TCG Books

The latest play from Britain's foremost playwright-provocateur, Mike Bartlett (Cock, King Charles III). In a housing crisis, a young couple are offered a home of their own. But at what price? Invasive and unnerving, this provocative new play invites us to spy on a family as they explore a dangerous new way to live. Game premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London in February 2015.

Everyone creates their own coping strategies or rules for living. But what happens when an extended family gathers for Christmas and they each follow those rules, rigidly? In Sam Holcroft's theatrically playful, dark comedy, long-held mechanisms for survival are laid bare and everyone, even Mum, becomes embroiled. Rules for Living premiered at the National Theatre in March 2015.

NSFW is "Not Safe for Work." Lucy Kirkwood's coruscating comedy takes a scathing, hilarious look at the media and, in particular, how magazines objectify women. Premiering at the Royal Court, NSFW is a sharp, biting, satirical new comedy that marks the breakthrough of one of the United Kingdom's most exciting playwrights.

A raucous, hilarious, and sparky new play from the award-winning Dublin-born playwright. Dublin lads Colin and Ray are out of luck, work, food, and cigarettes. On a whim old and lonely ex-teacher Clarence invites the two brothers back to his cottage, but Clarence gets a lot more than he bargained for.

In Lucy Kirkwood's version of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's nineteenth-century heroine is relocated to present-day London, to startling effect.

Hedda, still mourning for the father she adored, returns from honeymoon with a husband she doesn't love, to a flat and a pregnancy she doesn't want. Trapped by her past and terrified of her future, bored by her life but too cowardly to walk away from it, she finds herself caught between three men. And in the end, something has to give

Includes: Motherhood 2000 by Adrienne Kennedy, The Law of Remains by Reza Abdoh, Pangean Dreams: A Shamanic Journey by Rachel Rosenthal, Enter The Night by Maria Irene Fornes, Two Altars, Ten Funerals (All Souls) by Erik Ehn, A Girl’s Guide to the Divine Comedy by Shelley Berc, Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Antony by The Wooster Group, The Mind King by Richard Foreman and Cellophane by Mac Wellman.

This groundbreaking work of scholarship explores convergences between performance and science through an investigation of new technologies that drive computer-mediated, interactive art. Wide-ranging and richly illustrated essays uncover shifts that have occurred globally in the aesthetic understanding of performance within computer-augmented virtual and networked environments.

“He is James Joyce reborn as a rap artist.”—Mel Gussow, The New York Times

This collection includes Albanian Softshoe, Mister Original Bugg, Cleveland, Bad Penny, Cellophane, Three Americanisms, Fnu Lnu, Girl Gone, Hypatia, The Sandalwood Box and Cat’s Paw. Written between 1983 and 1998, they showcase Wellman’s ongoing exploration of the limits of language and the consequences of humanity in the postmodern world.

Erin Shields' award-winning play is a shocking, uncompromising examination of the horrors of war, giving voice to a woman long ago forced into silence, and placing a spotlight on millions of female victims who have been silenced through violence, delivered through the lens of Greek tragedy.

This volume includes: Failure to Thrive by Neena Beber; Terra Incognita by Maria Irene Fornes; Steak Knife Bacchae by Joe Goodrich; Heads by Murray Mednick; The Chemistry of Change by Marlane Meyer; The Tight Fit by Susan Mosakowski; Disgrace by John O ’Keefe; Understanding the Dead by John Steppling; and Demonology by Kelly Stuart.

The Padua Hills Playwrights Festival ran from 1978 through 1995 in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains and at venues across the Los Angeles area, attracting theatrical talents such as Sam Shepard, Jon Robin Baitz, Maria Irene Fornes, John Steppling, Kelly Stuart and David Henry Hwang. The Festival was resurrected in 2001 by artistic director Guy Zimmerman.

Joe & Betty brings us into the darkly comic world of an impoverished, disintegrating family in the Catskills of the 1950s. 16 Routines takes us on a surreal comic journey into a panicked mind of an actor who has forgotten his lines. Mrs. Feuerstein depicts a Holocaust survivor plotting revenge on a German couple by writing them into her play.

Brooklyn-born Murray Mednick founded the Padua Hills Playwrights workshop/Festival (now Padua Playwrights) in 1978. He was honored with the American Theater Critic’s Association Best New Play Citation for Joe & Betty in 2002, and has received two Rockefeller grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an OBIE and several Bay Area Critics Awards.

