TCG Books

A play in which history, memory, and legacy challenge notions of progress and country club ideals. With Radio Golf, Wilson's lifework comes full circle.

It's the late 1990s, and Aunt Ester's onetime home at 1839 Wylie Avenue (the setting of the cycle's first play) is slated for demolition. The goal of this slick real estate venture is to boost both the depressed Hill District and Harmond Wilks's chance of becoming Pittsburgh's first Black mayor.

The play is the final part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Suzan-Lori Parks.

A treasure trove of prompts, provocations, and practical exercises to help you spark new ideas, hone your craft, and unleash your creativity.

In A Year of Creative Thinking, award-winning writer, director, and filmmaker Jessica Swale guides you through 366 fun and rewarding activities—one for every day of the year (including leap years!)—to fire up your imagination and flex your creative muscles.

You'll find a host of writing prompts and imaginative challenges to get you going, quick-fire exercises to help you focus on key aspects of craft (including inventing scenarios, writing dialogue, building subtext, creating atmosphere and plot, and developing your characters), and plenty of quirky and unusual challenges to test your limits and help you explore new avenues. Some are writing exercises, others encourage you to draw, to listen to music, to get outside and find inspiration in your surroundings. Work through the activities day by day, or dip in to suit your needs—the choice is yours!

Fun, engaging and pressure-free, this book is designed to supercharge your imagination and boost your creativity, helping you build a set of expressive tools that you can apply in all aspects of your life.

Harry Kondoleon has said his plays are “sad, scary, funny.” Though his work has been compared to that of Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, John Guare and Christopher Durang, his acute and elegant voice has from the first been distinctively his own.

Kondoleon’s tragicomedies are peopled by extremists, their behavior bizarre. And yet these curious characters are driven by the most familiar of passions. Abandonment and betrayal define their pasts, shadow their present. They are needy and lonely and full of desire. They seek transcendence, and this impossible, fundamental longing takes forms both common and strange.

These plays are not only jet-black comedies. They are fairy tales, fables, passion plays, masquerades. Kondoleon’s intensely theatrical sensibility is, finally, romantic. He sees the contemporary world clearly; he also sees other worlds: prior, within, beyond.

This volume also includes: Christmas on Mars, The Vampires, Slacks and Tops and Anteroom.

“Priceless and peerless…a thrilling work of theatricality.” —Wayman Wong, San Francisco Examiner

For over three decades, Stephen Sondheim has been the foremost composer and lyricist writing regularly for Broadway. His substantial body of work now stands as one of the most sustained achievements of the American stage.

Pacific Overtures, originally produced in 1976, combines an unsurpassed mastery of the American musical with such arts as Kabuki theatre, haiku, dance, and masks to recount Commander Matthew Perry’s 1835 opening of Japan and its consequences right up to the present.

This new edition of Pacific Overtures incorporates substantial revisions made by the authors for the successful 1984 revival.

Jitney is a richly textured play that follows a group of men trying to eke out a living by driving unlicensed cabs, or jitneys. When the city threatens to board up the business and the boss's son returns from prison, tempers flare, potent secrets are revealed, and the fragile threads binding these people together may come undone at last.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Ishmael Reed.

Set in 1940s Pittsburgh, Seven Guitars is a play about the search for self-fulfillment and acceptance in a hostile world.

Winner of the New York drama Critics Circle award for Best New Play, it is a play whose epic proportions and abundant spirit remind us of what the American theater once was (Vincent Canby The New York Times). Floyd Schoolboy Barton has fallen on bad times since blowing the money he got for recording his song, That's All Right. Now the song is a hit, and he has one more chance to make it in life.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Tony Kushner.

The time is 1927. The place is a run-down recording studio in Chicago. Ma Rainey, the legendary blues singer, is due to arrive with her entourage to cut new sides of old favorites. Waiting for her are her Black musician sidemen, the white owner of the record company, and her white manager. What goes down in the session to come is more than music. It is a riveting portrayal of black rage…of racism, of the self-hate that racism breeds, and of racial expression. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a play dealing with issues of race, art, religion and the historic exploitation of Black recording artists by white producers.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a Foreword by Frank Rich.

A powerful, stunning dramatic work that won Wilson critical acclaim and the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and Black was to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But now, the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s This spirit is changing the world Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, adnd it's making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less…

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Samuel G. Freedman.

The story of an ex-con in post-Reagan Pittsburgh, 1985, trying to rebuild his life.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Marion McClinton.

It is Pittsburgh, 1969. Memphis Lee's diner—and the rest of his block—is scheduled to be torn down, a casualty of the city's renovation project that is sweeping away the buildings of a community, but not its spirit. Memphis stands his ground, determined to make the city pay him what the property is worth, refusing to be swindled out of his land as he was years before in Mississippi. Into this fray come Sterling, the ex-con who embraces the tenets of Malcolm X; Wolf, the bookie who has learned to play by the white man's rules; Risa, a waitress of quiet dignity; and Holloway, resident philosopher and fervent believer in the prophecies of a legendary 322-year-old woman down the street.

Just as sure as an inexorable future looms right around the corner, these people of loud voices and big hearts continue to search, to falter, to hope that they can catch the train that will make the difference. With compassion, humor, and a superb sense of place and time, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of everyday lives in the shadow of great events, and of unsung men and women who are anything but ordinary.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Laurence Fishburne.

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.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Phylicia Rashad.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Romulus Linney.

A powerful exploration of the legacy of slavery in America, The Piano Lesson centers on a brother and sister in 1930s Pittsburgh as they argue over whether to sell the family piano, an instrument tainted by the wages of slavery. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990.

The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatization of the African American experience in the twentieth century.

This edition includes a foreword by Toni Morrison.