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Drama & Plays
- Texts printed in the clearest, most readable type
- Names of each speaker given in full
- Detailed footnotes at the bottom of each page keyed to the numbered lines of the text
- Textual notes
- Updated bibliography
-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 David McCandless 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.
Amadeus is the most talked about play in many years. In England it won both the Evening Standard Drama Award and the Theatre Critics Award for the best play of the year.aAmadeus is the story of Salieri's war against God for making him mediocre, for implanting in him a desire to serve as a composer and then making his service seem shameful in his own ears. The play is centrally concerned with divine unfairness and man's unforgiving rage at it.aThe play gives us a portrait of Mozart (based on great research) which should destroy the popular image of that composer as a delicate porcelain infant seated at a porcelain keyboard. Shaffer's Mozart is a human being silly, scatological, irrepressible and in many ways infuriating but always-to his last breath-the instrument of an unwearying God.
The light of fires. The light of stars.
The light that reflects off rivers.
Light that penetrates through cracks.
Then there's the type of light that reflects off the skin.
--Nilo Cruz, Anna in the Tropics This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of Depression-era America. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new "lector" (who reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land. Reviews:
"The words of Nilo Cruz waft from the stage like a scented breeze. They sparkle and prickle and swirl, enveloping those who listen in both specific place and time . . . and in timeless passions that touch us all. In Anna in the Tropics, Cruz claims his place as a storyteller of intricate craftsmanship and poetic power."--Miami Herald "Deeply engrossing." -Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle "Earnestly poetic...Mr. Cruz has created a work as wistful and affectingly ambitious as its characters. Anna in the Tropics reaches for the artistic heavens -- specifically, that corner of eternity occupied by the plays of Anton Chekhov, where yearning is an existential condition." -Ben Brantley, New York Times Nilo Cruz is a young Cuban-American playwright whose work has been produced widely around the United States, including the Public Theater (New York, NY), South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa, CA), Magic Theatre (San Francisco, CA), Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McCarter Theater (Princeton, NJ) and New Theatre (Coral Gables, FL). His other plays include Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, and Anna in the Tropics (Winner of 2003 Pulitzer Prize). Mr. Cruz teaches playwriting at Yale University and lives in New York City.
A play about sex and entropy!
This play is a witty reflection on relationships mixed masterfully with philosophical reflections on epistemology and disorder.
-Aaron
"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self." Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom.
To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity.
This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.
Antoine Marie Joseph Artaud, better known as Antonine Artaud, was a French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theatre director, widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century theatre and the European avant-garde.
Jack Hirschman (b. December 13, 1933, in New York, NY) is a poet and social activist who has written more than 50 volumes of poetry. Dismissed from teaching at UCLA for anti-war activities in 1966, he moved to San Francisco in 1973, and was the city's present poet laureate. Hirschman translates nine languages and edited The Artaud Anthology.
"Pevear and Volokhonsky are at once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English."--The New Yorker
There have always been two versions of Chekhov's heartrending and humorous masterwork: the one with which we are all familiar, staged by Konstatine Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1904, and the one Chekhov had originally envisioned. Now, for the first time, both are available and published here in a single volume in translations by the renowned playwright Richard Nelson and Richard Peavar and Larissa Volokhonsky, the foremost contemporary translators of classic Russian literature. Shedding new light on this most revered play, the translators reconstructed the script Chekhov first submitted and all of the changes he made prior to rehearsal. The result is a major event in the publishing of Chekhov's canon.
Richard Nelson's many plays include Rodney's Wife, Goodnight Children Everywhere, Drama Desk-nominated Franny's Way and Some Americans Abroad, Tony Award-nominated Two Shakespearean Actors and James Joyce's The Dead (with Shaun Davey), for which he won a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical, and the critically acclaimed, searing play cycle, The Apple Family Plays.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have produced acclaimed translations of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Mikhail Bulgakov. Their translations of The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina won the 1991 and 2002 PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prizes. Pevvear, a native of Boston, and Volokhonsjky, of St. Petersburg, are married to each other and live in Paris.
Clybourne Park spans two generations fifty years apart. In 1959, Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bedroom at a bargain price, unknowingly bringing the first black family into the neighborhood (borrowing a plot line from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun) and creating ripples of discontent among the cozy white residents of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by a young white couple, whose plan to raze the house and start again is met with equal disapproval by the black residents of the soon-to-be-gentrified area. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same, fifty years on? Bruce Norris's excruciatingly funny and squirm-inducing satire explores the fault line between race and property.