“Defiance is a necessary step in the life of an individual and in the life of a nation.”—John Patrick Shanley

“As thoughtful and probing as its predecessor, Defiance [is] filled with the provocative questions and bristling dialogue for which Mr. Shanley is known . . . as it wonders about its big, knotty subjects.”—Ben Brantley, The New York Times

Defiance is the “very rich and satisfying” (The Village Voice) second work in John Patrick Shanley’s trilogy that began with Doubt. The play is set in 1971 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where Lt. Col. Morgan Littlefield and his reluctant protégé Capt. Lee King—a young African American officer—clash over issues of race and authority within the Marine Corps, even as the civil rights movement and Vietnam War divide the world outside. In this high-stakes struggle at the top of the ranks, witnessed by the base’s inquisitive Chaplain White and Littlefield’s irreproachable wife Margaret, Shanley has crafted another timely play exploring issues of power and morality within a hallowed institution.

John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play, and was chosen as best play of the year by over ten news-papers and magazines. His other plays include Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Four Dogs and a Bone, Psychopathia Sexualis, and Savage Limbo. He has written extensively for TV and film, including Moonstruck, for which he won an Academy Award for best screenplay.

Successful acting must reflect a society’s current beliefs. The men and women who developed each new technique were convinced that previous methods were not equal to the full challenges of their time and place, and the techniques in this book have been adapted to current needs in order to continue to be successful methods for training actors. The actor’s journey is an individual one, and the actor seeks a form, or a variety of forms, of training that will assist in unlocking his own creative gifts of expression.—from the introduction

The first comprehensive survey and study of the major techniques developed by and for the American actor over the past 60 years. Each of the 10 disciplines included is described in detail by one of today’s foremost practitioners.

Presented in this volume are:

• Lee Strasberg’s Method by Anna Strasberg, Lee’s former student, widow, and current director of The Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute
• Stella Adler Technique by Tom Oppenheim, Stella’s grandson and artistic director of the Stella Adler Institute in New York
• Sanford Meisner Technique by Victoria Hart, director of the Meisner Extension at New York University
• Michael Chekhov Technique and The Mask by Per Brahe, a Danish teacher inspired by Balinese dance and introduced to the Chekhov technique in Russia
• Uta Hagen Technique by Carol Rosenfeld, who taught under Hagen’s tutelage at the Herbert Berghof (HB) Studio
• Physical Acting Inspired by Grotowski by Stephen Wangh, who studied with Jerzy Grotowski himself
• The Viewpoints by Mary Overlie, the creator of Viewpoints theory
• Practical Aesthetics by Robert Bella of the David Mamet-inspired Atlantic Theatre Company school
• Interdisciplinary Training by Fritz Ertl, who teaches at the Playwrights Horizons Theatre School
• Neoclassical Training by Louis Scheeder, director of the Classical Studio of New York University

Arthur Bartow is the artistic director of the Department of Drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. A former associate director of Theatre Communications Group, he is the author of the landmark book The Director’s Voice.

Actioning is one of the most widely used rehearsal techniques for actors. It helps bring clarity to every moment or thought in the text, energizing rehearsals and bringing performances to life. This step-by-step guide draws on concepts from Stanislavsky, using sample scenes from both classic and contemporary plays, and is filled with exercises to demonstrate the technique at work.

Munro's vividly imagined trilogy brings to life three generations of Stewart kings who ruled Scotland in the tumultuous fifteenth century. Each play stands alone as a unique vision of a country tussling with its past and future; viewed together the trilogy creates a complex and compelling narrative of Scottish culture and nationhood.

Finalist, 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

"The finest work yet from this gifted writer."—The New York Times

Offered his freedom if he joins his master in the ranks of the Confederacy, Hero, a slave, must choose whether to leave the woman and people he loves for what may be another empty promise. As his decision brings him face to face with a nation at war with itself, the ones Hero left behind debate whether to escape or wait for his return, only to discover that for Hero, freedom may have come at a great spiritual cost. A devastatingly beautiful dramatic work, Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, & 3) is the opening trilogy of a projected nine-play cycle that will ultimately take us into the present.

Suzan-Lori Parks became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Topdog/Underdog in 2002. Her other plays include The Book of Grace, In the Blood, Venus, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, Fucking A, Imperceptible Mutabilities in the Third Kingdom and The America Play. In 2007 her 365 Days/365 Plays was produced at more than seven hundred theaters worldwide. Parks is a MacArthur Fellow and the Master Writer Chair at the Public Theater.

