Twentieth century North American drama

Presents the script for a two-act play set in a Chicago recording studio in 1927 where African-American band members and blues singer Ma Rainey reveal the conflicted feelings they have about their status in the white man's world.

The Woman Lady Henrietta Maclellan longs for the romantic swirl of a London season. But as a rusticating country maiden, she has always kept her sensuous nature firmly under wraps -- until she meets Simon Darby. Simon makes her want to whisper promises late at night, exchange kisses on a balcony, receive illicit love notes. So Henrietta lets her imagination soar and writes... The Letter A very steamy love letter that becomes shockingly public. Everyone supposes that he has written it to her, but the truth hardly matters in the face of the scandal to come if they don't marry at once. But nothing has quite prepared Henrietta for the pure sensuality of... The Man Simon has vowed he will never turn himself into a fool over a woman. So, while debutantes swoon as he disdainfully strides past the lovely ladies of the ton, he ignores them all... until Henrietta. Could it be possible that he has been the foolish one all along?

The scene is a small city in Ohio, and the chief characters are Stephen Minch, an inventor who works for the joy of inventing; his wife, Martha; and his assistant, Hanus Wicks. For thirty years the Minch family has lived uneventfully in the same city, and Hanus has lived with them. Their routine existence is blasted by a marvelous invention of Stephen’s, through which various characters can return to their youth, and there enact not only what really happened, but also what might have been. The old bicycle shop, seen in 1902; the wonder and skepticism of people at the “horseless buggy"; the picnic by the lake and the choir practice scene in the church—carry one back into the romantic past. Finally, Stephen, Martha and Hanus return to the present wiser, richer in experience and more happily adjusted than before.

''Hymn to the Rising Sun,'' a grim prison drama from the 1930's, takes place in the barracks of a rural Southern work camp in the early morning on the Fourth of July, and the idea of the cruelly incarcerated waking to Independence Day is the irony that thrums loudly throughout the play. --NY Times, Feb. 5, 2001.

Nathaniel, a sea captain who left Salem penniless, returns wealthy after a seven-year absence. With one exception, the pleasure of the puritanical members of his family is marred when they discover he has brought a Malay wife and their two children back with him. Deeply as he loves Oparre, the princess who has shared danger and misfortune with him, Nathaniel cannot but feel the invisible finger of scorn pointed at him by the townspeople, or avoid hearing their whispered comments on his unusual alliance. For Oparre's sake he lends them money to consolidate his social position, but they find this a weapon to be used against him. The travel of the man's soul when faced with a sudden choice between dishonor and the loss of his property or the loss of his dark-skinned family, and the magnificent self-sacrifice of the woman who has risked all she has for love have been clearly and forcefully presented.

(Three acts) This Obie Award-winning play, a darkly comic exploration of the American family psyche, is an expository look at four family members of the Tate family who live on a Californian farm. As the four characters shift into adolescence, adulthood and old age, they face the loss of their farm to debt and developers. Weston is the alcoholic father who has driven his family deep into debt. Ella is the mother who is seeking solace outside of her marriage and dreams of escape to exotic locations. Daughter Emma plans to become a mechanic, and pursues her 4-H projects and horseback fantasies with an adolescent?s intensity. Son Wesley looks for a way to keep his family together while changing from a boy to a man. Various secondary characters are interspersed in the story, each trying to exploit the family and take over their land. The play examines the death of the American family as hardship clouds all interaction and any mutual understanding is lost.

"Successfully produced by the Group Theatre in New York City. In Fresno, California, lives a poet who kneels on a stool to write his poems on the head of a barrel, his son turns handsprings outside and wheedles bread and cheese from a stylized grocer. And an old, old man who is an actor and a trumpeter comes to live with them for a while and plays sweet old songs on his horn while the people of Fresno gather around. But the poet's poems come back from the "Atlantic Monthly" and the old man dies, rambling through Shakespeare. The boy is the center of this. He is a gay, ingenious lad and through him the author now and then wonders about life; or hints at wonderment. He hints, too, of war and of love and of the place of money and art in the world. This is a play filled with affection for small people, for the innocents of this world who long dimly for a beauty they but vaguely understand"--Publisher's website.

The romance of a middle-aged clothing manufacturer and a young girl.

In three short months, Oscar Wilde, the most celebrated playwright and wit of Victorian England, was toppled from the apex of British society into humiliation and ruin. Drawing from trial documents, newspaper accounts, and writings of the key players, Moises Kaufman ignites an incendiary mix of sex and censorship, with a cast of characters ranging from George Bernard Shaw to Queen Victoria herself.

