Smith and Kraus

id: 100
Title: 60471
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 2
Synopsis: A young man's obsession with a strange and unique girl.

id: 101
Title: A Figment
Author: Ron Weaver
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 0
Synopsis: A play character (Character 2) wants to leave the play and lead a frivolous and fun filled life.  The other character (Character 1) points out that Character 2 can't do that because he is merely a figment of the playwright's imagination.  Character 2 doesn't believe he's a figment and makes several attempts to get out of the play.  When he becomes an irritation to the playwright, Character 2 is eliminated from the play, or is he?

id: 102
Title: A Modest Proposal
Author: Steve Koppman
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minuet Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Words pass between a couple in the middle of the night. He's having trouble sleeping. He wants to share something inchoate. Is he really fully living? Our most profound concern as humans. All real living is meeting.  But life's an ongoing process.  Ditto, a river.  He just wants her to know him. But not all the dreary details. That's not what it's about. So goes the conversation that threatens to unravel this relationship and ends with a proposal at once modest yet audacious.

id: 103
Title: A Quiet Place
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 6
Synopsis: A group of students take revenge on a noisy boy who is disturbing the peace and quiet of their public library.

id: 104
Title: A Short History of Weather
Author: Jonathan Yukich
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 105
Title: After Godot
Author: George A. Freek
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3; Women: 0
Synopsis: Following a miserable performance of Waiting for Godot, Estragon initially convinces Vladimir the disaster wasn't entirely his fault, until director Lucky appears from the wings and tears into both of them.

id: 106
Title: All Good Cretins Go to Heaven
Author: Karen Warnock
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: It's late 2006/early 2007, late at night or far too early in the morning on the Bowery in New York City. Lulu passes the boarded-up front of CBGB, and calls on one of rock's patron saints to explain what's happened to downtown. An angel, Joey Ramone, comes down from rock and roll heaven and answers some of her questions, and reminds her that rock and roll never dies.

id: 107
Title: All in a Day's Work
Author: M. Lynda Robinson
ISBN: 9781575256986
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 108
Title: Alternate Plans
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Serio-Comic
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 2
Synopsis: Friends studying for the SAT exam discuss what they might do if they don't get into college.

id: 109
Title: American Flag
Author: Sylvia Reed
ISBN: 9781575256979
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: A stripper and a man have a conversation after his bachelor party about the consequences of the choices we make as individuals … and as a nation

id: 110
Title: An Epic Story of Love and Sex in Ten Minutes - Chapter One
Author: Richard Vetere
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Young males/teens: 6; Women/Young Girls: 11
Synopsis: A young boy in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens growing up in the 60's in New York City learns about love and sex from the age of nine to seventeen usually with encounters with slightly older women, much tougher women or women who don't love him back.

id: 111
Title: Antarctica
Author: George Freek
ISBN: 9781575256580
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 1
Synopsis: As the parents of an unruly teenager discuss his troubles with a family therapist, they are suddenly confronted with a few more problems.

id: 112
Title: Appointment Required
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 4
Synopsis: A waiting room in purgatory, and the people that pass through it.

id: 113
Title: Arms
Author: Bekah Brunstetter
ISBN: 9781575256962
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Sis and Sam, recently separated Siamese twins, meet on Halloween night in the park where they grew up playing. Sam wants to move on; Sis cannot.

id: 114
Title: Barbie World
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 2
Synopsis: A dating service specifically designed for the famous "Barbie".  Now that she has split with equally famous counterpart, "Ken", she is looking for eligible bachelors.

id: 115
Title: Be The Hunter
Author: Thomas Coash
ISBN: 9781575256955
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 0
Synopsis: A Marine, on home leave from Iraq, asks a hunting buddy to help him stage an accidental shooting which would excuse him from returning to the war

id: 116
Title: Blink of an Eye
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 2
Synopsis: Told through a series of monologues, a heartbreaking story of one family's tragedy.

id: 117
Title: Blue in the Face
Author: Kayla Cagan
ISBN: 9781575257068
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Blue in the Face is a short play about young love and lost love. Marion and Andrew, both in their early twenties and living in New York City, a trying to be civil to each other post-breakup. Marion pushes Andrew's emotional buttons, Andrew has to decide whether to push back.

id: 118
Title: Body Shop
Author: Anne Phelan
ISBN: 9781575256283
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 1
Synopsis: Rachel and her boyfriend Sam run a successful body shop, but it’s for human body parts.

id: 119
Title: Bollywood Ending
Author: R.D. Murphy
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 2
Synopsis: Global economy, local wildlife and the karma of the Chevy Vega collide, when an Indian call center rings up a bankrupt care dealer on Boston's North Shore. What we need now is a Bollywood Ending!

id: 120
Title: Bone China
Author: K. Alexa Mavromatis
ISBN: 9781575257051
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 2
Synopsis: A Saturday afternoon sorting through the attic brings memories -- as well as concerns about an uncertain future -- to the surface for two sisters facing the most emotionally trying time of their lives.

id: 121
Title: Brushstroke
Author: John Shanahan
ISBN: 9781575256948
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 0
Synopsis: Artist Timothy Parsons has a brilliant painting that has been one brushstroke away from completion for the last three weeks, and he can't bring himself to finish it. What is holding him back?

id: 122
Title: Cabman
Author: William Orem
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Girl: 1
Synopsis: CABMAN is an update of Anton Chekhov's short story "Misery" set inside a taxicab taking fares around Capitol Hill.

id: 123
Title: Canadian Tuxedo
Author: Nicole Pandolfo
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Dark Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 0
Synopsis: Sal, in desperate need for money to marry his pregnant girlfriend, goes on a job for his mafioso friend to kill a man. The only problem is that his partner, Lou, is a "New-Age" moron and the man they are hired to kill just so happens to be at a bar with his identical twin, dressed alike in a Canadian Tuxedo.

id: 124
Title: Cate Blanchett Wants to be My Friend on Facebook
Author: Alex Broun
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 2
Synopsis: Facebook. It's a valuable "social networking" tool. But what if you haven't got any friends? Cate Blanchett, Academy Award winning actress (She played Galadriel in Lord of the Rings 1, 2 and 3!) knows the feeling. And now she's out to get some more. Whether Barry likes it or not. A comedy - with one very famous person...

id: 125
Title: Cell Mates
Author: Molly Tinsley
ISBN: 9781575256368
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 126
Title: Censored
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 4
Synopsis: Students in the drama club decide to take matters into their own hands, when they find out their school play is being censored for content.

id: 127
Title: Charm of the British
Author: Laura Cotton
ISBN: 9781575256566
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: How well do you know the one you love? In The Charm of the British a newly married couple discovers that they have each been harboring bizarre secrets from one another, one of which threatens to destroy their marriage. The play is an astonishingly refreshing tale of how true love will survive any circumstance.

id: 128
Title: Cocktail Conversation
Author: Andrew Biss
ISBN: 9781575256931
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 0
Synopsis:

id: 129
Title: Controlling Destiny
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 3
Synopsis: Three teen girls walk to the ocean's edge, putting their dreams in a bottle and throwing the bottles into the sea. They never realized the results would be so immediate.

id: 130
Title: Crimes Against Humanity
Author: Ross Maxwell
ISBN: 9781575256924
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 131
Title: Critical Care
Author: Bara Swain
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0; Women: 2
Synopsis: Carol and her daughter, Theresa, are having coffee at a diner during the graveyard shift. Carol has just returned from visiting her brother-in-law, who is in the critical care unit at a nearby hospital. Somewhere amidst the humor and laughter, Carol's fragile veil is whisked aside long enough to glimpse the longing and pain of a woman needing to be loved by her critical sister.

