OBERON MODERN PLAYS

"April 1793, the French Revolution is four years old and the Committee of Public Safety under Robespierre finds threats to national liberty at home and abroad. When Gamelin, an ambitious and idealistic young magistrate, joins a group of old friends for a picnic outside Paris, the ties of love and affection can take the strain. But how strong will they prove when Gamelin is given power over life and death, and the new republic plunges from high idealism to mob rule and state terror? Private jealousies and public fears, old alliances and new ideologies, panic legislation and political correctness all combine in this thrilling adaptation of Anatole France's 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif."--Publisher description.

Vienna, 1900. A Jewish doctor prevents a Catholic priest from absolving a dying patient. A witch hunt ensues.

No straight women. No parents of students. Nobody under thirty-five. Vanessa Martini makes no apologies for her dating checklist. She’s been up close to enough messy breakups to know what havoc they wreak in life. Just because people see her as fun and happy, and just because she loves her life in general, that doesn’t mean she can’t be careful. Or discerning. Or, okay, fine, super picky. Grace Chapman is tired of being judged by her boss, by the husband she’s divorcing, by her parents. All she cares about now is her seven-year-old son, Oliver. The divorce is making him act out in school, and she just needs to find a way to help him so they can start again. What she does not need is the silent judgment she gets from his teacher. His wildly attractive, super sexy, annoyingly gorgeous teacher. Grace ticks all Vanessa’s Do Not Date boxes. Vanessa is yet one more person who disapproves of Grace. Of course, they’re never going to fall in love.

A play in verse about a white woman who has a black child by a slave in pre-Civil War South Carolina. The author is a Pulitzer Prize winner and is the present U. S. poet laureate. This verse play, based on the story of Oedipus & placed within the context of slavery, is set on a plantation in antebellum South Carolina.

The Greek fleet bound for Troy is becalmed. For the sake of a wind, Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces, is persuaded that he must sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia. But as the priest raises his knife to slit the child’s throat, the goddess Diana spirits her away. Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, believing her beloved daughter to be dead, slays her husband in revenge on hisreturn from the Trojan wars. Their son, Orestes, avenges his father’s death by killing his mother. Now, years later, as Iphigenia, a prisoner of the temple of Diana, looks across the sea to Greece, longing to return home, her brother Orestes arrives...

Don Pedro has it all - high position, wealth, a beautiful family - and enjoys the good life in the heart of the Spanish capital. But now he faces a challenge that would test the patience of a saint. It is time to marry off his daughters. It's bad enough that his eldest Beatriz is both obsessed by the latest fashions and talks like a university professor, but his youngest Leoner is already enjoying illicit midnight trysts with her lover and is in no mood to accept an arranged marriage.

Devenu adulte, un orphelin, trouve dans un bateau sur un piano a queue, entreprend une brillante carriere de pianiste sans jamais quitter le dit bateau. Un texte qui a du charme, ecrit pour un comedien, dans lequel on retrouve l'humour fin et l'ecriture simple et savante de l'auteur de "Soie" (cf. la postface, p. 73-75), egalement auteur, en 1988, d'un essai sur la musique de Rossini.

"Am 15. März 1938 verkündete Adolf Hitler unter den Jubelrufen der anwesenden Wiener auf dem Heldenplatz den "Anschluss" Österreichs an Deutschland. 50 Jahre später versammeln sich in einer Wohnung in der Nähe des Heldenplatzes die Familie Schuster und deren engste Freunde. Der Anlass: das Begräbnis von Professor Josef Schuster. Für diesen philosophischen Kopf, von den Nazis verjagt, in den fünfziger Jahren auf Bitten des Wiener Bürgermeisters aus Oxford auf seinen Lehrstuhl zurückgekehrt, gab es keinen anderen Ausweg als den Selbstmord. Denn die Situation im gegenwärtigen Österreich sei "noch viel schlimmer als vor fünfzig Jahren"." --Publisher description.