In Foote's mythical small town of Harrison, Texas, newlyweds Richard and Emily move in with the bride's elderly and anxious parents, Lee and Lyd Davis. Richard seems like the ideal husband for Emily, whose first marriage ended in a sad divorce. When Richard shows himself to be greedy and untrustworthy, tensions in the already-strained family threaten to cleave parents from child. -- Publisher's website.

When she falls in love with a Chinese boy, a young girl discovers the difference between what her parents have taught her and what they truly believe.

Shows a primeval forest, with great trees, thickets in background, and moss and ferns underfoot. A set in the foreground. To the left is a tent, about ten feet square, with a fly. The front and sides are rolled up, showing a rubber blanket spread, with bedding upon it; a rough stand, with books and some canned goods, a rifle, a fishing-rod, etc. Toward centre is a trench with the remains of a fire smoldering in it, and a frying pan and some soiled dishes beside it.

"The Day Room", Don DeLillo's first play, is a black comedy that explores the chaos caused when the onlooker is unsure of the status of a team of medics in a psychiatric unit. Are they really bona fide staff or patients just pretending to be?

A play dramatizing the philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, and his stand concerning civil disobedience. He refused to pay taxes owing to his disapproval of the Mexican War. For his act of protest he was sent to jail.

An surrealistic allegorical play about racial prejudice that takes place in a giant transparent egg shell. The action actually takes place inside a public library within the egg shell.

Twelve-year-old Lucie-Marie and her older sister Annie Sharon attempt to deal with the death of their mother in a rodeo accident, while hoping to follow in her footsteps as championship riders.

"Gathered here are three of Adam Rapp's latest works: Faster, in which two young drifters try to strike a deal with the devil during the hottest summer on record; Finer Noble Gases, a lament for a band of arrested thirty-year-olds slouching toward adulthood amid East Village decay; and the Off-Broadway hit Stone Cold Dead Serious. Honest, strange, and humorous, this play looks at a blue-collar family's struggle to survive in the face of disability and addiction, and the seemingly surreal lengths to which their teenage son will go to save them from themselves."--BOOK JACKET.

A powerful, yet funny confrontation between two brothers set in the contemporary West.

"The time is now, the place New York City. Rich, a young writer who is beginning to find success, is breaking up with his longtime lover, Saul, a professional photographer. The split is particularly difficult for Saul, who still loves Rich deeply, but the mood is one of bantering and ironic humor as they divide their belongings. However Rich's idyll with his new lover is short-lived when he learns that he has AIDS and returns to the goodhearted Saul for sanctuary as he awaits its slow and awful progress. Thereafter the action is comprised of a mosaic of brilliantly conceived short scenes, some profoundly moving, some brightly humorous, which capture the pathos of Rich's relationship with friends and family; the cold impersonality of the doctors and nurses who care for him; and the widely diverse aspects of New York's gay community--for which Rich's plight is a chilling reminder of their own peril. In the end the effect of the play is emotionally overwhelming--an honest and unsparing examination of a deeply felt human relationship shattered by a mindless, destructive force which cannot be tempered or turned aside."--

"A thoroughly revised version of a play August Wilson first wrote in 1979, Jitney was produced in New York for the first time in the spring of 2000, winning rave reviews and the accolade of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the year. Set in the 1970s in Pittsburgh's Hill District, and depicting gypsy cabdrivers who serve black neighborhoods, Jitney is the seventh in Wilson's projected ten-play cycle (one for each decade) on the black experience in twentieth century America. He writes not about historical events or the pathologies of the black community, but, as he says, about "the unique particulars of black culture...I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us...through profound moments in our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.""--BOOK JACKET.

A man sets out on an ordinary business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana. It turns out to be a mock-heroic journey toward identity and transcendence. This is Don DeLillo's second play and it is funny, sharp, and deep-reaching. Its characters tend to have needs and desires shaped by the forces of broadcast technology. This is the way we talk to each other today. This is the way we tell each other things, in public, before listening millions, that we don't dare to say privately. This is also a play that makes obsessive poetry out of the language of routine airline announcements and the flow of endless information.

This play was written in 1930. The author, Susan Glaspell, wrote many other better-known works. It is incredibly difficult to get your hands on a copy of this script. If you find it, or download it, feel very grateful!

The story is that of a bartender whose saloon has been confiscated to be used for public trials by the new police state.

This is the ideal mid-90's New Orleans legal mystery. A bored Central Business District attorney takes up three quintessential deep south and separate cases, steeped in barge culture, drug dealers, and river polluters (pro bono of course), all the while keeping busy with a presumably mob-run casino development which subtly dumps cash into his pockets. And regular Crescent City cuisine mentions provide nice little respites from the messy action. --Carol at Amazon.com.

