This anthology contains four of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright's most brilliant works: Summer and Smoke, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer and Period of Adjustment. "The innocent and the damned, the lonely and the frustrated, the hopeful and the hopeless . . . (Williams) brings them all into focus with an earthy, irreverently comic passion."--Newsweek. Views: 502
Christmas 1982: Cornelius and Bella McCorkle of Pascagoula, Mississippi, return home one midnight in a thunderstorm from the Memphis funeral of their older son to a house and a life literally falling apart--daughter Joanie is in an insane asylum and their younger son Charlie is upstairs having sex with his pregnant, holy-roller girlfriend as the McCorkles enter. Cornelius, who has political ambitions and a litany of health problems, is trying to find a large amount of moonshine money his gentle wife Bella has hidden somewhere in their collapsing house, but his noisy efforts are disrupted by a stream of remarkable characters, both living and dead.
While Williams often used drama to convey hope and desperation in human hearts, it was through this dark, expressionistic comedy, which he called a "Southern gothic spook sonata," that he was best able to chronicle his vision of the fragile state of our world. Views: 502
Widely considered one of the great dramatic creations of the modern stage, "Mother Courage and Her Children" is Bertolt Brecht's most passionate and profound statement against war. Set in the seventeenth century, the play follows Anna Fierling -- "Mother Courage" -- an itinerant trader, as she pulls her wagon of wares and her children through the blood and carnage of Europe's religious wars. Battered by hardships, brutality, and the degradation and death of her children, she ultimately finds herself alone with the one thing in which she truly believes -- her ramshackle wagon with its tattered flag and freight of boots and brandy. Fitting herself in its harness, the old woman manages, with the last of her strength, to drag it onward to the next battle. In the enduring figure of Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht has created one of the most extraordinary characters in the literature of drama. Views: 497
Three-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Edward Albee’s most provocative, daring, and controversial play since Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, The Goat won every major award for best new play of the year: the Tony, New York Drama Critics Circle, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle Awards. In the play, Martin—a hugely successful architect who has just turned fifty—leads an ostensibly ideal life with his loving wife and gay teenage son. But when he confides to his best friend that he is also in love with a goat (named Sylvia), he sets in motion events that will destroy his family and leave his life in tatters.
The playwright himself describes it this way: “Every civilization sets quite arbitrary limits to its tolerances. The play is about a family that is deeply rocked by an unimaginable event and how they solve that problem. It is my hope that people will think afresh about whether or not all the values they hold are valid." Views: 451
"I yearned for a bad influence and boy, was Tennessee one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing and dangerously funny."—John Waters"I cannot write any sort of story," said Tennessee [to Gore Vidal] "unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire." These transgressive Tales of Desire, including "One Arm," "Desire and the Black Masseur," "Hard Candy," and "The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen," show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best. Views: 421
The long-awaited volume of Brecht's classic plays from the 1930's
Volume 4 of Brecht's Collected Plays contains works from the 1930's, straddling fateful years in German political and cultural history - as well as in Brecht's own life. Round Heads and Pointed Heads, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, is a powerful political allegory on Nazi racial policy and conditions in the Germany Brecht had to leave in 1933. The Trial of Lucullus, a starkly pacifist text originally written in response to a commission from Swedish radio, portrays the Roman general tried by the Underworld for his military triumphs. Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, unique in Brecht's work, consists of some thirty short scenes of life under the Nazis between 1933 and 1938, designed for use by groups in exile. Señora Carrara's Rifles is based on J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea, but relocated by Brecht in the Spanish Civil War. Also included are two one-act plays, Dansen and How Much is Your Iron?, minor works designed for amateurs in Scandinavia, where the Brechts lived till spring 1941.
The volume includes an introduction and notes by Tom Kuhn and John Willett, as well as Brecht's own notes on the texts. Views: 411
Victor, a New York cop nearing retirement, moves among furniture in the disused attic of a house marked for demolition. Cabinets, desks, a damaged harp, an overstuffed armchair - the relics of a lost life of affluence he's finally come to sell. But when his brother Walter, who he hasn't spoken to in years, arrives, the talk stops being just about whether Victor's been offered a fair price for the furniture, and turns to the price that one and not the other of them paid when their father lost both his fortune and the will to go on ... Views: 365
Here are portraits of American life during the Great Depression and after, populated by a hopelessly hopeful chorus girl, a munitions manufacturer ensnared in a love triangle, a rural family that deals “justice” on its children, an overconfident mob dandy, a poor couple who quarrel to vanquish despair, a young “spinster” enthralled by the impulse of rebellion, and, in “The Magic Tower,” a passionate artist and his wife whose youth and optimism are not enough to protect their “dream marriage.” This new volume gathers some of Williams’s most exuberant early work and includes one-acts that he would later expand to powerful full-length dramas: “The Pretty Trap,” a cheerful take on The Glass Menagerie, and “Interior: Panic,” a stunning precursor to A Streetcar Named Desire.
