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Camino Real
By Tennessee Williams. 2008
Now with a new introduction, the author's original Foreword and Afterword, the one-act play 10 Blocks on the Camino Real,…
plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar, Michael Paller. In this phantasmagorical play, the Camino Real is a dead end, a police state in a vaguely Latin American country, and an inescapable condition. Characters from history and literature--Don Quixote, Casanova, Camille, Lord Byron--inhabit a place where corruption and indifference have immobilized and nearly destroyed the human spirit. Then, into this netherworld, the archetypal Kilroy arrives--a sailor and all-American guy with "a heart as big as the head of baby." Celebrated American playwright John Guare has written an illuminative Introduction for this edition. Also included are Williams' original Foreword and Afterword to the play, the one-act play Ten Blocks on the Camino Real, plus an essay by noted Tennessee Williams scholar Michael Paller.Fugitive Kind
By Tennessee Williams, Allean Hale. 2001
Social outcasts, misfit survivors, dangerous passions—Tennessee Williams fleshed out the characters and themes that would dominate his later work in…
Fugitive Kind, one of his earliest plays. Fugitive Kind, one of Tennessee Williams's earliest plays, is one of his richest in dramatic material. Written in 1937 when the playwright was still Thomas Lanier Williams, Fugitive Kind introduces the character who will inhabit most of his later plays: the marginal man or woman who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive. Signature Tennessee Williams' characters, situations, and even the title (which was used as The Fugitive Kind for the 1960 film based on Orpheus Descending) have their genesis here. At age twenty-six, Williams was still learning his craft and this, his second full-length play, shows his debt to sources as diverse as thirties gangster films (The Petrified Forest, Winterset) and Romeo and Juliet. Fugitive Kind, with its star-crossed lovers and big city slum setting, takes place in a flophouse on the St. Louis waterfront in the shadow of Eads Bridge, where Williams spent Saturdays away from his shoe factory job and met his characters: jobless wayfarers on the dole, young writers and artists of the WPA, even gangsters and G-men. Fugitive Kind was also Williams's second play to be produced by The Mummers, a St. Louis theatre group devoted to drama of social protest. Called "vital and absorbing" by a contemporary review in The St. Louis Star-Times, this play reveals the young playwright's own struggle between his radical-socialist sympathies and his poetic inclinations, and signals his future reputation as our most compassionate lyric dramatist.Spring Storm
By Tennessee Williams, Dan Isaac. 1999
"A crucible of so many elements that would later shape and characterize Williams's work."--World Literature Today When Tennessee Williams read…
Spring Storm aloud to his playwriting class at the University of Iowa in 1938, he was met with silence and embarrassment. His professor, the renowned E. C. Mabie, remarked as he got up and dismissed the seminar, "Well, we all have to paint our nudes!" Tom's earlier comment in his journal that the play "is well-constructed, no social propaganda, and is suitable for the commercial stage" seems accurate enough in 1999, but woefully naive deep in the Depression when the play's sexual explicitness--particularly its matter-of-fact acceptance of a woman's right to her own sexuality--would have been seen as not only shocking but also politically radical. Spring Storm would later be disavowed by the author as "simply a study of Sex--a blind animal urge or force (like the regenerative force of April) gripping four lives and leading them into a tangle of cruel and ugly relations." But the solid and deft characterizations of the four young people whose lives intertwine--the sexually alive Heavenly Critchfield, her earthy lover Dick Miles, Heavenly's wealthy but tongue-tied admirer Arthur Shannon, and the repressed librarian Hertha Nielson who loves Arthur--are archetypes of characters we will meet again and again in the Williams canon. Epic in scope, a bit melodramatic in execution, tragic in outcome, Spring Storm created a wave of excitement among theatre insiders when it was given a staged reading at The Ensemble Studio Theatre's Octoberfest '96. This edition has been prepared, with an illuminating introduction, by Dan Isaac, who initiated the Octoberfest production.Vieux Carre
By Tennessee Williams, Robert Bray. 1979