"It's easy to see what brings actors back [to Mednick's work]. It's the rhythms, the wonderfully tortured characters, the dialogue that begs an actor to tease out the nuance in the lyrical poetry."—Anthony Byrnes, KCRW "Behind the Curtain," from the introduction

Four new plays from the Off-Off Broadway pioneer and Obie-award winner Murray Mednick, including the fifteenth-century historical tragicomedy Villon, reveal a master at the top of his game.

"In the work of John Patrick Shanley, the truth is as charming as it is painful, reality as touched with magic as it is factual, and existence as absolute as it is illusory."—BOMB magazine

Outside Mullingar is about the romance of Anthony and Rosemary, neighbors in rural Ireland, who are nearing their middle years. It is by turns poetic, uplifting, dark and funny as hell. Anthony is an introverted farmer and Rosemary is the woman who vows to have him at all costs. When Anthony's father threatens to disinherit his son, Rosemary steps into the middle of a land feud and family eccentricities beyond what one might imagine. On the brink of romantic catastrophe, this one-of-a-kind Irish heroine fights against time and mortality in hopes of securing her dream of love.

"Outside Mullingar is a charmer of a play... In [Shanley's] first work set in Ireland, he lovingly tends the roots and tills the soil of his ancestry, spinning a tale suffused with melancholy humor and a deep yearning for heart, home, land, faith and a sense of belonging.... Shanley has a poet’s ear for the lyrical music and twinkly humor of their dialogue." - Hollywood Reporter

"Mullingar is Shanley’s best play since Doubt, and like that hit from a decade ago, it’s lean, dialectical and packed with wise saws and aphoristic gems." - Time Out New York

"Shanley once again reveals both a touch of the poet and a fine gift of gab." - NY1

"Wholly diverting... Mr. Shanley's finest work since Doubt... a softhearted comedy freckled with dark reflections on the unsatisfactory nature of life and the thorns of love." - New York Times

John Patrick Shanley is the author of Doubt: A Parable (Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Best Play), Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Four Dogs and a Bone, Dirty Story, Defiance and Storefront Church, among many others. He wrote the teleplay for Live from Baghdad (Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or Dramatic Special), and the screenplays for Doubt (Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay), Five Corners (Special Jury Prize, Barcelona Film Festival), Alive, Joe Versus the Volcano, and Moonstruck (Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay).

“American theater needs more plays like Naomi Wallace’s The Liquid Plain—by which I mean works that are historical, epic and poetic, that valorize the lives of the poor and oppressed.”—Time Out New York

On the docks of late eighteenth-century Rhode Island, two runaway slaves find love and a near-drowned man. With a motley band of sailors, they plan a desperate and daring run to freedom. As the mysteries of their identities come to light, painful truths about the past and present collide and flow into the next generation. Acclaimed playwright Naomi Wallace’s newest work brings to life a group of people whose stories have been erased from history. Told with lyricism and power, The Liquid Plain was awarded the 2012 Horton Foote Prize for Promising New American Play. This sweeping historical saga has enjoyed acclaimed runs at Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Signature Theatre in New York.

Naomi Wallace is a playwright from Kentucky. Her plays, which have been produced in the United Kingdom, Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, include In the Heart of America, Slaughter City, One Flea Spare, The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Things of Dry Hours, The Fever Chart: Three Visions of the Middle East, And I and Silence, The Hard Weather Boating Party , and The Liquid Plain. Awards include the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize (twice), Joseph Kesselring Prize, Fellowship of Southern Writers Drama Award, Obie Award, Horton Foote Award for Most Promising New American Play, MacArthur Fellowship, and the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Drama.

In Karen Hartman’s "juicyfruit tragedy," two young sisters discover new appetites within the walls of their father’s garden. Gum explores the need to tame nature in a fictional fundamental country where the title candy is contraband and every desire has its price. "A brief, intense, beguiling, sensual, witty, impassioned, deeply moving and brightly burnished gem"—San Francisco Examiner. Also includes The Mother of Modern Censorship.

Karen Hartman is the author of Girl Under Grain, Troy Women and Alice: Tales of a Curious Girl. She is a native of San Diego who lives in Brooklyn and is currently the playwright-in-residence at Princeton University.