id: 132
Title: Crows Over Wheatfield
Author: Gregory Hischak
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 0
Synopsis: In an alternate reality two sign painters for the Road Department have an altercation over creativity, job promotions and draftsmanship.

id: 133
Title: Current Season
Author: Vanessa David
ISBN: 9781575256559
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 0
Synopsis: A funny and heartwarming piece detailing the joy and agony of the holiday season as seen through the eyes of three light-up reindeer

id: 134
Title: Daddy Took My Debt Away
Author: Bekah Brunstetter
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men; 2, Women 1
Synopsis: Two recent graduates, paralyzed by student loan debt, take jobs with student loan debt collectors. When a recent grad calls in the pay off.

id: 135
Title: Dedication
Author: Andrew Biss
ISBN: 9781575256610
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 0
Synopsis: A grief-stricken father belatedly pays his respects at his son’s gravesite and soon finds himself drawn into an argument over the reason why he lost his child in the first place.

id: 136
Title: déjà vu All Over Again
Author: Robin Rice Lichtig
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: Yogi Berra is in a batting slump. He feels like literally throwing in the towel. Yolanda, the biggest fan the Yankees have ever had, tries to cheer him up. She tries jokes, quotes, praise, prayer, everything she can think of. He feels old at 31, used up, no good. Finally, it's advice from Shakespeare that really turns the trick. It ain't over 'til it's over.

id: 137
Title: Dining Outdoors
Author: Vincent Delaney
ISBN: 9781575256290
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comic Horror
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2
Synopsis: At the height of a major sales event, two friends meet at a watering hole, which isn't exactly on the beaten path. But rather than drinks, they discover the more primal side of the consumer lifestyle.

id: 138
Title: Do-Overs
Author: Larry Hamm
ISBN: 9781575256535
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2
Synopsis: A couple recounts the highs and lows of living multiple lives together to a young soul. As all three wait for their next incarnation, they share their experiences as worms, rabbits, and a variety of other animal and human forms.

id: 139
Title: Double D
Author: Jim Dalglish
ISBN: 9781575257044
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Mary is on her way to her impossibly thin step-sister’s engagement party, when she has a shoe emergency.  Where the hell will she be able to find a pair of 12 Double E pumps at this time of night?  “Feel the Power? The thrill of 3-inch spikes. There’s a reason they’re called spikes, Mary. Because they’re weapons. Like two 45-caliber pistols strapped to each ankle. Power, Mary, Power.”

id: 140
Title: Early Dismissal
Author: Vanessa David
ISBN: 9781575256832
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Serio-Comic
Character Breakdown: Women: 4, 1 man or woman
Synopsis: "...two women commiserate about the insufficiencies of daycare. Monologues redux, you think, but no, and you're forced to recalibrate all your assumptions."

id: 141
Title: Eating in the Dark
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 3
Synopsis: A troubled young woman attends a movie in a crowded theatre, where she is required to find an additional seat for her stomach, which has become so large it requires an extra seat. There, she is given advance from a helpful stranger as to how to she can "get rid" of the overbearing Stomach.

id: 142
Title: Einstein and the Angel
Author: Laura Harrington
ISBN: 9781575256696
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1 Teenagers
Synopsis: In a post-apocalyptic world, 2 teenagers search for love, connection, and something to believe in."

id: 143
Title: Elsa and Frinz
Author: Bruce Shearer
ISBN: 9781575256634
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Esla and Frinz go partying is a comedy.  Esla and Frinz are balloons at their first children’s party. They are

id: 144
Title: End of a Perfect Game
Author: Jay Crehak
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 4; Women : 0
Synopsis: the last game of the World Series, and veteran Al “Trainwreck” Sexton is one pitch away from a perfect game and baseball immortality. But Al’s last three pitches have been far outside of the strike zone, and it appears “Trainwreck” is sliding off the rails. A conference at the pitcher’s mound ensues, as Willie Morris, Al’s catcher and best friend, tries to convince Al to throw one last pitch. Will it be the end of the perfect game?

id: 145
Title: Enter the Naked Woman
Author: Brendon L. Etter
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 1
Synopsis: Two male colleagues meet at a fancy restaurant to celebrate a promotion.  Their waitress is overwhelmingly under-dressed.  When one man realizes the waitress's nudity seems to be conditional, he quickly executes a plan to get her to himself - at least for a little while.

id: 146
Title: Everything in Between
Author: Shannon Murdoch
ISBN: 9781575256917
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Two lovers constantly separated by time zones, transport delays and different needs try to communicate through any means possible to find common ground. 

id: 147
Title: Fallout
Author: Sheldon Senek
ISBN: 9781575255897
Translator:
Editor:
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: A year before the Cuban missile crisis (1961), Howard and Janet build a fallout shelter—for fear that the Russians might attack. However, in his attempt to do continuous bomb drills, his fear drives him and Janet over the edge.

id: 148
Title: Farewell and Adieu
Author: Jack Neary
ISBN: 9781575256825
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 2
Synopsis: FAREWELL AND ADIEU reunites "seasoned" actresses Bethel and Clarice, characters introduced in SHE'S FABULOUS, also published by Smith and Kraus. This time, the ladies meet at the wake of another actress--a rival who invariably won roles both Bethel and Clarice thought belonged to them. Now that she's gone, they discover they must vie against each other for the few "seasoned" roles available in town. When Clarice shows Bethel an audition notice calling for actresses to read for Fraulein Schneider in CABARET, friendship takes a back seat.

id: 149
Title: Feeding Time at the Human House
Author: Dave Wiener
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: Things are usually pretty routine for Bernie and Fran, a pair of baboons living quietly at the local zoo. But a milestone birthday hits Fran hard, and both of them end up doing some serious thinking about life, mating, humankind - and those disturbing rumors about what’s really going on in the dolphin pen.

id: 150
Title: First Time for Everything
Author: John Shanahan
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 3
Synopsis: Last night Ben and Dori had sex for the first time. This morning, their waitress knows it.

id: 151
Title: Floored
Author: Gregg Kreutz
ISBN: 9781575257037
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Suspense/Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men:2, Women: 0
Synopsis: Floored is a two character suspense/comedy ten minute play. Two men, Phillip and Mitch, have been hired to sand and varnish a floor. While they are varnishing, one of them becomes curious about why they in particular were hired. They've never worked together and neither of them has any experience with this kind of job. Why did they get picked? After personal secrets are revealed and after they've varnished themselves up to a closed door at the back of the room the answer to that question becomes horrifyingly clear.

id: 152
Title: Gloom, Doom and Soul-Brushing Misery
Author: Robin Rice Lichtig
ISBN: 9781575256528
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2
Synopsis: How to get rid of a happy dream and achieve utter misery.

id: 153
Title: Godfrey
Author: Ian August
ISBN: 9781575256672
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Godfrey has just been the victim of a vicious gay bashing in the West Village of Manhattan. When Helen, a good Samaritan, arrives to help, Godfrey is skeptical of her words of redemption, especially when she reveals to him that she is, in fact, the Tooth Fairy. Funny, poignant and uplifting, Godfrey shows how a bit of good will and an optimistic spirit can shine a ray of hope through the darkest of times.

id: 154
Title: Grave
Author: Sarah Gavitt
ISBN: 9781575256306
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2
Synopsis:

id: 155
Title: Gunning for Life
Author: William Borden
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: An old man's lust for life confronts his terminal cancer in an unusual comedy with a poignant ending.

id: 156
Title: Guys, Only Guys!
Author: Jerome Parisse
ISBN: 978157525795
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 1
Synopsis: Some where between life and death, David is about to be reincarnated as a gay man…and he is ecstatic! But should he really?