Born out of the journals the playwright kept at the time, Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré is not emotion recollected in…
tranquility, but emotion re-created with all the pain, compassion, and wry humor of the playwright's own 1938-39 sojourn in the New Orleans French Quarter vividly intact. The drama takes it form from the shifting scenes of memory, and Williams's surrogate self invites us to focus, in turn, on the various inhabitants or his dilapidated rooming house in the Vieux Carré: the comically desperate landlady, Mrs. Wire; Jane, a properly brought-up young woman from New York making at last grab at pleasure with Tye, the vulgar but appealing strip-joint barker; two decayed gentlewomen politely starving in the garret; and the dying painter Nightingale, who tries to teach the young writer something about love--both of the body and of the heart. This is a play about the education of the artist, and education in loneliness and despair, in giving and not giving, but most of all in seeing, hearing, feeling, and learning that "writers are shameless spies," who pay dearly for their knowledge and who cannot forget. Building on two decades of Williams scholarship since Vieux Carré was originally published, Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, has provided a new introduction for this edition, giving the most authoritative account yet of its background and genesis.Uma Vida depois da Dor
By Ana Paula Ruth Lima, Marcelo C Troche. 2018
"Eu acredito que a vida é a melhor oportunidade de ser você mesmo, ser leal e livre, mesmo vivendo em…
uma sociedade onde você deve seguir regras, onde você deve ter valores e onde, às vezes, você não pode se revelar e seguir seus ideais. A vida é a expressão e a liberdade de voar como um pássaro e de seguir sua própria luz, sua própria estrela. Eu acho que você tem a oportunidade de selecionar aqueles que oferecem amor e que também recebem. Lembre-se que você é único e que a pessoa que quer estar ao seu lado não deve ser ferida, não deve ser mudada, não deve quebrar suas asas, ou parar seu vôo e claro que você não deveria. Pelo contrário, os pássaros que voam juntos, aprendem a conviver, aprendem a se entender e a encontrar estratégias para chegar ao seu destino. Além disso, a solidão e a dor fazem parte desse processo que chamamos de viver, dão-lhe aprendizagens, elas mudam você, lembram-lhe o quanto você é forte para continuar lutando; Eles nos lembram de quão vulneráveis e fracos às vezes nos tornamos, mas quão invencíveis e perseverantes podemos nos tornar. Pinte uma imagem da sua vida, visualize onde você está e aonde você quer ir. Analise, se você está dando os passos certos, se você está no lugar certo e com as pessoas certas. Se não é assim e você precisa de uma mudança, faça agora porque a vida é hoje, e você pode ir com a passagem do tempo, ou no momento em que menos espera."Clothes for a Summer Hotel: Play
By Tennessee Williams. 1983
This late play by Tennessee Williams explores the troubled relationship between F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The late Tennessee Williams's…
Clothes for a Summer Hotelmade its New York debut in 1980. Here Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, often seen as symbols of the doomed youth of the jazz age, become two halves of a single creative psyche, each part alternately feeding and then devouring the other. Set in Highland Hospital near Asheville, North Carolina, where Zelda spent her last confinement, this "ghost play" begins several years after Scott's death of a heart attack in California. But the past is "still always present" in Zelda, and Williams's constant shifting of chronology and mixing of remembrance with ghostly re-enactment suggest that our real intimacy is with the shadow characters of our own minds. As Williams said in the Author's Note to the Broadway production: "Our reason for taking extraordinary license with time and place is that in an asylum and on its grounds liberties of this kind are quite prevalent: and also these liberties allow us to explore in more depth what we believe is truth of character." Williams poses the inevitable, unanswerable questions: Did Scott prevent Zelda from achieving an independent creativity? Did Zelda's demands force Scott to squander his talents and turn to alcohol? Whose betrayal--emotional, creative, sexual--destroyed the other? But he poses these questions in a new way: in the act of creation, Zelda and Scott are now aware of their eventual destruction, and the creative fire that consumed two artists combines symbolically with the fire that ended Zelda's life.Bride Roses: A Scene