In the spring of 1948, in the still-cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. There's the laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rising just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's Seven Guitars is the sixth chapter in the continuing theatrical saga that explores the hope, heartbreak, and heritage of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The story follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of Floyd "Schoolboy" Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom. Together, they revisit his short life, reminisce about the good times they shared, and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that live within each of them.

This is a clean, quality pdf with two A5 pages to an A4 sheet, ideal for printing.

This play is based on the William March novel by the same title. It is the story of Rhoda Penmark, eight years old, and her mother (Christine). The young girl on the surface seems to be a perfect child, but is an evil and emotionless murderess. This original book is credited with starting the genre books and films about evil or psychopathic children.

Contains the script for the 1977 play "Buried Child" in which a family is haunted by the knowledge that their grandfather killed and buried his wife's illegitimate child years earlier.

Moises Kaufman and fellow members of the Tectonic Theater Project made six trips to Laramie over the course of a year and a half in the aftermath of the beating [and death of Matthew Shepard] and conducted more than 200 interviews with people of the town. From these interviews as well as their own experiences, ... the Tectonic Theater members have constructed a deeply moving theatrical experience.

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won possession, has been gathering dust in the parlor of Berniece Charles's Pittsburgh home. When Boy Willie, Berniece's exuberant brother, bursts into her life with his dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves, he plans to sell their antique piano for the hard cash he needs to stake his future. But Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real "piano lesson," reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present.

"Why Marry?" was the first play by Jesse Lynch Williams and it was difficult to live up to since it won the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1918. Originally titled "And So They Were Married" it is a smart and humorous look at society's view of marriage and love and how the two aren't always the same or even appear to be related. While this theme could still be used today, the play probably wouldn't do very well with a modern audience since it is clearly a product of the early 20th century. Nevertheless, for those who enjoy classic plays, this one is certainly well done. The subjects of the play's title are Helen and Ernest. Helen is a woman with a career as Ernest's lab assistant, and the two have fallen in love Helen has become convinced that the worst thing they can do is get married; after all scientists are not paid well and she does not want to disrupt his career or hers. Ernest is more inclined to get married, but Helen is able to sway him with her arguments.

"These three plays by Sam Shepard are bold, explosive, and ultimately redemptive dramas propelled by family secrets and illuminated by a searching intelligence. In The Late Henry Moss - which premiered in San Francisco, starring Sean Penn and Nick Nolte - two estranged brothers confront the past as they piece together the drunken fishing expedition that preceded their father's death. In Eyes for Consuela, based on Octavio Paz's classic story "The Blue Bouquet," a vacationing American encounters a knife-toting Mexican bandit on a gruesome quest. And in When the World Was Green, cowritten with Joseph Chaikin, a journalist in search of her father interviews an old man who resolved a generations-old vendetta by murdering the wrong man. Together, these plays form a powerful trio from an enduring force in American theater."--BOOK JACKET.

Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard's latest play is an uproarious, brilliantly provocative farce that brings the gifts of a quintessentially American playwright to bear on the current American dilemma.Frank and Emma are a quiet, respectable couple who raise cows on their Wisconsin farm. Soon after they agree to put up Frank's old friend Haynes, who is on the lam from a secret government project involving plutonium, they're visited by Welch, an unctuous government bureaucrat from hell. His aggressive patriotism puts Frank, Emma, and Haynes on the defensive, transforming a heartland American household into a scene of torture and promoting a radioactive brand of conformity with a dangerously long half life.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape isn’t one of his best-known works, but it has gained popularity as an exploration of early American society. It was first produced in 1922 by the Provincetown Players in Massachusetts, embracing expressionism in its set design and staging, before moving on to Broadway, where it faced resistance from local and federal governments due to its radical views. The play examines the existential crisis of the protagonist, a brutish stoker named Yank, who begins the play secure in his role as the leader of firemen on an Atlantic ocean liner. But when confronted by the disdain of an upper-class passenger who calls him a “filthy beast,” he seeks to rebel against his place. Then, as all his plans for revenge fail, he slowly finds himself descending to the literal level that society has relegated him to. O’Neill uses Yank’s search for belonging to explore the destructive forces of industrialization and social class. Early on, The Hairy Ape’s commentary on the dehumanization of workers caused it to be taken up by many labor groups and unions to further their own causes. The play also touches on themes of masculinity and socialism, and the repeated references to the “blackface” of the ship’s stokers and Yank’s degeneration into an animal have added a racial element to recent analyses.