id: 157
Title: Hanging on
Author: Claudia Haas
ISBN: 9781575256900
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 0
Synopsis: Two best friends, Melanie - an optimistic actress and Jennifer - an underemployed playwright - celebrate their 10th anniversary of moving to the Big Apple when Jennifer suddenly announces she's chucking it all to move home and find a normal job with dental insurance.  Melanie tries to persuade her to "hang on."

id: 158
Title: Heartbreaker
Author: Michael Golmaco
ISBN: 9781575256894
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Vuthy (Pronounced “Woo-tee”) is not your average Cambodian American teenager. He’s fuckin’ weird. And now that his mom’s gone, he has to face the deadly possibly of being a fuckin’ weird kid growing up alone in Long Beach, California — unless he can convince his college aged sister Ra to take him with her. But she already has enough on her plate…

id: 159
Title: High Speed Disconnect
Author: Chris Widney
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best 10-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: Two attractive, young singles attempt to connect live and in person in a world of cell phones and hi-tech distractions.

id: 160
Title: His Last Fight
Author: Jacqueline Goldfinger
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Southern Boxing Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 1
Synopsis: A young female boxer befriends a broken-down aging boxer.

id: 161
Title: Horticultural Therapy
Author: George Sauer
ISBN: 9781575257020
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 162
Title: How to Survive in Corporate America
Author: Ian August
ISBN: 9781575256771
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 1
Synopsis: How to Survive in Corporate America is an theatrical instructional manual about getting through a day in the office. Narrated in the second person, the main character, "You" is faced with some serious decisions regarding what projects to address in the course of his work day. So "You" chooses the only viable option: attempting to kill a man with his mind.  Offbeat and often absurd, How to Survive in Corporate America is a hilarious look at the inner workings of the mind of a young professional.

id: 163
Title: I Have It
Author: Bekah Brunstetter
ISBN: 9781575256665
Translator:
Editor: The Best-Ten Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: A first date - with stds

id: 164
Title: If, When and Only
Author: Maryann Lesert
ISBN: 9781575256276
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 2 or Men: 2, Women: 3
Synopsis: Ensconced in a circle of thought, a husband (Henry) watches as his wife (Mary), aided by their Marriage Counselor’s prompts, bags, and lists, comes to the realization that she is no longer in love. As Mary toys with the idea of ending the marriage, Henry’s inner struggle (Should he fight for the marriage or assist his wife in dismantling it?) is mounted with the help of two spirited characters: When, escort to the end of love (“Tell me you didn’t see this coming.”) and If, guardian of the possibility of ongoing love (“You can have something that endures. Reach, Henry, Reach!”). In the end, Henry remains true to Shakespeare’s sense of the moment when he calls a halt to the battle between If and When and steps forward, reminding Mary that we love “If and when and because we want to. That’s all there really is.”

id: 165
Title: In the Trap
Author: Carl L. Williams
ISBN: 9781575256511
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 166
Title: Intervention
Author: Mark Lambeck
ISBN: 9781575256504
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 2
Synopsis: Chuck, an accountant, has resisted embracing a popular technology that everyone else seems to share. In Intervention, Chuck’s wife and friends conspire to stage an intervention to force Chuck to face the reality that to be a part of today’s civilized society, this particular piece of technology is absolutely mandatory for survival.

id: 167
Title: Labor Day Weekend
Author: Jon Spano
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1: Women: 1
Synopsis: Fed up with his infidelity, Andrea ensnares her husband Jason, a transgendered male, in a compromising position. But with Jason's zero-hour at hand, will he deliver the truth Andrea seeks...or simply deliver?

id: 168
Title: Let's Not Talk About Men
Author: Carla Cantrelle
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best 10-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 6
Synopsis: A group of friends meet for brunch and make a very unusual pact.

id: 169
Title: Lucky
Author: Laura Jacqmin
ISBN: 9781575257013
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 170
Title: Meatball Hero
Author: Richard Vetere
ISBN: 978157525723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 1
Synopsis: Holly is an American restaurant critic asked to preside over a French chef-off at a Gala Award dinner and loves everything French but she cannot speak the language and really kills it when she speaks it mispronouncing everything. She has asked Raymond to be her date but their relationship is clearly based on the physical and not what they have in common. She drinks too much wine and falls for the French waiter who flirts with her. She decides to stay with him and Raymond goes off on his own in pursuit of a meatball hero.

id: 171
Title: Mrs. Jansen Isn't Here Now
Author: Steven Korbar
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: Mary Margaret seems completely uninterested when shy, awkward Chris tries to pick her up at a bar - until she hears that he has recently left the priesthood. Suddenly Mary Margaret appears very interested; in living out every Catholic schoolgirls favorite forbidden fantasy. Chris too seems enthusiastic about the evening's prospects, and even more excited to see his phony, ex-priest pickup line working so effectively. Seducer becomes the seduced several times over before Chris and Mary Margaret finally reveal the whole truth about themselves; that they are a long married, suburban couple out on their weekly, fantasy role playing date night.

id: 172
Title: My Boyfriend's Wife
Author: Barbara Lindsay
ISBN: 9781575256344
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 2
Synopsis: A woman goes to a cemetery to confront her boyfriend’s late wife.

id: 173
Title: New Year's Resolution
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256389
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 4
Synopsis: Three young people, home alone on New Year's Eve, believe that what they wished for, may have possibly come true.

id: 174
Title: No Entry
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 4
Synopsis: Issues of prejudice are dealt with in a college dormitory.

id: 175
Title: Novices
Author: Monica Raymond
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: In a contemporary riff on Taming of the Shrew, Kate and Pete meet in Au Bon Pain for a date they've arranged on the Internet.

id: 176
Title: October People
Author: Mark Lambeck
ISBN: 9781575256474
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 1
Synopsis: In this quirky comedy, Holly and Sam are at a crossroads in their platonic friendship but continue the tradition of celebrating their October birthdays together with dinner at a restaurant. As they struggle to reignite their friendship, Guy, an inebriated stranger, sits down and inserts himself into their dinner as well as their conversation. Initially put off by the presumptuous table guest, Holly and Sam soon discover they have more in common with Guy than they could have imagined

id: 177
Title: Odysseus Swims for It
Author: Joshua Cohen
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 2
Synopsis: Young John wakes up waterlogged on the sirens' island, vaguely remembering the sound of beautiful voices. Aggie immediately falls in love with him, but Thel wants to throw him back into the water. Can a wandering sailor find happiness on barren rock? Or will the sharks get a good meal? And what are two demigoddesses doing giving vocal recitals in the middle of the ocean, anyway?

id: 178
Title: Open House
Author: Michael Grady
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 4; Women: 0; Monster
Synopsis: Jayk Lesser is a real estate agent working on commission. All he has to do to collect his money is sell a dream house (with a large, flesh-eating monster in the living room.) When Woody, a potential buyer, arrives Jayk musters all his positivity, sales skills and misdirection to conceal the monster and make his sale. Blot, an agent-in-training, arrives to help, and Mr. Rankle, the owner of the realty company, comes to observe. When the monster eats Woody, Blot complains about the monster while Rankle argues that this is no excuse for losing a sale. At the close, Blot quits, Rankle admonishes Lesser to see the positive and Lesser stands alone with the monster in the living room.

id: 179
Title: Our Mothers & Fathers
Author: Crystal Skillman
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 2
Synopsis: Three teenage girls at an all girl rock camp struggle to write a new song in the middle of the woods until they discover the key to creating a great song might be their shared frustrations.

id: 180
Title: Parental Consent
Author: Sheri Graubert
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Dark Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0; Women: 2
Synopsis: Edna is proud of her country, her government and her plans for her daughter's career. As Edna rails against the politics of a patient, her daughter surprises her with a choice which shake her beliefs to the core.

