Series introduction by John Lahr with individual volumes introduced by Laurence Fishburne, Tony Kushner, Romulus Linney, Marion McClinton, Toni Morrison, Suzan-Lori Parks, Phylicia Rashad, Ishmael Reed, and Frank Rich.

"No one except perhaps Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams has aimed so high and achieved so much in the American theater." --John Lahr, The New Yorker

"Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story. . . . For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned."--Tony Kushner

August Wilson's Century Cycle is "one of the most ambitious dramatic projects ever undertaken." (The New York Times) With it, Wilson dramatizes the African American experience and heritage in the twentieth century, with a play for each decade, almost all set in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where he grew up. Wilson's extraordinary lifework--completed just before his death in October 2005--is presented here for the first time in its entirety.

"Art is beholden to the kiln in which the artist was fired. Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African American. . . . The cycle of plays that I have been writing since 1979 is my attempt to represent that culture on stage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves. 

The characters in the plays still place their faith in America's willingness to live up to the meaning of her creed. It is this belief in America's honor that allows them to pursue the American Dream even as it remains elusive. . . . They shout, they argue, they wrestle with love, honor, duty, betrayal; they have loud voices and big hearts; they demand justice, they love, they laugh, they cry, they murder, and they embrace life with zest and vigor. . . . In all the plays, the characters remain pointed towards the future, their pockets lined with fresh hope and an abiding faith in their own abilities and their own heroics."--August Wilson

Titles included in the set:

Gem of the Ocean 

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone 

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 

The Piano Lesson 

Seven Guitars 

Fences 

Two Trains Running 

Jitney 

King Hedley II 

Radio Golf 

“iHo is a vast, rich work of public-intellectual engagement. . . The values built into this beautifully inquiring play operate outside of common dramatic economies. Kushner’s carefully organized labor of love is a spur to the active mind.”—Adam Feldman, Time Out New York

Gus Marcantonio, a retired longshoreman, summons his adult children home to the family’s Brooklyn brownstone to discuss his recent decision to commit suicide. With his trademark mix of soaring intel­lect, searing emotion, and biting wit, Kushner unfurls an epic tale of revolu­tion, radicalism, family, love, sex, politics, real estate, unions, and debts both unpaid and unpayable.

This volume gathers sixty years of essays, speeches, and manifestos by the founding mother of the resident professional theatre movement. As a founder and artistic director of the flagship Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and chair of New York University’s Graduate Acting program, the late Zelda Fichandler changed the where and how of the American theatre. The Long Revolution gathers Fichandler’s most prescient writing about that movement, ranging over such topics as The Institution as Art-Work, the Profit in NonProfit, Race and a Deepening Aesthetic, and Creativity and the Public Mind. It also includes intimate portraits of artists with whom she frequently collaborated and director’s notes from the major productions that defined her vision. Celebrated as the defining architect and builder of the most sweeping transformation of twentieth-century American theatre, her brilliant writing reestablishes Fichandler as one of its most expansive and provocative thinkers.

Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, James Ijames' Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare's masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbecue in the American South.

Winner of the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Drama.

Juicy—a young, queer, Southern man, who is grappling with questions of identity—is visited by the ghost of his father (Pap) at his mother’s wedding/family barbecue. Pap demands that Juicy avenge his recent murder. How will Juicy, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man, trying to break a cycle of trauma and toxic masculinity, avenge his father’s premature death? Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare’s masterpiece in startling and hilarious ways amidst the backdrop of a family barbeque in the American South.

This book is a guide to one hundred plays addressing the most urgent and important issue of our time: the climate crisis

100 Plays to Save the World is a book to provoke as well as inspire—to start conversations, inform debate, challenge our thinking, and be a launchpad for future productions. Above all, it is a call to arms—to step up, think big, and unleash theatre’s power to imagine a better future into being.

Each play is explored with an essay illuminating key themes in climate issues: Resources, Energy, Migration, Responsibility, Fightback, and Hope.

100 Plays to Save the World is an empowering resource for theatre directors, producers, teachers, youth leaders, and writers looking for plays that speak to our present moment.

Summer, 1827. In a red barn in Suffolk, Maria Marten awaits her lover. A year later, hidden in a grain sack under the floor of the barn, Maria's body is found, barely identifiable—and the manhunt begins.

The Red Barn Murder had all the hallmarks of a classic crime drama: a missing body, a country location, a disreputable squire and a village stuck in its age-old traditions. But whilst sending shockwaves throughout the country, Maria's own story was lost.

The Ballad of Maria Marten rediscovers her story, bringing it back to vivid, urgent life. Beth Flintoff's thrilling play was first performed by an all-female cast in a production by Eastern Angles in July 2018. Subsequent national tours were produced with Eastern Angles by Matthew Linley Creative Projects in association with the Stephen Joseph Theatre.