"Guillermo Calderón is an authentic genius of the theater . . . you can't say you've heard or seen any of it before, which may make you want to hear and see it again."—The New Yorker

"Neva's neobrutalist punch demonstrates . . . the enduring power of art."—Time Out New York

"Brilliant and provocative."—TheatreMania

"A lovely, disturbing drama . . . Calderón's drama is Chekhovian in the best sense."—The Village Voice

This politically charged, haunting yet humorous meditation on theater and the revolutionary impulse tells the story of three actors, including Anton Chekhov's widow, who gather to rehearse scenes from The Cherry Orchard as Russia faces an impending revolution. A savage examination of the relationship between theater and historical context, Neva is the author's first play, which he directed for its English language premiere at the Public Theater in New York City.

Guillermo Calderon is Chile's foremost contemporary theater artist. His plays include Diciembre (December), Clase (Class), Villa, Discurso (Speech), Quake, and Escuela (School), and his productions have toured extensively through South America and Europe. His co-written screenplay Violeta won the World Cinema Jury Prize for Drama at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and other awards include Best Play of the Year (Art Critics Circle of Chile), three Chilean Altazor Awards for Best Playwright and Best Director, and the 2010 Bank of Scotland Angel Award (Edinburgh Fringe Festival).

In his fifth, brashest solo show, Eric Bogosian again aims scorching social commentary at the contemporary urban and suburban scene. From subway panhandlers to barbecue-crazed millionaires, Bogosian reveals the hidden humor, fear, hypocrisy and rage of Americans - including, for the first time, "Eric Bogosian," a hyperaggressive standup comic. With this seductive element of self-revelation, he heightens the disturbing connections between his characters and, by extension, between us and the people we try not to see - and not to be - every day.

One of America’s premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists, Eric Bogosian’s plays and solo work include suburbia (Lincoln Center Theater, 1994; adapted to film by director Richard Linklater, 1996); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; Griller; Humpty Dumpty; 1+1; Skunkweed; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; Drinking in America; Notes from Underground and Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist; New York Shakespeare Festival, 1987; Broadway, 2007; adapted to film by director Oliver Stone, 1988). He has starred in a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. Most recently, he created the character of Captain Danny Ross on the long-running series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2014, TCG published 100 (monologues), a collection that commemorates thirty years of Bogosian’s solo-performance career.

Goodnight Children Everywhere
"Richard Nelson’s new play announces itself almost as if it were Chekhovian . . . the play, like all plays of discovery and purgation, has a translucency and a density that nag, hurt and heal."—London Sunday Times

New England
"Smart, sharp, acridly funny . . . in the sweetest of all ironies, it’s an American writer at the peak of his form who has given London’s RSC the major new play that has eluded them all year."—Variety

Some Americans Abroad
"A sequel to The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain’s caustic view of pretentious Americans abroad: both works indict the well-educated American middle-class for its supine and superficial relationship to Old World culture."—New York Times

Two Shakespearean Actors
"Nelson’s provocative account of the deadly rivalry between two great 18th-century actors."—Variety

Franny’s Way
"Boundaries warp and melt in the dense urban heat that pervades Franny’s Way, Richard Nelson’s sensitively drawn portrait of love in the age of J.D. Salinger."—New York Times

A prolific and varied writer, Richard Nelson is also the author of a screenplay, a television play, the books for musicals and plays for young audiences, as well as a string of radio plays and powerful adaptations from the classic European repertory of Beaumarchais, Brecht, Chekhov, Goldoni, Molière and Strindberg, all of which have influenced the development of his own craft. Among his many awards include the London Time Out Award, two OBIEs, two Giles Cooper awards and numerous grants and fellowships. He is an honorary associate of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

This volume features two of Bogosian's more unsettling works. Notes from Underground charts, in diary form, the life of an urban recluse who wants desperately to be "normal" but ultimately sinks into an abyss of his own making. Scenes from the New World is a play composed of three one-acts, probing modern life on the eve of the millennium.

One of America’s premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists, Eric Bogosian’s plays and solo work include suburbia (Lincoln Center Theater, 1994; adapted to film by director Richard Linklater, 1996); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; Griller; Humpty Dumpty; 1+1; Skunkweed; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; Drinking in America; Notes from Underground and Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist; New York Shakespeare Festival, 1987; Broadway, 2007; adapted to film by director Oliver Stone, 1988). He has starred in a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. Most recently, he created the character of Captain Danny Ross on the long-running series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2014, TCG published 100 (monologues), a collection that commemorates thirty years of Bogosian’s solo-performance career.