By William Dean Howells. 2012
A Lady, entering the florist's with her muff to her face, and fluttering gayly up to the counter, where the…
florist stands folding a mass of loose flowers in a roll of cotton batting: "Good-morning, Mr. Eichenlaub! Ah, put plenty of cotton round the poor things, if you don't want them frozen stiff! You have no idea what a day it is, here in your little tropic." She takes away her muff as she speaks, but gives each of her cheeks a final pressure with it, and holds it up with one hand inside as she sinks upon the stool before the counter.Skin & Liars
By Dennis Foon. 2013
Skin introduces us to a group of Canadian teenagers who are coming of age in the late 1980s. Faced with…
racial discrimination, Phiroza, Jennifer, and Tuan must navigate the choppy waters of high school, each confronting his or her own set of challenges. Ranging from academic difficulties, to budding relationships, to the trials of adapting to a foreign language and culture, the three share their stories of struggle, survival, and defiance of negative expectations and racist attitudes. Lenny is at the top of her class. Jace seemingly couldn't care less. By all appearances these two classmates are polar opposites, but despite all their differences they are inexplicably drawn towards one another. When it is revealed that each has been trying to hide the same dark secret—that they share a home with an alcoholic parent—each decides to take action and confront the demon they call "Mom" or "Dad."Spring Awakening
By Steven Sater, Duncan Sheik. 2007
"This brave new musical, haunting and electrifying by turns, restores the mystery, the thrill to that shattering transformation that stirs…
in all our souls."--Charles Isherwood, The New York Times"The staggering purity of this show will touch all open hearts...In its refined, imaginative simplicity, it daringly reverses all the conventional rules by returning the American musical to an original state of innocence."--John Heilpern, The New York Observer"An unexpected jolt of sudden genius, edgy in its brutally honest, unromanticized depiction of human sexuality."--New York Post Spring Awakening is an extraordinary new rock musical with book and lyrics by Steven Sater and music by Grammy Award-nominated recording artist Duncan Sheik. Inspired by Frank Wedekind's controversial 1891 play about teenage sexuality and society's efforts to control it, the piece seamlessly merges past and present, underscoring the timelessness of adolescent angst and the universality of human passion. Steven Sater's plays include the long-running Carbondale Dreams, Perfect for You, Doll (Rosenthal Prize/Cincinnati Playhouse), Umbrage (Steppenwolf New Play Prize), and a reconceived version of Shakespeare's Tempest, which played in London. Duncan Sheik is a singer/songwriter who also collaborated with Sater on the musical The Nightingale. He has composed original music for The Gold Rooms of Nero and for The Public Theater's Twelfth Night in Central Park.Walpurgis Night, or the Steps of the Commander
By Marian Schwartz, Venedikt Erofeev. 2014
Walpurgis Night, by acclaimed Russian writer Venedikt Erofeev, is considered a classic in the playwright's homeland. Erofeev's dark and funny…
five-act satire of Soviet repression has been called the comic high-water mark of the Brezhnev era. Walpurgis Night dramatizes the outrageous trials of Lev Isakovich Gurevich, an alcoholic half-Jewish dissident poet confined by the state to a hospital for the insane. In "Ward 3"--a microcosm of repressive Soviet society--Gurevich deploys his brilliant wit and ingenuity to bedevil his jailers, defend his fellow inmates, protest his incarceration, and generally create mayhem, which ultimately leads to a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.Prince Friedrich of Homburg: A New Translation For The American Stage
By Heinrich Kleist, Diana Peters, Frederick Peters. 1978
Prince Friedrich of Homburg is the indisputable dramatic masterpiece of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), a leading figure, along with Goethe…