id: 181
Title: Paris' Snatch
Author: Brian Dykstra
ISBN: 9781575256658
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis:  A couple of disaffected kids who have totally bought into modern pop culture debate the merits of a photograph snapped when two famous celebrities (sans underwear) scoot out of the back seat of their limo. The photos are clear. But, there is a problem.

id: 182
Title: Parkersburg
Author: Laura Jacqmin
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 3
Synopsis: Three women dig for coal on the day when they must find a vein or lose their jobs.

id: 183
Title: Parking Lot Hero
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256389
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 1
Synopsis: Two grocery store employees mistake a homeless girl for a shoplifter.

id: 184
Title: Pie and the Sky
Author: Vanessa David
ISBN: 9781575256887
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: A young husband kidnaps his wife and takes her to the middle of nowhere. Once there he shares his dreams of a self sufficient homestead, and his pie, of course.

id: 185
Title: Poor Shem
Author: Gregory Hischak
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 1
Synopsis: A grim discovery in the copyroom of an office. Finding Shem entwined in the machinations of the copier (they recognize his tie) three co-workers come to terms with life, death, productivity and the bypass tray.

id: 186
Title: Post Wave Spectacular
Author: Diana Grisanti
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 3
Synopsis: Three plucky women, united by one man's addictive charms, invite his latest conquest Jessica to tea. When the party becomes an intervention, this sudden sisterhood takes a turn.

id: 187
Title: Preconception
Author: Larry Hamm
ISBN: 9781575256405
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Sperm meets Egg, and so it begins. He has one clear goal in mind, but she has doubts. Does an understanding of our gender differences lead to a more perfect union?

id: 188
Title: Prize Inside
Author: Peter Hanrahan
ISBN: 9781575256351
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 189
Title: Prized Begonias
Author: Bara Swain
ISBN: 9781575256863
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Dramatic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 2
Synopsis: Two strangers discover friendship in an unusual setting: a cemetery.  Swain's 10-minute dramedy features a quirky southern woman and a young widow.

id: 190
Title: Public Relations
Author: Andrew Biss
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best 10-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: Tim and Sarah bump into each other on the street one ordinary afternoon. Tim is excited, not having seen Sarah in some time. Sarah is embarrassed since, try as she might, she cannot recall Tim's name let alone where she knows him from, but struggles to maintain a facade of familiarity. As their conversation continues, Tim clearly conveying a very thorough knowledge of her and her family, Sarah decides to come clean and confess the truth of what she can and cannot recollect. Unfortunately for her, so does Tim.

id: 191
Title: Quarks
Author: William Borden
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 1
Synopsis: A man and a woman meet at a singles bar. His "Take off your panties," gets unexpected results.

id: 192
Title: Reverse Evolution
Author: Brian James Polak
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men:2; Women: 1
Synopsis: Male roommates are caught in what they think is a nuclear apocalypse.  One panics about his girlfriend who may have been killed while the other convinces him two dudes can repopulate the earth if they really have to

id: 193
Title: Rightsized
Author: Kate McCamy
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Recently downsized Lex gets rightsized by the queen of office cleaners.

id: 194
Title: Road Kill
Author: Edward Crosby Wells
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: We meet Mary and Joey, a young homeless couple waiting by the side of the road for Joey's ride to his first day on his new job. In the shopping cart along with all their belongings, is their infant son. Optimism abounds next to the road kill they find along the side of the road. This sweet and tender love story is both poignant and relevant.

id: 195
Title: Saguaro
Author: Philip Dawkins
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0; Women: 2, Off-stage voices: 3
Synopsis: All of Wren's friends are getting married, and she can't seem to get a date. Enter the cactus, a well-groomed, healthy, desert house plant. While drunk at a wedding reception, Wren finds the potted plant refreshingly easy to talk to, and decides to start dating the cactus. Will Wren be able to make it work? Will the stress of their "abnormal" relationship only add to the pressure of being the only one of her friends not in a healthy relationship? Wren must decide how badly she wants to be partnered, even if it means settling for someone who doesn't even belong to her scientific Kingdom. Um, it's comedy.

id: 196
Title: Second Kiss
Author: Andrea Lepcio
ISBN: 9781575256313
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays, 2006 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 3
Synopsis: Second kiss, cause the first one didn't do it. A teenage girl figures out why she isn't boy crazy.

id: 197
Title: Self Phone
Author: Brendon L. Etter
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best 10-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre:
Character Breakdown:
Synopsis:

id: 198
Title: Seven/Elevens
Author: Robert Brustein
ISBN: 9781575257679
Translator:
Editor:
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1 (The Comfort Station), Men: 2, Women: 0 (Poker Face), Men: 1, Women: 1 (Beacham's Last Poetry Reading), Men: 2, Women: 0 (Terrorist Skit), Men: 2, Women: 0 (Airport Hell), Men: 2, Women: 0 (Dated Rape), Men:1, Women: 1 (Sex for a Change)
Synopsis: Seven/Elevens is a series of seven short plays on a variety of subjects, including 9/11, the dreadfulness of airlines, the quality of poetry, sex change operations, the hiring of Buster Keaton to be in a Samuel Beckett's Film and so forth.

id: 199
Title: Sexual Perversity in Connecticut
Author: Mike Folie
ISBN: 9781575256450
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2
Synopsis: A short comic tale in the style of David Mamet about two scheming Connecticut housewives and a high-class hooker."

id: 200
Title: Sister Snell
Author: Mark Troy
ISBN: 9781575256443
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 3
Synopsis: When a young architect shows up for a job interview with a world renowned architect, she is stunned to find that not only is the woman a flat out pig and disgusting human being, and sex-aholic, but for some reason, she is dressed like a nun.

id: 201
Title: Smile
Author: Nina Mansfield
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: A man and a women are discovered in separate interrogation rooms of the same police station. A dispute has occurred. The man thinks the woman is completely insane. The women feels she has been wronged. As each tells their tale to an unseen police woman, it is revealed that the woman has punched the man because he asked her to smile.

id: 202
Title: Sometimes Romeo is Sad
Author: Suzanne Bradbeer
ISBN: 9781575256856
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men:1, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 203
Title: Stick and Move
Author: Greg Lam
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 2
Synopsis: A couple on their first date receive instruction from their respective trainers in a battle of the sexes.

id: 204
Title: Stuffed Grape Leaves
Author: Damon Chua
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 2
Synopsis: A Hispanic cook, an Asian server and a bored housewife meet in a Los Angeles restaurant and quickly realize that they have more in common than they initially thought.

id: 205
Title: T.I.P.S.
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 1575254069
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 2
Synopsis: A group of friends "hanging out" in a diner, discuss the appropriate tip to leave the waiter.

id: 206
Title: Table for Four
Author: Steven Korbar
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best 10-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 2
Synopsis: Moments after a school shooting; four college students cower together underneath a library table. Terrified and desperate, they try to find some consensus on what to do next, why someone would commit such an unthinkable act and if, perhaps, the shooter might still be in the building with them.

id: 207
Title: Table for Three
Author: Carl L. Williams
ISBN: 9781575255903
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 3 or More Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 1
Synopsis: A solitary diner is suddenly joined by a beautiful woman who wants him to protect her from her jealous husband, who accuses him of being her lover and wants revenge.  But what they really want is his table.

id: 208
Title: Tech Support
Author: Henry Meyerson
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Existential Comedy
Character Breakdown: 2 characters, any gender and age
Synopsis: Tech Support depicts the frustrating horror of seeking tech help for a malfunctioning phone from those in control: the sadistic alleged tech support staff.