“I want theater to wake me up, not lull me to sleep. My theater is not about fantasy, it’s not about seduction. My theater is not an outline for a film. It is not a TV sitcom onstage. I want my theater to be an event. I want it to push limits, bite the hand that feeds it and bang heads. It’s about my fears, my ideas, my blind spots, my isolation.”—Eric Bogosian

Eric Bogosian is one of our most singular and exhilarating commentators on American life. His award-winning solo performance works have been performed with acclaim all over the world. As the New York Times has pointed out, “Bogosian is a born storyteller with perfect pitch.” That is never more evident than in his newest book, which collects his three most recent plays.

In Humpty Dumpty, five friends gather for a holiday at a mountain getaway where unforeseen events bring them to the brink of the end of the world. Griller is set in a New Jersey backyard, where a barbecue gathering turns sinister and deadly. Red Angel is Bogosian’s riff on Von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, reset on a college campus in 1990s New England.

One of America’s premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists, Eric Bogosian’s plays and solo work include suburbia (Lincoln Center Theater, 1994; adapted to film by director Richard Linklater, 1996); Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead; Griller; Humpty Dumpty; 1+1; Skunkweed; Wake Up and Smell the Coffee; Drinking in America; Notes from Underground and Talk Radio (Pulitzer Prize finalist; New York Shakespeare Festival, 1987; Broadway, 2007; adapted to film by director Oliver Stone, 1988). He has starred in a wide variety of film, TV and stage roles. Most recently, he created the character of Captain Danny Ross on the long-running series Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2014, TCG published 100 (monologues), a collection that commemorates thirty years of Bogosian’s solo-performance career.

For nearly three decades, Ping Chong and his company have written and staged some of the most innovative and arresting examinations of "the Other" on stages in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. His work more than any other artist has explored the ways Asian cultures have intersected with contemporary American society and throughout history.

This volume collects four of his masterworks created over the past decade, including:

Deshima (1990), a documentary collage of the history of the West and Japan;
Chinoiserie (1995), spans centuries, continents and cultures, where the mysterious East meets the mysterious West;
After Sorrow (1997), explores the legacy of war in Vietnam;
Pojagi (1999), a poetic documentary on Korea from the sixteenth century to today.

The Washington Post has said these works are "like poems in their simplicity and power to evoke . . . -carefully wrought and beautifully designed.

Artfully and elegantly conceived, rich in metaphor, political yet deeply personal, the four works in The East-West Quartet tell us much about the pitfalls and ironies of history, the various contradictions, collisions and collusions within the East and the West, and the search for national and personal identity. A true citizen of the world, Ping Chong refuses to be pigeonholed and goes his own way, as much at home on the streets of Beijing and Paris as he is on the Canal Street in New York. He continues to make work that bristles with intelligence, that is filled with empathy for the human condition, that is angry yet beautiful - work that matters. It is all here in this book." - Jessica Hagedorn, from her preface

"As an artist , I’m an outsider in American society. As an experimental artist, I’m an outsider in the art world. As a person of color, I’m an outsider; as an immigrant, I’m an outsider; as a gay man, I’m an outsider. It’s the position that fate has allotted me, but it’s a valuable postion to be in, because I think every society should have a mirror held to it by the outsider."—Ping Chong, 1999

Ping Chong was born in 1946 and raised in the Chinatown section of New York City. He began his theatrical career with Meredith Monk and later founded his own company in 1975, which later became Ping Chong and Company. It was created to explore the meaning of contemporary theatre and art on a national and international level. He has created over fifty major works for the stage, including Humboldt’s Current, Nosferatu, Kind Ness, and Undesirable Elements. His works have received numerous Obie and Bessie Awards and are performed throughout the world.

Surrealism, magic realism and expressionism are the hallmarks of Jose Rivera’s influential body of work. This new volume collects the author’s plays written in the past five years, including References to Salvador Dalí Make Me Hot ("effortlessly melds otherworldly fantasy with gritty realism to make sparks fly onstage."—The Journal News), Sueño (a reworking for Pedro Calderón’s Life is a Dream) and Sonnets for an Old Century, the author’s most recent work, which recently premiered in Los Angeles.

