Plays & playscripts Books

"Baker may just have the subtlest way with exposition of anyone writing for the theater today... There is something distinctly Chekhovian in the way her writing accrues weight and meaning simply through compassionate, truthful observation." --Charles...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika "Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork...Details of specific...

"It is a meditation on Chicago's old soul . . . a witty, seductive, live-wire and greatly entertaining dark comedy that you just don't want to end." Chicago Tribune "Superior Donuts is a soulful play, full of humor and humanity... drawn with deep...

"A fascinating, funny and evocative play. . . . Ruhl develops the story with the enticing blend of irreverent humor and skewed realism. . . . It's beautiful." San Francisco Chronicle"[This] breathtakingly inventive addition to Ruhl's singular body of...

"Satire is her oxygen. . . . In her new oddball comedy, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Sarah Ruhl is forever vital in her lyrical and biting takes on how we behave."-The Washington Post"Ruhl's zany probe of the razor-thin line between life and death delivers a...

"This brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill to that shattering transformation that stirs in all our souls."-Charles Isherwood, The New York Times"The staggering purity of this show will touch all open...

"The concluding work in one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken . . . a play that could well be Mr. Wilson's most provocative."-Ben Brantley, The New York Times"Radio Golf is a rich, carefully wrought human tapestry that is colorful,...

"Donald Margulies has an unerring sense of language and the ability to penetrate deeply into the darkness of tangled human emotions." Joel Hirschhorn, Variety "Quietly melancholic... Margulies has a near-matchless ear for what common speech can express...

"Wicked, observant comedy interspersed with keenly acted monologues that make your heart ache." -Miami Herald "[The] Latino comedy trio simultaneously makes mincemeat out of American cultural icons and skewers the hell out of their own ethnic heritage -...

"God's Heart is a play which dares to say very ugly things from a very moral place, which risks censure in an effort to reach an ugly truth; a play that's wise to its own inescapable shortcomings and addresses them as part of its subject; a play which...

"Culture Clash is a national treasure." - Philip Kan Gotanda "These guys are funny daredevils of performance, totally fearless as they skewer convention and lazy thinking. Cool." - Eric Bogosian "Important social satire for these urgent times." - Dolores...

"A landmark musical, one of those few shows that enter the permanent lore of the theatre by altering the vocabulary of dramatic possibilities." Time"There's never been a franker, more sophisticated work written for the musical stage." San Francisco...

The first play by multi-media artist Vivek Shraya, about fame and personal transformation.Described as 'cultural rocket fuel' by Vanity Fair, Vivek Shraya is a multi-media artist whose art, music, novels, and poetry and children's books...

Shakespeare by McBean collects 300 images, many never before published, taken by the renowned photographer Angus McBean. Incorporating images from every one of Shakespeare's plays performed at the RSC, with some from the Old Vic, between the years...

LARGE PRINT EDITION. Macbeth, a successful solider, is visited by Three Witches who claim he will soon become king, but his ascension may be thwarted by other parties. Macbeth is driven by ambition and takes drastic steps to secure his place on the...

From the moment of her spectacular death on the scaffold, the story of Mary Queen of Scots became nothing short of a sensation across Europe. She was executed on 8 February 1587, and her death was the climax of a captivity that lasted over eighteen years...

Age range 7+This refresher reference volume features concise character and plot summaries for 12 of Shakespeare's best-known plays, drawn from the SparkNotes website and illustrated with colourful infographics.Each of the 12 chapters in this volume runs...

Read Romeo and Juliet in graphic-novel form - with NO FEAR!  NOW IN COLOUR! Based on the No Fear Shakespeare translations, this dynamic graphic novel - now with color added - is impossible to put down. The illustrations are...

Read Macbeth in graphic-novel form - with NO FEAR!  NOW IN COLOUR! Based on the No Fear Shakespeare translations, this dynamic graphic novel - now with color added - is impossible to put down. The illustrations are...

Read Hamlet in graphic-novel form - with NO FEAR!  NOW IN COLOUR! Based on the No Fear Shakespeare translations, this dynamic graphic novel - now with colour added - is impossible to put down. The illustrations are...

No Fear Shakespeare gives you the complete text of The Comedy of Errors on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand translation on the right.Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:The complete...

April 9, 2010 Approximate Local Time Midnight in Afghanistan Twenty-five hundred feet over Taliban-held territory in southern Afghanistan, three U.S. Air Force CV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft droned through the inky black sky. The mission of the...

This volume contains two new American translations of works by Valre Novarina, one of the major voices in avant-garde theater of the past forty years. Novarina is celebrated for his unique theatrical writing, exploring language beyond the conventional...