id: 209
Title: That Thing
Author: John Shanahan
ISBN: 9781575256641
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men:1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Carl remembers that thing they used to do. Linda does, too. Problem is, only one of them actually enjoyed it. "Age and sex, lovingly and wittily discussed!"--

id: 210
Title: The Adventures of…
Author: Kathleen Warnock
ISBN: 9781575256603
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 1
Synopsis: Join Maggie Day, as she follows the adventures of Commander Zoron and Prince Kal in in their search for truth, justice, and homoerotic subtext in "Atlantis: One Million Years B.C." and the early days of television.

id: 211
Title: The Answer
Author: Vanessa David
ISBN: 9781575256597
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2
Synopsis: A young receptionist drives her co-workers crazy with her obsession with the new hit Broadway Musical The Answer. Inspired by our obsession with The Secret and Broadway with original music by playwright Vanessa David

id: 212
Title: The Arrangement
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256389
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2
Synopsis: A young Chinese-American woman confides in her friends about the arranged marriage her strict parents have planned for her.

id: 213
Title: The Attractive Women on the Train
Author: Marta Praeger
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best 10-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre:
Character Breakdown:
Synopsis:

id: 214
Title: The Baby War
Author: Laura Cotton
ISBN: 9781575256573
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0. Women: 3
Synopsis: Should she have it? But who would raise it? When a teenage girl gets pregnant, the answers are never easy. The Baby War presents the surprisingly humorous battle between three women who each have their own unique perspective about what should be done about the baby.

id: 215
Title: The Birthday Knife
Author: Jerome Parisse
ISBN: 9781575256740
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Thriller/Black Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 3
Synopsis: Never give someone a knife for their birthday... you may end up regretting it!

id: 216
Title: The Blues Street Jazz Club Rehearses
Author: William Borden
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 3
Synopsis: Five would-be musicians meet to "play" to recorded music. Their various loves intertwine like strands of music, improvised and unpredictable.

id: 217
Title: The Dating Go-Round
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256382
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 2
Synopsis: Miscommunication occurs when two boys want to ask twin sisters to the homecoming dance.

id: 218
Title: The Dress Rehearsal
Author: Marisa Smith
ISBN: 9781575256238
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 2
Synopsis: Marti’s mother invites her to lunch and serves up a very bizarre request testing Marti’s bonds of loyalty, love, and sense of humor.

id: 219
Title: The Giftbox
Author: Francine Volpe
ISBN: 9781575256689
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 2
Synopsis:

id: 220
Title: The Godot Variations
Author: Meron Langsner
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy/Parody
Character Breakdown: Cast of 2-4, gender non-specific
Synopsis: Waiters for Godot: Two waiters prepare Mr. Godot's reserved table in anticipation of his arrival. Call Waiting for Godot: Trying to place an important call to The Godot Corporation. Whining for Godot: A retelling of Samuel Beckett's classic. A retelling of Samuel Beckett's classic. Minus the subtext, plus vocal stylings.

id: 221
Title: The Long Arm
Author: Estep Nagy
ISBN: 9781575255903
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy/Farce
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 1
Synopsis: A high-energy farce about two LAPD cops who bring their method-acting classes onto the job, with hilarious results. When an actress and her boyfriend get pulled over in Hollywood, they get a lot more than just a ticket.

id: 222
Title: The New World Order
Author: Anne Phelan
ISBN: 9781575256221
Translator:
Editor: The Best-Ten Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 2
Synopsis: A ten-minute play about the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall

id: 223
Title: The Non-Losers Club
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256389
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 5
Synopsis: A group of high school social outcasts start their own club in an attempt to find a place where they fit in.

id: 224
Title: The Perfect Red
Author: Paola Soto Hornbuckle
ISBN: 9781575256467
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 1
Synopsis: A young artist, Jessica, and her boyfriend/benefactor, Dan, argue due to her hopelessness about ever painting anything beautiful or meaningful. He believes in her work and owns an art gallery that is displaying it, but she doubts her talent. Suddenly, Adam, Dan's old protégé comes into their lives after an absence of ten years. He is a painter, a strange genius filled with obsessions and visions. Dan worries about Adam, wonders about the dangerous nature of his disappearance and the meaning of his return. But Jessica is enthralled, inspired, and enchanted. Adam's strange and compelling magic works a spell on them both, even though there is a darker aspect to his personality. Will they choose to let him stay?

id: 225
Title: The Plot
Author: Mark Troy
ISBN: 9781575256870
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 2
Synopsis: An overbearing mother visits her down-on-her luck 30ish daughter only to screw her life up more by telling that she has purchased for her two cemetery plots even though the girl is not dating. 

id: 226
Title: The Pre-Nup
Author: Marisa Smith
ISBN: 9781575256412
Translator:
Editor:
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2
Synopsis: Delphina, a film star, is brought to a Beverly Hills funeral parlor to say farewell to her husband, Lincoln (also a film star) by Heather, Lincoln’s personal assistant. The goodbye scene doesn’t go as any of them planned

id: 227
Title: The Rumor Mill
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256389
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 2
Synopsis: A modern translation of the "telephone game" where gossip is spread and the truth is distorted.

id: 228
Title: The Sarahs Three
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256389
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 4
Synopsis: Three best friends with the same name, show their distinctly different personalities.

id: 229
Title: The Streak
Author: Gary Richards
ISBN: 9781575256849
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men:2, Women: 0
Synopsis: Based on a true story, THE STREAK is a fictitious account of the afternoon meeting between the Yankee’s “Iron Horse,” Lou Gehrig, telling his manager, Joe McCarthy, that he is taking himself out of the line-up resulting in his consecutive games played streak coming to an end

id: 230
Title: The Title Fight
Author: Ian August
ISBN: 9781575256436
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 0
Synopsis: Teddy and Milo are two brothers, preparing to engage in a fist fight in the back yard of their childhood home. But both are haunted by the voice of their dead father, egging them on, reminding them of the past, and raising questions that had long since been buried. An engaging drama, The Title Fight is an exploration of tragedy, obligation, and hope through the lens of a decimated family.

id: 231
Title: The Train Ride
Author: Daniel Talbott
ISBN: 9781575256627
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Boy: 1
Synopsis: Two brothers travel on a train late at night in the dead of winter, moving towards some inexplicable tragedy concerning their father.

id: 232
Title: The Transfiguration of Linda
Author: Sheldon Senek
ISBN:
Translator:
Editor:
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Randy wakes up Linda beside him. The only problem is he broke up with her…in fifth grade.

id: 233
Title: The Visitor
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256389
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 4
Synopsis:

id: 234
Title: Theft
Author: Jerrod Bogard
ISBN: 9781575257594
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2; Women: 2
Synopsis: When psychiatrist Dr. Featherstone reports a mugging to the police he’s ushered into a room wherein lays everything that was ever stolen from him.

id: 235
Title: Tongue, Tied
Author: M. Thomas Cooper
ISBN: 9781575257099
Translator:
Editor: The Best-Ten Minute Plays 2008, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre:
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 236
Title: Top Floor
Author: David Epstein
ISBN: 9781575256269
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Top Floor follows the lives of two couples. Susan and Gary are well-off and, after experiencing the trauma of a stillborn pregnancy, decide to invest a great deal of money by adding a level to the top floor of their East Village apartment. The place is beautiful, but the renovation now casts a shadow upon the tenement building across the way, where Tony and Lauretta have lived since they were young. Soon, these two couples from opposite ends of the social strata will face off, both claiming the grass to be greener on the other side of the urban street. Before long, we find that these people have crossed paths before and that there is more to these four people than meets the eye.