Puerto Rican-born playwright José Rivera plays have been produced all over the world and his work has been translated into seven languages. His best known work includes Marisol and Each Day Dies with Sleep. "Rivera has a messianic mission to replace old and dying creeds with vibrant new visions."—Robert Brustein, New Republic

Also available by José Rivera
Marisol and Other Plays
PB $15.95 1-55936-136-0 • USA

“McCraney’s richly drawn characters and colloquial poetry . . . manages to sound both epic and rooted in a specific place. Listen closely, and you might hear that thrilling sound that is one of the main reasons we go to the theater, that beautiful music of a new voice.”—The New York Times

“Taut, expressive drama, The Brothers Size realizes the potential of theater to elevate the ordinary. . . . McCraney’s writing can be arresting.”—Time Out New York

This is the first collection by Tarell Alvin McCraney, a major new playwright of the American theater. Lyrical and mythic, provocative and contemporary, McCraney’s dramas of kinship, love, and heartache are set in the bayou of Louisiana and loosely draw on West African myths. In the Red and Brown Water charts the story of Oya, a fast and beautiful track star who must make difficult choices on her journey to womanhood. The Brothers Size dramatizes the struggle between brothers who have taken different paths: Ogun, single-mindedly running his auto shop, and Oshoosi, recently returned from prison and fallen back with trouble. Marcus; or the Secret of Sweet explores a young man’s relationship with his history and friends as he discovers his sexuality and true self against the backdrop of an impending storm.

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s other works include Wig Out! and The Breach. His plays have been produced at The Public Theater in New York, internationally at the Royal Court Theatre and Abbey Theatre, and throughout the United States.

“A mischievous new translation by the poet Richard Wilbur, [The Bungler] is great good fun and should open the gate for the play to be presented with the regularity it deserves.”—Bruce Weber, The New York Times

“My notion of translation is that you try to bring it back alive. Speak-ability is so important. . . . I came to see that a line that simply says ‘I love you,’ at the right point in the show, is entirely adequate, that a great deal of verbal sophistication is not necessarily called for.”—Richard Wilbur

Poet Richard Wilbur’s translations of Molière’s plays are loved, renowned, and performed throughout the world. This volume is part of Theater Communications Group’s new series (with cover designs by Chip Kidd) to complete trade publication of these vital works of French neoclassical comedy. The Bungler is Molière’s first recognizably great play, and the first to be written in verse. The charming farce is set in Sicily and born of the great Italian tradition of the commedia dell’arte: Loyal valet Mascarille schemes to win the lovely Celie away from rival Leadre, and into the arms of his master Leslie. Molière himself originated the role Mascarille, self-described as “the rashest fool on earth,” who naturally bungles the job along the way.

Richard Wilbur is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a former Poet Laureate of the United States. His publications include six volumes of poetry and two collections of selected verses, a collection of prose, and two books for children.

"The words of Nilo Cruz waft from the stage like a scented breeze. They sparkle and prickle and swirl, enveloping those who listen in both specific place and time . . . and in timeless passions that touch us all."—The Miami Herald

One of the United States' most-produced Cuban American writers, Nilo Cruz employs his signature poetic imagery and vivid language to tender and humorous effect in this pair of his newest works. The Color of Desire, set in 1960 Havana, revolves around a passionate romance between an American businessman and an out-of-work Cuban actress. As the relationship becomes a metaphor for their countries' ruptured love affair, Cruz artfully weds magical realism to a familial story that is touching, harrowing, and funny. In Hurricane, a damaged family—a fire-and-brimstone missionary; his wife, who he saved in more than the spiritual sense; and their adopted son, who seems to have materialized from the ocean—face a shocking crisis when a hurricane ravages their Caribbean town. A celebration of humility, generosity, and kindness, Cruz's play explores the nature of identity, faith, and the redemptive power of love.

Nilo Cruz is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Anna in the Tropics, as well as A Park in Our House, A Bicycle Country, Dancing on Her Knees, Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, and other works.