The plays include:*
• At Liberty
• The Magic Tower
• Me, Vashya
• Curtains for the Gentleman
• In Our Profession
• Every Twenty Minutes
• Honor the Living
• The Case of the Crushed Petunias
• Moony’s Kid Don’t Cry
• The Dark Room
• The Pretty Trap
• Interior: Panic
• Kingdom of Earth
• I Never Get Dressed Till After Dark on Sundays
• Some Problems for The Moose Lodge* Views: 356
Tennessee Williams’ Collected Stories combines the four short-story volumes published during Williams’ lifetime with previously unpublished or uncollected stories. Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life." Views: 345
In this daring, provocative, and insightful book, bestselling author and internationally acclaimed playwright Eve Ensler writes fictional monologues and stories inspired by girls around the globe. Moving through a world of topics and emotions, these voices are fierce, alive, tender, complicated, imaginative, and smart. Girls today often find themselves in a struggle between remaining strong and true to themselves and conforming to society’s expectations in an attempt to please. They are taught not to be too intense, too passionate, too smart, too caring, too open. They are encouraged to shut down their instincts, their outrage, their desires and their dreams, to be polite, to obey the rules. I Am an Emotional Creature is a celebration of the authentic voice inside every girl and an inspiring call to action for girls everywhere to speak up, follow their dreams, and become the women they were always meant to be.
Among the girls Ensler creates are an American who struggles with peer pressure in a suburban high school; an anorexic blogging as she eats less and less; a Masai girl from Kenya unwilling to endure female genital mutilation; a Bulgarian sex slave, no more than fifteen, a Chinese factory worker making Barbies; an Iranian student who is tricked into a nose job; a pregnant girl trying to decide if she should keep her baby.
Through rants, poetry, questions, and facts, we come to understand the universality of girls everywhere: their resiliency, their wildness, their pain, their fears, their secrets, and their triumphs. I Am an Emotional Creature is a call, a reckoning, an education, an act of empowerment for girls, and an illumination for parents and for us all. Views: 339
An erotic, sensual, and comic novel that was a generation ahead of its time, Moise and the World of Reason has at its center the need of three people for each other: Lance, the beautiful black figure skater full of love and lust for young men as well as a craving for drugs; the nameless gay young narrator, a runaway writer from Alabama who lives near the piers of New York City’s West Village, c. 1975, frantically filling notebooks with his observations; and Moise, a young woman who speaks in riddles and can never finish her paintings or consummate her affairs.
The long unavailable Moise and the World of Reason represents a kind of uncensored Williams, radically frank, fully articulated, and deeply tender: a true gem. Views: 309
Horace Annesley Vachell was an English novelist, so it\'s somewhat surprising that one of the genres Vachell is best known for is Westerns. Vachell depicted life in the American West in a number of works, as well as social life in England. Views: 307
A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay combines fantasy, philosophy, and science fiction in an exploration of the nature of good and evil and their relationship with existence. It has been described by the critic and philosopher Colin Wilson as the greatest novel of the twentieth century. Lindsay\'s descriptive prose is simply beyond compare. Lindsay was author of A Haunted Woman, and is considered to be one of the great British fantasy authors. His work forms a bridge from George MacDonald to authors such as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, who both greatly admired Lindsay\'s work. It was Lindsay that discovered the authentic use for other planets in fiction. Views: 299
In 1956, Time magazine called Tennessee Williams’ Baby Doll "just possibly the dirtiest American-made motion picture that has ever been legally exhibited." The taut, vivid drama of a voluptuous child-bridge, who refuses to consummate her marriage to an older, down-on-his-luck cotton-gin owner in Tiger Tail County, Mississippi until she is "ready," has gained in humor and pathos over the years as society has caught up with the author’s savagely honest view of bigotry and lust in the rural South. But Tennessee Williams was first and foremost a writer for the stage, and this reissue of his original screenplay for the Elia Kazan movie of Baby Doll is now accompanied by the script of the full-length stage play, Tiger Tail, developed from that screenplay during the ’70s. The text, which incorporates the author’s final revisions, records the play as it was produced at the Hippodrome Theatre Workshop in Gainesville, Florida, in 1979. Views: 274