id: 237
Title: Triage
Author: Sharyn Rothstein
ISBN: 9781575256320
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy/Farce
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 2
Synopsis: A man watches his wife choke to death in a hospital lobby while the American health insurance system points and laughs.

id: 238
Title: Use Unknown
Author: Ali Walton
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best 10-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy/Science Fiction/Environmental
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: Use Unknown is a journey to the future, where Guy, a working class programmer, meets Girl, an employee of a museum whose subject is - us. The pair explore their feelings about twenty-first century homo sapiens while also exploring their feelings about each other. The verdict on us: we were self-destructive chumps who almost destroyed the planet, but at least we had passion. Guy and Girl discover they may have a thing or two to learn from us about love and connection.

id: 239
Title: Whack-a-Mole
Author: Beth Lein
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best 10-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men:1, Women: 1, Mole Chorus: 5
Synopsis: We all have our emotional hurdles to jump, but Charlotte has hit a seemingly insurmountable stumbling block. That is until she meets Brian, who by her calculations, is the perfect candidate to help her move to the "next level". So what if her emotional baggage is represented by a chorus of maddening moles? Surely the physical manifestation of one's historical trauma is easier to overcome than the subtleties of one's unconscious--or is it? Sock puppets and physical comedy. What more could you want?

id: 240
Title: What I Learned From Grizzly Bears
Author: Jessica Lind
ISBN: 9781575256693
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2006, 2 Actors
Type: 10
Genre: Dark Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Bernadette wants nothing more than to live among the grizzly bears of Alaska.  But when her husband appears out of nowhere to tell her she’s the mother of twins, her world is turned upside down.

id: 241
Title: What Really Happened Was…
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575256389
Translator:
Editor: Twenty Ten-Minute Plays, Volume II for Teens
Type: 10
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 3
Synopsis: The truth is revealed about a couple's abusive relationship.

id: 242
Title: Whatever Happened to Finger-Painting, Animal Crackers and Afternoon Naps?
Author: Nora Chau
ISBN: 9781575256429
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2008, 3 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Woman: 1
Synopsis:

id: 243
Title: What's the Meta?
Author: Andrew Biss
ISBN: 9781575256252
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, 2 Actors or More
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1 or 2 Men and 2 Women
Synopsis: Two written parts await to be brought to life on a stage. One of them, however, is found to be mired in a crisis of self-worth due to the size and quality of their role. The larger, more developed part must then attempt to convince its smaller counterpart of just how necessary they are to the production that is soon to begin, and of the true and indisputable collaborative nature of theatre.

id: 244
Title: Wish You Were Here
Author: Claudia Haas
ISBN:
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 1; Women: 1
Synopsis: A possible pick-up in a Paris park leads to a lifetime of wishes and a bittersweet parting.

id: 245
Title: Worse Things
Author: Mona Mansour
ISBN: 9781575257723
Translator:
Editor: The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2010
Type: 10
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0; women: 2
Synopsis: Liz peaks to her girlfriend/partner Maeve. They've been together for a few years, and while Maeve loves to "process" endlessly about the relationship, analyzing each and every minutia of feeling, Liz quite frankly finds this a buzzkill. This piece comes right after they've started to fool around gotten halted by some tidbit Maeve wants to analyze, and Liz tells Maeve she'd rather talk about anything - ethnic cleansing, even - than their relationship.

id: 246
Title: Mortal Terror
Author: Robert Brustein
ISBN: 97815752557686
Translator:
Editor:
Type: Full
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 1
Synopsis: MORTAL TERROR is a sequel to a Brustein play about the young Shakespeare, THE ENGLISH CHANNEL, in which Will, now 41 is commissioned by the King to write a play about his ancestral line and the existence of witches. Meanwhile, the Gunpowder Plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament is being hatched and Shakespeare is implicated. If THE ENGLISH CHANNEL was about the process of playwriting, MORTAL TERROR is about the process of playwriting, and what are the political and social obligations of the artist under an illiberal reign.

id: 247
Title: Nobody Dies on Friday
Author: Robert Brustein
ISBN: 9781575257648
Translator:
Editor: New Playwrights: The Best Plays 1998
Type: Full
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 1
Synopsis: Nobody Dies on Friday is about a weekend in the life of the Lee Strasberg family, at the time when Marilyn was living in their house, and how Lee's feelings for Marilyn impinged upon the entire family.

id: 248
Title: Phat Girls
Author: Debbie Lamedman
ISBN: 9781575254258
Translator:
Editor: New Playwrights: The Best Plays 2003
Type: Full
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 0, Women: 12
Synopsis: phat girls is a fast-paced account of the struggle many women experience dealing with weight and body image. The audience is transported from childhood to adulthood, witnessing the development and many facets of an eating disorder, in addition to how these women learn to survive in a body-conscious society. We see inner demons personified as we follow each woman on her journey to self-acceptance. phat girls relates to these issues with humor, poignancy, and an honesty that everyone will be able to relate to.

id: 249
Title: Spring Forward/Fall Back
Author: Robert Brustein
ISBN: 9781575257655
Translator:
Editor:
Type: Full
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 8, Women: 3
Synopsis: A story of three Jewish fathers and children over a period that covers the depression to 9/11, and the impact on them of politics and music.

id: 250
Title: Three Farces and a Funeral (No Smoking Please, The Proposal, The Wedding, Chekhov on Ice)
Author: Robert Brustein
ISBN: 9781575257662
Translator:
Editor:
Type: Full
Genre: Farce
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 3, Master of Ceremonies, Extra Characters
Synopsis: Three Farces and a Funeral proceeds, by means of Chekhov's own farces and a play of my own about his death in Germany, to use his work as a way of showing the developing relationship[ with Olga Knipper, who later became his wife, and who was at his bedside in Germany when he died. It also chronicles the continuing argument between Chekhov and Stanislavsky over whether his plays were tragedies or farces.

id: 251
Title: Book Group
Author: Marisa Smith
ISBN: 9781575254265
Translator:
Editor: New Playwrights the Best Plays 2004
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 5
Synopsis: Set in a small New England college town, Book Group is a delightful character comedy about four women in a book group, Mags, Ellie, Alison, and Fiona, who spend their monthly meetings intruding in each others lives. They save their youngest member, Fiona-the wife of Stuart, a physics professor-from a ruinous affair with her hunky contractor, Nick. The play, narrated by the as-yet-unborn daughter of one of the book group members, dramatizes the redemptive power of literature, love, laughter, and the enduring bond of friendship between women.

id: 252
Title: Clown, A Love Story
Author: Kristen Dabrowski
ISBN: 9781575255569
Translator:
Editor: Acting Edition
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 2
Synopsis: Love. It's a beautiful, magical thing. Unless you're a clown. Pippa is a big shoe-wearing, polka-dot loving clown looking for love. But how can you be sexy wearing a red nose?

id: 253
Title: Dancing by Myself
Author: Brad Slaight
ISBN: 9781575257082
Translator:
Editor:
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Flexible cast.
Synopsis: Dancing by Myself consists of six mini-plays that all feature young adults from high school to college age. Larry's Inferno (1 male/3 female) Dreams and visitations. A successful playwrights struggles with the conscience and with the characters in a new play he is writing. Two by Two (1 male/3 female) In this funny and touching story, an 18-year old girl discovers that she is not alone when she goes to the hospital to give birth to her twin baby girls. Day 35 (1 male/2 female) Three teenagers have been living in a brand new car for the past 35 days as part of a car dealership contest. The one who lasts the longest will win the car. G Girlz (1 male/1 female) A one time popular fan club for a boy band called "G Boyz" is now down to just 3 members. A decision has to be made about finally disbanding the club. Coffee Chat (1 male/1 female) A chance meeting at a local trendy coffee shop is the spark that ignites a heated conversation as two former lovers reunite. Dancing with Myself (2 male/2 female) A high school dance is the setting for this short play where a boy's fantasy has a real chance of becoming a reality. Dancing by Myself can be done as a full-length evening; as a shorter version featuring several of the plays; or each mini-play can be presented as a solo piece.