and Schiller, among early German Romantics. Available until now only in verse translation, it has been newly rendered for the American stage by Diana Stone Peters and Frederick G. Peters. A work of profound psychological insight, Prince Friedrich of Homburg probes with passionate intensity questions fundamental to “civilized” behavior. Prince Friedrich, the hero of the historic battle of Fehrbellin (1675) against the invading Swedes, receives not laurels for his victory but the sentence of death for disobeying orders in the field. Faced with certain execution, his mood swings from abject terror to high-minded exultation as first he challenges, and then accepts, the rule of law and subservience to the state. The action moves relentlessly in the near-frenzied pace characteristic of Kleist. Intended as a paean to a Prussia triumphant in the Napoleonic wars. the play was, ironically, censured and never produced in Kleist's lifetime. In our own day, Prince Friedrich of Homburg has been both denounced as a protofascist work and lauded as a supreme metaphysical disquisition. Whatever the merits of such intellectualization, it remains one of the most moving and performable plays available for the modern stage.Prince Friedrich of Homburg: A New Translation For The American Stage
By Heinrich Kleist, Diana Peters, Frederick Peters. 1978
Prince Friedrich of Homburg is the indisputable dramatic masterpiece of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), a leading figure, along with Goethe…
and Schiller, among early German Romantics. Available until now only in verse translation, it has been newly rendered for the American stage by Diana Stone Peters and Frederick G. Peters. A work of profound psychological insight, Prince Friedrich of Homburg probes with passionate intensity questions fundamental to “civilized” behavior. Prince Friedrich, the hero of the historic battle of Fehrbellin (1675) against the invading Swedes, receives not laurels for his victory but the sentence of death for disobeying orders in the field. Faced with certain execution, his mood swings from abject terror to high-minded exultation as first he challenges, and then accepts, the rule of law and subservience to the state. The action moves relentlessly in the near-frenzied pace characteristic of Kleist. Intended as a paean to a Prussia triumphant in the Napoleonic wars. the play was, ironically, censured and never produced in Kleist's lifetime. In our own day, Prince Friedrich of Homburg has been both denounced as a protofascist work and lauded as a supreme metaphysical disquisition. Whatever the merits of such intellectualization, it remains one of the most moving and performable plays available for the modern stage.Enriched Classics offer readers accessible editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and commentary. Each book includes…
educational tools alongside the text, enabling students and readers alike to gain a deeper and more developed understanding of the writer and their work. Wilde's classic comedy of manners, The Importance of Being Earnest, a satire of Victorian social hypocrisy and considered Wilde's greatest dramatic achievement, and his other popular plays-Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and Salome-challenged contemporary notions of sex and sensibility, class and cultural identity. Enriched Classics enhance your engagement by introducing and explaining the historical and cultural significance of the work, the author's personal history, and what impact this book had on subsequent scholarship. Each book includes discussion questions that help clarify and reinforce major themes and reading recommendations for further research. Read with confidence.The Last Days of Mankind
By Karl Kraus, Edward Timms, Fred Bridgham. 2015
One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, "The Last Days of Mankind "remains as…
powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus's play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly "defensive" war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus's towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars. Bertolt Brecht hailed "The Last Days" as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army's call to arms, people's responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today's readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.The Member of the Wedding: A Play
By Carson McCullers, Carlos Dews. 1997
Celebrated worldwide for her masterly novels, Carson McCullers was equally accomplished, and equally moving, when writing in other forms. The…
play The Member of the Wedding (1950), adapted from her 1946 novel at the urging of her close friend Tennessee Williams is, like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a great American poem for the stage. At its center is tomboy Frankie Addams, a motherless adolescent neglected by her father and utterly bored with life in small-town Georgia until romantic longing is ignited by her older brother’s wedding. A hit on Broadway, running for more than five hundred performances, it won the Drama Critics’ Circle Award and soon inspired a film.Vic/Tim
