own character." Drama works, in the end, when it supplies the meaning and wholeness once offered by magic and religion--an embodied journey from lie to truth, arrogance to wisdom.
Mamet also writes of bad theater; of what it takes to write a play, and the often impossibly difficult progression from act to act; the nature of soliloquy; the contentless drama and empty theatrics of politics and popular entertainment; the ubiquity of stage and literary conventions in the most ordinary of lives; and the uselessness, finally, of drama--or any art--as ideology or propaganda.
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.
"The play's two hours fly by as if you've barely taken a breath. . . . Ethical dilemmas arise like exploding mines."-Variety
"Mr. Margulies is a skilled practitioner of fluid dialogue that is naturally funny and sensibly smart." -The New York Times
In his "absorbing intelligent" (Los Angeles Times) and timely new play, Donald Margulies uncovers the layers of a relationship between a photojournalist and foreign correspondent--once addicted to the adrenaline of documenting the atrocities of war, and now grounded in the couple's Brooklyn loft. Photographer Sarah was seriously injured while covering the war in Iraq; her reporter partner James had left weeks earlier, when the stress and horrors became too much for him. Now James writes online movie reviews while Sarah recovers, mourning for her Iraqi driver (and former lover) killed in the explosion, and itching to get back behind the camera. With this play--coming to Broadway this winter--Margulies revisits themes of being an artist, as characters ask: What does it mean to capture suffering on film, rather than stopping to intervene?
Donald Margulies received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Dinner with Friends, which has been produced throughout the world. Other plays include Sight Unseen (OBIE Award), Brooklyn Boy, and Collected Stories, among many others.