id: 254
Title: Deux Mariages: Romola and Nijinsky
Author: Lynne Alvarez
ISBN:
Translator:
Editor: Woman Playwrights, The Best Plays of 2001
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 3, Extras+J5: Dancers: 1 man, 3 women
Synopsis:

id: 255
Title: Hunger
Author: Sheri Wilner
ISBN: 1575252252
Translator:
Editor: New Playwrights: The Best Plays 1999
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 1
Synopsis: A ravenous, inexplicable hunger wakens Diana in the middle of the night, hours after accepting Adam's marriage proposal. She eats all the food in his Nantucket cabin, but her hunger is not abated and she is compelled to venture out to the beach alone. A mysterious stranger named Seymour emerges from the depths of the ocean, and presents her not only with oysters, but the opportunity to accompany him back into the sea.

id: 256
Title: I Take Your Hand in Mine
Author: Carol Rocamora
ISBN: 9781575252445
Translator:
Editor: "I Take Your Hand in Mine…"
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 1
Synopsis: Everybody loves a love story. But this one is special. Special, because it's one about two extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. He, a great playwright and humanitarian, who knew his life would be brief. She, a great actress and founding  leading lady of one of the world's most famous theater companies, who was full of vitality and passion. When they met, he was 38; she was 29. They knew each other only six years; they were married for three of them, until his death in July, 1904. During those six short years, circumstances - his health, her work - kept them apart almost all that time. He was banished to Yalta for medical reasons; she, committed to Moscow for the theater season. And though they were together during the summer, his ever-declining health marred the quality of that precious time. And yet it is through these circumstances that their moving love story is told. Roughly, 400 letters written by each  of them.

id: 257
Title: Kong's Reunion
Author: Marisa Smith
ISBN: 9781575256337
Translator:
Editor:
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Farce
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 6
Synopsis: Webster College is celebrating it’s 99th Reunion and the sorority girls of Alpha Fi have arranged for the college’s only Oscar winning actor, Gregory Sail, to make a personal appearance.  As the reunion attendees wait for Greg’s arrival, old friends reunite, old lovers reignite and a man of the cloth experiences….a miracle. Into the fray, enter a poetess trying to channel Emily Dickinson, Biker Bob and a decidedly strange waiter with a big secret.  KONG’S REUNION is a zany comedy, features kooky sorority tunes and a high octane cast of ten.  KONG’S REUNION runs just over an hour.

id: 258
Title: The Face Lift
Author: Robert Brustein
ISBN: 9781575254646
Translator:
Editor: Acting Edition
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 3
Synopsis:

id: 259
Title: Up From the Ashes
Author: Joanne Gilbert
ISBN: 9781575255859
Translator:
Editor:
Type: Full/One Act
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 3 Chorus
Synopsis: Details the lives of six Holocaust survivors before, during, and after the Holocaust, weaving their stories of despair, hope, and survival together in a new and powerful way.

id: 260
Title: Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257099
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Girls: 3, 6 Dancers, a philosopher, a composer
Synopsis:

id: 261
Title: Diamonds in the Snow
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257105
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 2, Boys: 2, Girls: 2
Synopsis:

id: 262
Title: Go Tell It on the Mountain
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257112
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 1, Boys, 4: Girls: 4, A Stranger
Synopsis:

id: 263
Title: Good King Wenceslas
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257129
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 2, 2 Serf Children, Angel, 4 Castle Revelers
Synopsis:

id: 264
Title: Here We Come A-Wassailing
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257136
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 10, Women: 3, Girl, Boy
Synopsis: An original dramatizations of one of the world's most loved songs. A celebration of legend and lore that make Christmas one of the most festive days on Earth. The plays introduce information about history and customs related to each song.

id: 265
Title: Jingle Bells
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257143
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 3, Girl, Boy, Horse
Synopsis:

id: 266
Title: Let Us Go, O Shepherds
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257150
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Young Man: 1, Women: 2, Shepherds: 3, Young Women: 1
Synopsis:

id: 267
Title: O Thou Joyful Day
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257167
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 3, 2 clothsellers, slave buyer, tax collector
Synopsis:

id: 268
Title: O, Christmas Tree
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257174
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, 6 Teuton Warriors
Synopsis:

id: 269
Title: Queenie's Christmas
Author: Marisa Smith
ISBN: 9781575256498
Translator:
Editor:
Type: Holiday
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown:
Synopsis: Queenie Whitestone is fourteen and not looking forward to Christmas this year, in fact she wishes it wouldn’t come at all. Recently her family has gone crazy; her mother won't stop kick boxing and working on her pecs and abs, her father is obsessed with making money and her Grandpa, former Professor of Romantic Poetry, has retreated into a world of hip hop music and reality TV. The only person in the whole world that Queenie likes is her tap dance teacher, Mr. Mendoza. When he appears at her door a few days before Christmas with an incredible story, Queenie thinks he has lost his marbles, but Mr. Mendoza insists that unless Queenie helps him, Christmas will never be the same again!

id: 270
Title: Silent Night
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257181
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 1, Sexton, Choir Members, Altar Boy, Guitar Student, 4 Congregation Members
Synopsis:

id: 271
Title: The Lumpkin Sister's Christmas Caper
Author: Marisa Smith
ISBN: 9781575256481
Translator:
Editor:
Type: Holiday
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 6, Women: 5
Synopsis: The Christmas Eve wedding of Begonia Lumpkin goes terribly awry when her finance, Benjamin, contracts a severe case of cold feet and flees to the bar, the entire Lumpkin clan in hot pursuit. It turns out that Begonia and Benjamin aren’t the only mis-matched pair in the family and with the help of some serious shiatsu, a Bianni Bini and a speeding asteroid, the knotted web of couples is unraveled and true love prevails.

id: 272
Title: The Twelve Days of Christmas
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257198
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 2, Narrator, Royal Trumpeter, 12 drummers, 11 pipers, 10 lords, 9 ladies, 8 maids
Synopsis:

id: 273
Title: We Three Kings of Orient Are
Author: L.E. McCullough
ISBN: 9781575257204
Translator:
Editor: Plays of the Songs of Christmas
Type: Holiday
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 2, Beggar, Roman Centurion, Shepherd, 2 Angels
Synopsis:

id: 274
Title: 90 Minute Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream
Author: William Shakespeare
ISBN: 1575252902
Translator: Diane Timmerman
Editor: 90-Minute Shakespeare A Mid-Summer Night's Dream
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 12, Women: 7
Synopsis:

id: 275
Title: 90 Minute Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet
Author: William Shakespeare
ISBN: 1575252384
Translator: Diane Timmerman
Editor: 90-Minute Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 9, Women: 7, Extras: Dancers and Fighters
Synopsis:

id: 276
Title: A Doll House
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254791
Translator: Rick Davis and Brian Johnston
Editor: Ibsen, Volume I: Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 5
Synopsis: The action of A Doll House takes place at Christmas, the time of the death of the old year and the birth of the new. Two couples in this play will experience this 'turning point' of the year in radically different ways. Christine Linde and Nils Krogstad will see their lives of sorrow, forgiveness, reconciliation, (embodying the Christian aspect of the season) move from devastation to happiness. Torvald and Nora Helmer, living in 'doll house' will be expelled from their illusory Eden. They perform the season’s pagan celebration: the Yule tree, the gifts, the tarantella dance, the feasting...If it is Nora who awakens first, it is because she, not Torvald, has been put through the violent shocks of three days drastic and examination of herself and her world. But the play ends with Torvald, and the possibility of his awakening too. The themes of the play, therefore, explore beyond the dimensions of particular social issues with which the play long has been associated. These issues are only one component of the rich human drama opened up by the dialectical action.