Clybourne Park is the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and the winner of the 2012 Tony Award for Best Play.
"Immensely haunting... The first of many great things about Martyna Majok's Cost of Living... is the way it slams the door on uplifting stereotypes... Ms. Majok has engineered her plot to lead naturally to moments of intense and complicated pungency... If you don't find yourself in someone in Cost of Living, you're not looking." --Jesse Green, New York Times
Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Cost of Living deftly challenges the typical perceptions of those living with disabilities and delves deep into the ways class, race, nationality, and wealth can create gulfs between people, even as they long for the ability to connect. Eddie, an unemployed truck driver, and his estranged ex-wife, Ani, find themselves unexpectedly reunited after a terrible accident leaves her quadriplegic. John, a brilliant PhD student with cerebral palsy, hires Jess, a first-generation recent graduate who has fallen on desperate times, as his new aide.
With an Introduction by Eteel Lawson
and an Afterword by Cynthia B. Kerr
Now a major motion picture! Starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams. Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley from his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.
"The best new play of the season. That rarity of rarities, an issue-driven play that is unpreachy, thought-provoking, and so full of high drama that the audience with which I saw it gasped out loud a half-dozen times at its startling twists and turns. Mr. Shanley deserves the highest possible praise: he doesn't try to talk you into doing anything but thinking-hard-about the gnarly complexity of human behavior."--Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal
"A breathtaking work of immense proportion. Positively brilliant."--Melissa Rose Bernardo, Entertainment Weekly
"#1 show of the year. How splendid it feels to be trusted with such passionate, exquisite ambiguity unlike anything we have seen from this prolific playwright so far. In just ninety fast-moving minutes, Shanley creates four blazingly individual people. Doubt is a lean, potent drama . . . passionate, exquisite, important and engrossing."--Linda Winer, Newsday
John Patrick Shanley is the author of numerous plays, including Danny in the Deep Blue Sea, Dirty Story, Four Dogs and a Bone, Psychopathia, Sexualis, Sailor's Song, Savage in Limbo, and Where's My Money? He has written extensively for TV and film, and his credits include the teleplay for Live from Baghdad and screenplays for Congo; Alive; Five Corners; Joe Versus the Volcano, which he also directed; and Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for best original screenplay.
I can tell the difference between who I am and a side effect.
The Effect is a clinical romance. Two young volunteers, Tristan and Connie, agree to take part in a clinical drug trial. Succumbing to the gravitational pull of attraction and love, however, Tristan and Connie manage to throw the trial off-course, much to the frustration of the clinicians involved. This funny, moving and perhaps surprisingly human play explores questions of sanity, neurology and the limits of medicine, alongside ideas of fate, loyalty and the inevitability of physical attraction.
Following on from the critical and commercial success of Enron, The Effect offers a vibrant theatrical exploration into the human brain via the heart. It received its world premiere at the National Theatre's Cottesloe Theatre in November 2012, starring Billie Piper and Jonjo O'Neill.
It is published here in the Modern Classics series alongside an introduction by Miriam Gillinson.
Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
"Dazzling and ruthless...One of the most exquisitely and systematically arranged ambushes of an unsuspecting audience in years...A glorious, scary reminder of the unmatched power of live theater to rattle, roil and shake us wide awake." --Ben Brantley, New York Times
Grandma's birthday approaches. Beverly is organizing the perfect dinner, but everything seems doomed from the start: the silverware is all wrong, the carrots need chopping and the radio is on the fritz. What at first appears to be a family comedy takes a sharp, sly turn into a startling examination of deep-seated paradigms about race in America.
Finalist, 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
"The finest work yet from this gifted writer."--The New York Times
Offered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be another empty promise. As his decision brings him face to face with a nation at war with itself, the ones Hero left behind debate whether to escape or wait for his return, only to discover that for Hero, freedom may have come at a great spiritual cost. A devastatingly beautiful dramatic work, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) is the opening trilogy of a projected nine-play cycle that will ultimately take us into the present.
Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002. Her other plays include The Book of Grace, In the Blood, Venus, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Fucking A, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The America Play. In 2007 her 365 Days/365 Plays was produced at more than seven hundred theaters worldwide. Parks is a MacArthur Fellow and the Master Writer Chair at the Public Theater.
Adapted into the Hit TV Series, Winner of Six 2019 Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series, Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series
Celebrate the incredible journey of Phoebe Waller-Bridge's outrageously funny, blazingly forthright Fleabag, from fringe theatre hit to international cultural phenomenon, in this special edition--featuring the original playscript, never-before-seen color photos, and exclusive bonus content by Phoebe, director Vicky Jones, and key members of the creative team.
