Plays / Theatre

"A slam-bang series of five plays providing kaleidoscopic windows into the recesses of the artist's fertile mind. . . . "Tiny Kushner" exists in its own imaginative realm, engaged in the process of working out the American experience without approval or condemnation."--"Variety"

"Kushner's eclectic, wicked wit makes for a great deal of charm and excitement. . . . Hefty political and moral issues dance with buoyant shtick. . . . Penetrating comedy and theatrical strokes light up the stage."--"San Francisco Chronicle"

Described as "a thinking person's comedy" ("The New York Times"), "Tiny Kushner" is a series of five short works from one of the most important voices in the American theater. Best known for his Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning seven-hour epic "Angels in America," Tony Kushner shows audiences his talent for brevity with this collection of works, which recently co-premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. The pieces include no fewer than two therapy sessions (one with Richard Nixon's shrink), a trip to the moon, Queen Geraldine of Albania, tax-evading New York City cops, and Laura Bush reading Dostoyevsky to a class of dead Iraqi schoolchildren--to give you a taste. Includes: "Flip Flop Fly!"; "Terminating or Sonnet LXXV or "Lass Meine Schmerzen Nicht Verloren Sein" or Ambivalence"; "East Coast Ode to Howard Jarvis: a little teleplay in tiny monologues"; "Dr. Arnold A. Hutschnecker in Paradise"; and "Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy."

Tony Kushner's plays include "A Bright Room Called Day"; "Angels in America, Parts One and Two"; "Slavs!"; "Homebody/Kabul"; and the book and lyrics for "Caroline, or Change." His many honors include the Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards for Best Play, and three OBIE Awards for Playwriting.

The 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 stunning new covers designed by Manuja Waldia, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.

This edition of Titus Andronicus is edited with an introduction by Russ McDonald.

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.

Aaron the Moor, a magnificent villain and the empress's secret lover, makes a similar transition. After the empress bears him a child, Aaron devotes himself to preserving the baby. Retaining his thirst for evil, he shows great tenderness to his little family--a tenderness that also characterizes Titus before the terrifying conclusion.

The authoritative edition of Titus Andronicus from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:

-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing 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

Essay by Alexander Leggatt

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.

An aging rock star in a world in which entertainment and street warfare go hand in hand, Hoss must defend himself against Crow, a newcomer who battles him for fame. Combining musical styles and intense dialogue in an unconventional musical-fantasy, Tooth of Crime riffs brilliantly on rising stars and fading legends, and rock lived and died for.

Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

A darkly comic fable of brotherly love and family identity is Suzan-Lori Parks latest riff on the way we are defined by history. The play tells the story of Lincoln and Booth, two brothers whose names were given to them as a joke, foretelling a lifetime of sibling rivalry and resentment. Haunted by the past, the brothers are forced to confront the shattering reality of their future.

Suzan-Lori Parks is the author of numerous plays, including In the Blood and Venus. She is currently head of the A.S.K. Theater Projects Writing for Performance Program at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia.

Featuring conversations with theatre makers in the US and UK during the first 8 months of the Covid-19 lockdown, this collection reveals the innovations in digital theatre as artists, companies and theatres had to adjust to the restrictions and formulate new ways of working and reaching audiences. Besides documenting in their own words the work that was generated, this book captures the artists' dreams for a new post-Covid reality in which theatre is reimagined and issues of racial and economic injustice are addressed.

With conversations grouped under 5 broad areas, a host of theatre makers candidly discuss the present and the future of theatre:

* R/evolution: How should theatre evolve rather than re-set? What kind of field could this be, if the arts sector is to survive in the US and UK and if white supremacist, classist, ableist, and patriarchal structures are dismantled, and acts of regeneration and reformation occur?

* What does theatre look like at the local and hyper-local level and when working with young people and communities at risk?

* What are the challenges of creating work in the digital realm and/or exploring socially distanced performance in new ways?

* How may theatre address social inequalities and be a place for acts of political and artistic resistance? How has the pandemic galvanised their commitments to communities, arts advocacy, use of languages on the stage and page, and considerations of the living archive?

* Acts of communion with audiences, readers, fellow artists, students, and within ensembles and collectives. How do we find new ways to gather and make when liveness and the shared experience are challenged?

Shakespeare may have written Julius Caesar as the first of his plays to be performed at the Globe, in 1599. For it, he turned to a key event in Roman history: Caesar's death at the hands of friends and fellow politicians. Renaissance writers disagreed over the assassination, seeing Brutus, a leading conspirator, as either hero or villain. Shakespeare's play keeps this debate alive.

This edition includes:
-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Newly revised explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing 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 up-to-date annotated guide to further reading

Essay by Coppélia Kahn

​The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.

For the first time in English, Vladimir Nabokov's earliest major work, written when he was only twenty-four: his only full-length play, introduced by Thomas Karshan and beautifully translated by Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy.
"The Tragedy of Mister Morn" was written in the winter of 1923---1924, when Nabokov was completely unknown. The five-act play--the story of an incognito king whose love for the wife of a banished revolutionary brings on the chaos the king has fought to prevent--was never published in Nabokov's lifetime and lay in manuscript until it appeared in a Russian literary journal in 1997. It is an astonishingly precocious work, in exquisite verse, touching for the first time on what would become this great writer's major themes: intense sexual desire and jealousy, the elusiveness of happiness, the power of the imagination, and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy. The play is Nabokov's major response to the Russian Revolution, which he had lived through, but it approaches the events of 1917 above all through the prism of Shakespearean tragedy.