Lennox Robinson

Ellen McCarthy, who debates 'patriotic' matters at the Erin Debating Society in Dublin, must choose between marrying a farmer in rural County Cork and her Dublin suitor.

Christian G. Appy's monumental oral history of the Vietnam War is the first work to probe the war?s path through both the United States and Vietnam. These vivid testimonies of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict, from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. Sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, they allow us to see and feel what this war meant to people literally on all sides? Americans and Vietnamese, generals and grunts, policymakers and protesters, guerrillas and CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people. By turns harrowing, inspiring, and revelatory, Patriots is not a chronicle of facts and figures but a vivid human history of the war.

When Dr. Nikki Adenike's rendezvous with an Internet playmate turns into a life-and-death fling with the serial killer called "Lucifer," she manages to escape--into the arms of the detective investigating the case. But the danger is far from over--and a newfound passion is just beginning.

First presented at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1916, "The Whiteheaded Boy" is set in a typical Irish small-town household which is thrown into a frenzy, as the play begins, with the return of son Denis from Dublin's Trinity College. He is the whiteheaded boy of the title--the apple of his mother's eye and as a result the focus of his siblings' resentment--who has just failed his exams. Rather than face the shame of this failure, the family plan to ship him off to Canada; he just wants to marry his sweetheart, get a job, and settle down in the country. Hijinks, marriage proposals, bribes, and counter-bribes ensue as the family members exploit and misinterpret Denis' situation.

This play was originally entitled "Drama at Inish". Subtitled "An Exaggeration in Three Acts," it is set in a small Irish resort town, Inish. To promote the tourist trade the proprietors have engaged a troupe of actors for the summer. Rather than the light comedies usually associated with holiday sites this company produces only SERIOUS GREAT DRAMA--Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, etc. The locals are soon enthralled by--indeed addicted to--these intense tales, and their lives are greatly effected. A wave of (comic) attempted murders, suicides, and other high melodrama pervades these normally placid, boring lives. In the end the source of these troubles is recognized and the great acting company is banished. It's a lovely comedy and a thoroughgoing spoof of early "Modern Drama". It has enjoyed several recent revivals in the U.S.

This is the original title of "Is Life Worth Living". See description there.