In 2013, Fleabag made its debut as a one-woman show in the sixty-seater venue the Big Belly, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe's Underbelly. It was an immediate hit, going on to enjoy two runs at London's Soho Theatre, national and international tours, while picking up prizes including Critics' Circle, The Stage, Fringe First and two Off West End Theatre Awards, plus an Olivier Award nomination.
The 2016 TV adaptation propelled Fleabag and Phoebe to worldwide fame, earning critical acclaim and further accolades including Writers' Guild, Royal Television Society and BAFTA Television Awards. A second season followed in 2019, winning an amazing six Emmy Awards, along with a sold-out run of the original play in New York.
This special edition of the play is released alongside Fleabag's first West End run at Wyndham's Theatre, London. It is introduced by Deborah Frances-White, stand-up comedian, writer and host of The Guilty Feminist podcast.
Whether his target is the war between the sexes or his fellow playwright Euripides, Aristophanes is the most important Greek comic dramatist--and one of the greatest comic playwrights of all time. His writing--at once bawdy and delicate--brilliantly fuses serious political satire with pyrotechnical bombast, establishing the tradition of comedy as high art. His messages are as timely and relevant today as they were in ancient Greece, and his plays still provoke laughter--and thought.
This volume features four celebrated masterpieces: Lysistrata, The Frogs, The Birds, and The Clouds, translated by three of the most distinguished translators and classicists of our time.
"No one except perhaps Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater."--John Lahr, The New Yorker
"A swelling battle hymn of transporting beauty. Theatergoers who have followed August Wilson's career will find in Gem a touchstone for everything else he has written."--Ben Brantley, The New York Times
"Wilson's juiciest material. The play holds the stage and its characters hammer home, strongly, the notion of newfound freedom."--Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
Gem of the Ocean is the play that begins it all. Set in 1904 Pittsburgh, it is chronologically the first work in August Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle dramatizing the African American experience during the 20th century--an unprecedented series that includes the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Fences and The Piano Lesson. Aunt Esther, the drama's 287-year-old fiery matriarch, welcomes into her Hill District home Solly Two Kings, who was born into slavery and scouted for the Union Army, and Citizen Barlow, a young man from Alabama searching for a new life. Gem of the Ocean recently played across the country and on Broadway, with Phylicia Rashad as Aunt Esther.
Earlier in 2005, on the completion of the final work of his ten play cycle-surely the most ambitious American dramatic project undertaken in our history-August Wilson disclosed his bout with cancer, an illness of unusual ferocity that would eventually claim his life on October 2. Fittingly the Broadway theatre where his last play will be produced in 2006 has been renamed the August Wilson Theater in his honor. His legacy will animate the theatre and stir the human heart for decades to come.
-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 A. R. Braunmuller 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.
Ibsen's plays continue to provoke diverse commentary. "Criticism" includes nineteen of the most important responses to Ibsen's work, among them essays by Bernard Shaw, Sandra Saari, E. M. Forster, Hugh Kenner, and Joan Templeton.
A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.
"Lynn Nottage's work explores depths of humanness, the overlapping complexities of race, gender, culture and history--and the startling simplicity of desire--with a clear tenderness, with humor, with compassion." --Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
Intimate Apparel "Thoughtful, affecting new play . . . with seamless elegance."--Charles Isherwood, Variety
Fabulation "Robustly entertaining comedy . . . with punchy social insights and the firecracker snap of unexpected humor."--Ben Brantley, The New York Times
With her two latest plays, "exceptionally gifted playwright" (New York Observer) Lynn Nottage has created companion pieces that span 100 years in the lives of African American women. Intimate Apparel is about the empowerment of Esther, a proud and shy seamstress in 1905 New York who creates exquisite lingerie for both Fifth Avenue boudoirs and Tenderloin bordellos. In Fabulation Nottage re-imagines Esther as Undine, the PR-diva of today, who spirals down from her swanky Manhattan office to her roots back in Brooklyn. Through opposite journeys, Esther and Undine achieve the same satisfying end, one of self-discovery.
Lynn Nottage's plays include Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Mud, River, Stone; Por' Knockers; Las Menias; Fabulation and Intimate Apparel, for which she was awarded the Francesca Primus Prize and the American Theatre Critics/Steinberg New Play Award in 2004. Her plays have been produced at theatres throughout the country, with Intimate Apparel slated for 16 productions during the 2005-2006 season.