"That joyous rarity, a work of sophisticated artistic ambition and deep political purpose that affords nonstop pleasure."--William A. Henry III, Time

How much do we value clean water? Enough to stop our industrialized way of life from degrading it? The documentary play The Watershed follows an artist and her family in the struggle to chart a sustainable course between economic prosperity and...

Skydive explores the world of dreams and imagination: the universal human desire to push beyond our physical limitations and to fly. Having grown apart after a traumatic and de?ning moment in their youth, two brothers reconnect to fulfill a life-long...

In The Ventriloquist, Larry Tremblay directs his celebrated mastery of the dramatic monologue to an interrogation of the process of characterization itself. Alone on the stage with his puppet, the ventriloquist introduces his "self " as a construct of...

Mambo Italiano achieves its overwhelming power through a perfect balance of fast-paced comedy and poignant drama. Angelo, at the prompting of his equally repressed sister Anna, has told his very traditionally Italian immigrant parents, Maria and Gino,...

'Ordinarily, theatre relies on illusion in order to reveal truths; The Noam Chomsky Lectures relies on truths in order to reveal illusions. Following the impetus of Chomsky himself, Brooks and Verdecchia have recognized that mass media, mass spectacle,...

This play by renowned poet and political activist Aime Csaire recounts the tragic death of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo and an African nationalist hero. A Season in the Congo follows Lumumba's efforts to free the...

Discover the richness and beauty of Bali's many performing art forms.This book is a lavishly illustrated introduction to the most popular forms of traditional performing arts in Bali--among the most intricate and spectacular musical and...

Upon its premiere, The Deputy stirred up more controversy and caused greater repercussions than any other postwar work. Based on Rolf Hochhuth's research into the Vatican activities during World War II, the play's treatment of Pope Pius XII - the...

The hilarious and poignant third play by award-winning actor, playwright, and writer Jesse Eisenberg, The Spoils continues Eisenberg's exploration of the privilege of the young straight white male. Nobody likes Ben. Ben doesn't...

The Revisionist, the second play by the award-winning actor and regular New Yorker contributor Jesse Eisenberg, is a stunning exploration of obsession, secrets, and the nature of family. The play had its world premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New...

Energetically places modern British drama and contemporary critical and cultural theory in dialogue, demonstrating how theory allows fresh insights into familiar plays. Each chapter pairs a well-known play from the post-war period with a classic theory...

Ben Jonson's "Volpone" (1605) is one of the most famous comedies of early modern Europe, translated into many languages and frequently revived on stage. This student edition has a carefully modernized text, aimed at undergraduates, theatrical producers...

We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question of modernity in...

A bold new reconception of ancient Greek drama as a mode of philosophical thinking.The Philosophical Stage offers an innovative approach to ancient Greek literature and thought that places drama at the heart of intellectual history. Drawing on evidence...

This volume offers the fruits of Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff's dynamic collaboration on the plays of Sophocles' Theban cycle, presenting the translators' Oedipus Tyrannus (2000) along with Woodruff's Antigone (2001) and a muscular new Oedipus at...

"Superior to any other Uncle Vanya I've read or seen... Baker practices astonishing verbal magic over and over again." - Clancy Martin, Paris Review "Strikingly intimate... Free of the stilted or formal locutions that clutter up some of the more...

This new volume of three of Euripides' most celebrated plays offers graceful, economical, metrical translations that convey the wide range of effects of the playwright's verse, from the idiomatic speech of its dialogue to the high formality of its choral...

Mitchell-Boyask's Introduction gives the reader a lively and accessible overview of Euripides' life, the circumstances of the original performances, and critical debate on the three plays. Footnotes to the translations provide students with useful...

Aeschylus: The Libation Bearers; Euripides: Electra; Sophocles: Electra

'This is the best Prometheus Bound in English. Deborah Roberts' translation is accurate, readable, and true to the original in idiom, imagery, and the combination of a high style with occasional colloquialism. The informative notes and perceptive...

This fully re-edited, modernised play text is accompanied by commentary notes and an introduction written by Paul Menzer, guiding you through the fume of fact and legend that have accompanied the play across the centuries. As well as the complete text of...

The Methuen Drama Student Edition of Twelve Angry Men is the first critical edition of Reginald Rose's play, providing the play text alongside commentary and notes geared towards student readers. In New York, 1954, a man is dead and the life of another...

An industrial port of a war-torn city. Women survivors wait to be shipped abroad. Officials come and go. A grandmother, once Queen, watches as her remaining family are taken from her one by one. The city burns around them.  Euripides' great anti-war...

A dazzling display of William Shakespeare's fondness for wit and wordplay, Much Ado About Nothing is a high-spirited comedy, edited with notes by R.A. Foakes, and an introduction by Janet Dillon. 'Some, Cupid kills with arrows, some, with traps' Proud,...