By Mike Sims, MARÍA GABRIELA GUZMÁN MIGUEL. 2015
Vickie es una ejecutiva corporativa de carrera, con una personalidad brillante, creativa y letal. Es como una rosa roja, de…
apariencia hermosa, y ojos que se asemejan a la flor de la violeta, pero llena de espinas para los que no tienen cuidado. A pesar de que las adversidades de la vida la han convertido en víctima, también la ayudaron a fortalecer las habilidades que le permiten salir airosa de diferentes situaciones con otras personas. Ella es fuerte desde el punto de vista físico y brillante desde el punto de vista intelectural y aquellos que entran en su radar obtienen un tratamiento especial. VÍC-TIM-AS es un libro que recorre su viaje a través situaciones y relaciones nuevas. En él, ella despliega su humor negro y su paradógico estilo de justicia sobre algunos, mientras salva a otros en el proceso. Una heroína reacia, como una Valquiria que hace lo que piensa que es necesario sin sacar provecho ni hacer alarde de ello. Y aprende que las vidas que ella intenta modificar, también modifican la suya.Vic/Tim
By Mike Sims, MAR A GABRIELA GUZM N MIGUEL. 2015
Vickie es una ejecutiva corporativa de carrera, con una personalidad brillante, creativa y letal. Es como una rosa roja, de…
apariencia hermosa, y ojos que se asemejan a la flor de la violeta, pero llena de espinas para los que no tienen cuidado. A pesar de que las adversidades de la vida la han convertido en víctima, también la ayudaron a fortalecer las habilidades que le permiten salir airosa de diferentes situaciones con otras personas. Ella es fuerte desde el punto de vista físico y brillante desde el punto de vista intelectural y aquellos que entran en su radar obtienen un tratamiento especial. VÍC-TIM-AS es un libro que recorre su viaje a través situaciones y relaciones nuevas. En él, ella despliega su humor negro y su paradógico estilo de justicia sobre algunos, mientras salva a otros en el proceso. Una heroína reacia, como una Valquiria que hace lo que piensa que es necesario sin sacar provecho ni hacer alarde de ello. Y aprende que las vidas que ella intenta modificar, también modifican la suya.The Price
By Arthur Miller. 1968
Years after an angry breakup, Victor and Walter Franz are reunited by the death of their father. As they sort…
through his possessions in an old brownstone attic, the memories evoked by his belongings stir up old hostilities. The Price was nominated for two Tony Awards, including best play.A Bubble out of time
By Silvia De Cristofaro, Andrea Calo'. 2016
If it was true we all live more than one life? If we grew up remembering one of our past…
lives? Mystery and passion blended in a page turner novel! Katherine, called Kate by everybody, is an Italian American young woman who lives in New York. Many people are sure she has mental issues, her family included. But that's not true: her distinctive trait is to clearly remember details of her past life, a life she lived in a place far from her birthplace. At thirty five she decides to go back to Joseph, in Wallowa county, Oregon, where she's sure she had lived. She's looking for her past, for her soul closed in the body of a past time woman. When she's forced to stop in Portland because of a snow storm, she meets John and she feels an unexplainable connection with him. He will offer to help her look for traces of the past that doesn't stop to haunt her. A painting, a kiss, a house and a journal written by herself in the second half of 1800, everything leads to a breath taking revelation saved for an end that has the ability to make this novel unforgettable.Life Is a Dream
By Gregary Racz, Pedro Calderon de la Barca. 2006
The masterwork of Spain's preeminent dramatist--now in a new verse translation Life Is a Dream is a work many hold…
to be the supreme example of Spanish Golden Age drama. Imbued with highly poetic language and humanist ideals, it is an allegory that considers contending themes of free will and predestination, illusion and reality, played out against the backdrop of court intrigue and the restoration of personal honor. In the mountainous barrens of Poland, the rightful heir to the kingdom has been imprisoned since birth in an attempt by his father to thwart fate. Meanwhile, a noblewoman arrives to seek revenge against the man who deceived and forsook her love for the prospect of becoming king of Poland. Richly symbolic and metaphorical, Life Is a Dream explores the deepest mysteries of human experience.