Includes: One Flea Spare
In the Heart of America
Slaughter City
The War Boys
The Trestle at Pope's Creek

“A fascinating and provocatively stimulating distillation of three decades of intense conversations between one of the twentieth century’s few true theater innovators and America’s leading writer on the theatrical avant-garde. A splendid book.”—Clive Barnes

“Peter Brook continues to astonish, not in an ordinary, fashionable way, but in an ancient, insistent way that always forces one inward. There is a true, honest, fearless voice in this fascinating conversation.”—Ken Burns

Peter Brook, one of the most important contemporary theatrical directors in the West, shares his most insightful thoughts and deepest feelings about theater with Margaret Croyden, who has followed his career for thirty years, gaining an unparalleled perspective on the evolution of his work. In these interchanges from 1970 to 2000, Brook freely discusses major works such as his landmark airborne A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his untraditional interpretation of the opera La Tragédie de Carmen. He also covers the establishment of the Paris Center, his work in the Middle East and Africa, and his masterwork, the nine-hour production of The Mahabharata, which has virtually reinvented the way actors and directors think about theater.

Margaret Croyden is a well-known critic, commentator, and journalist, whose articles on theater and the arts have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Village Voice, American Theatre, and Antioch Review, among others. She is the author of Lunatics, Lovers and Poets, a seminal book on the development of nonliterary theater.

Mrs. Packard

“Naomi Wallace commits the unpardonable sin of being partisan, and, the darkness and harshness of her work notwithstanding, outrageously optimistic. She seems to believe the world can change. She certainly writes as if she intends to set it on fire.”—Tony Kushner

Naomi Wallace, the rare writer who combines lyrical theatricality with political ferocity, turns her sight to the Middle East, with a new triptych for the stage. Vision One, A State of Innocence, is set—as the playwright describes, in “something like a small zoo, but more silent, empty, in Rafah, Palestine. Or a space that once dreamed it was a zoo”—and features a Palestinian woman, an Israeli architect, and an Israeli soldier. Vision Two, The Retreating World, is of an Iraqi bird keeper from Baghdad and his address before the International Pigeon Convention. Vision Three, Between this Breath and You, takes place after hours in the waiting room of a clinic in West Jerusalem, where a Palestinian father confronts the nurse’s aide, a young Israeli woman, about the meaning of the loss of his son and the impact it had on her life. These multifaceted works explore the urgency and complexity of the Middle East’s political landscape, through the voices and bodies of the people who inhabit it.

Naomi Wallace is a poet and playwright from Kentucky, who currently resides in England. Her numerous awards include the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Her plays, including One Flea Spare, In the Heart of America, and Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, are produced throughout the United States and around the world.

"Nottage is one of our finest playwrights, a smart, empathetic, and daring storyteller who tells a story an audience won't expect."—Time Out New York

"Lynn Nottage's work explores depths of humanness, the overlapping complexities of race, gender, culture and history—and the startling simplicity of desire—with a clear tenderness, with humor, with compassion."—Paula Vogel, Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright

In her first new play since the critically acclaimed Ruined, Lynn Nottage examines the legacy of African Americans in Hollywood in a dramatic stylistic departure from her previous work. Fluidly incorporating film and video elements into her writing for the first time, Nottage's comedy tells the story of Vera Stark, an African American maid and budding actress who has a tangled relationship with her boss, a white Hollywood star desperately grasping to hold onto her career. Stirring audiences out of complacency by tackling racial stereotyping in the entertainment industry, Nottage highlights the paradox of black actors in 1930s Hollywood while jumping back and forward in time and location in this uniquely theatrical narrative. By the Way, Meet Vera Stark premiered in New York in 2011 and received subsequent productions at Los Angeles's Geffen Playhouse in fall 2012 and Chicago's Goodman Theatre and The Lyric Stage Company of Boston in spring 2013.

Lynn Nottage's plays include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ruined; Intimate Apparel; Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine; Crumbs from the Table of Joy; Las Meninas; Mud, River, Stone; Por'Knockers; and POOF!

Allegations of gross misconduct plague a unit of the British army and raise challenging moral issues. In her first play, beloved comedian/author Sandi Toksvig writes with startling insight and tenderness about the minds of soldiers. The premiere marks the opening of St. James, London's first new theatre complex in thirty years.

A muscular version of Sophocles' timeless masterpiece, offering a profound reflection on the nature of power, democracy and human rights.

The war has ended, but with peace comes conflict. Antigone’s brother Polyneices lies on the battlefield where he fell, his burial outlawed by Creon, the new king of Thebes. Should Antigone obey Creon, or must she follow her conscience and lay her beloved brother to rest?

Ideal for schools and drama groups, this Dracula is all the more chilling for the respect it shows for Stoker's original nightmare creation.