id: 277
Title: A Dream Play
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255118
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 25, Women: 15, Extras: Many of both sexes
Synopsis: A Dream Play is one of the most significant as well as the most influential play of the modern theater. It is, in fact, the beginning of the modern theater inasmuch as it freed the stage of the time-bound, space-bound demands of naturalism, allowing for expressionism, symbolism, surrealism, and even the so-called theater of the absurd to develop. This full-length one-act play is comprised of eleven highly fluid scenes that take place in undefined European locations, scenes that melt into and out of one another as in a dream. “Characters,” as Strindberg says, “split, double, and multiply; they evaporate, crystallize, dissolve, and assemble. But one single consciousness rules them all, that of the dreamer.” The thrust of the play is to discover the reason for humankind’s misery, the universal question of earth’s inhabitants. The Indian god Indra sends his Daughter to earth to discover the answer to that conundrum, and in her wanderings she takes on many roles in order to experience human misery firsthand, the lowest and most devastating of which is the infernal agony of the state of marriage (a reflection of Strindberg’s tormented marriage to his third wife.) The play is filled with esoteric symbolic elements, such as the Growing Castle which at the end burns as though in a purging fire. The Daughter enters the burning Castle and finally we see “a wall of questioning, mourning, grieving faces. While the Castle burns, the bud on the roof bursts open and becomes a gigantic chrysanthemum.” On her arrival back to her father the Daughter will deliver what she has so painfully learned.

id: 278
Title: Agamemnon
Author: Aeschylus
ISBN: 9781575254654
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Aeschylus, Complete Plays, Volume I
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 2, Extras: Attendants, handmaids, soldiers, guards, slaves, male chorus
Synopsis: Agamemnon is the first part of the Oresteia trilogy. After ten years, the war at Troy is finally over with the Greeks as victors. Agamemnon’s wife Klytaimnêstra readies the palace in Argos to greet its triumphant general. Since his departure ten years ago, however, she has entered into an adulterous relationship with Aigisthos, and she has great bitterness toward Agamemnon for having sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia at the start of the war so that the fleet could sail. Consequently she and Aigisthos plot to kill him. At his triumphant arrival, with the prophetic Kassandra in tow as his new mistress, Klytaimnêstra pretends to rejoice and openly welcome her lord. She invites him into the palace. Upon his departure Kassandra foretells his and her own murder at the hands of Klytaimnêstra. Shortly after entering the palace screams are heard and Klytaimnêstra emerges with the two corpses to rejoice at her action. When the chorus protests, Aigisthos enters with a guard of armed men and he and Klytaimnêstra declare themselves the new rulers.

id: 279
Title: Aias
Author: Sophokles
ISBN: 9781575255019
Translator: Carl R. Mueller Anna Krajewska-Wieczorek
Editor: Sophokles, The Complete Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 6, Women: 2, Boy: 1, Extras: Soldiers, attendants, servants, chorus
Synopsis: When Achilles is killed in the Trojan War, his splendid armor is awarded to the devious and crafty Odysseus. Aias takes this as an affront to his heroic reputation and determines to avenge himself on his Greek comrades, in particular on Odysseus and Menelaos. Athêna intervenes, crazes Aias’s mind thereby causing him to slaughter in a night raid the army’s herds of sheep and cattle. So great is his humiliation upon returning to sanity, that he goes down to the seashore and there falls on his sword in heroic fashion. Menelaos argues to leave Aias’s body unburied, but Odysseus, despite that his life was at stake in Aias’s rage, convinces Menelaos and Agamemnon to give Aias an honorable burial.

id: 280
Title: Alkestis
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255347
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume I
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 6, Women: 2, Boys: 1, Girls: 1, Extras: Male chorus, attendants, guards, slaves, citizens of Pherai
Synopsis: The young King Admêtos of Phêrai in Thessaly is destined to die, but with the help of his friend the god Apollo they arrange with the Fates to postpone Admêtos’ death if someone can be found to take his place. Admêtos asks all of his relatives, including his old parents, to die for him, but is refused. Only his faithful wife Alkêstis agrees to the proposition. In the prologue to the play Death has come to take possession of Alkêstis, and Apollo tries to negotiate with Death to postpone the event, but Death refuses. The play’s first episode is the death of Alkêstis. She elicits from Admêtos the promise that he will never marry again and give their two children a stepmother who will not treat them as her own. Admêtos agrees, and laments her death. Phêres, Admêtos’ old father arrives with funeral gifts for the deceased Alkêstis and is castigated by his son for his cowardice in refusing his request and allowing a young person die. Phêres counters, saying that Admêtos was more cowardly in allowing a woman to die for him, and that life is precious even in old age. Phêres is driven off and the funeral procession continues on. Admêtos’ friend Heraklês arrives knowing nothing of the death nor that the house is in mourning. Admêtos greets him, but tells him nothing, and Heraklês is escorted to the guest quarters where he carouses in his usual fashion. A comic scene between a drunk Heraklês and a grieving household servant takes place in which Heraklês learns of the death and, hero that he is, goes off, sobered, to the burial site to attempt to retrieve the dead woman from Death. He does so and returns with her veiled, presumably a slave he has won at an athletic event. Once Heraklês is assured that Admêtos’ love for Alkêstis is now what it should have been before her death, he reveals the silent figure to be Alkêstis and returns her to his friend.

id: 281
Title: Amphitryon
Author: Heinrich Kleist
ISBN: 9781575254937
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Heinrich von Kleist, Three Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 2, Extras: Numerous: soldiers, citizens of both sexes
Synopsis: Amphitryon is Kleist’s splendid and very free reworking of Molière’s play of the same name. Jupiter and Mercury disguise themselves as the Greek General Amphitryon and his slave Sosia, both of whom are away at war. Jupiter’s intent is to seduce the unsuspecting Alkmena, wife of Amphitryon. This happens one night, and, as things turn out, Amphitryon and Sosia turn up while Jupiter is inside the palace tending to his task. The play becomes a comedy of errors, with the two pairs of “twins,” the real Amphitryon and Sosia comically playing off of the godly dissemblers. The upshot is that Jupiter impregnates Alkmene, who will give birth to the hero Hercules. It is the honorable and loving character of Alkmene that is the center of this gently amusing play. She is virtuous, she is honor bound, and she profoundly loves Amphitryon, to the degree that she even contemplates suicide.

id: 282
Title: An Enemy of the People
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254814
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor: Ibsen, Volume I: Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 9, Women: 2, Extras
Synopsis: An Enemy of the People. In this lively political comedy, DR. THOMAS STOCKMAN is impetuous, indignant, good-natured, ebullient and brave, embodying that "joy of life" invoked, but proving tragically elusive in GHOSTS. He also is naive, a little vain, loving attention, and enjoying a good fight if necessary. He is a study of the kind of man who is likely to turn into a Socratic rebel; like Socrates, a designated 'enemy of the people' in any society. He is capable of being shocked and surprised at the wickedness and folly of the world, in contrast to his more cynical opponents, such as his brother, PETER, the Mayor, or the fair-weather political friends who desert him and who adroitly adjust to corruption. The play opens with an emphasis upon the physical: upon feasting, healthy young bodies, the good doctor ministering to sick bodies; it concludes with the emphasis shifting to the spiritual: the doctor, in his study, who now intends to become the moral teacher ministering to unhealthy minds. The means (and metaphor) of this transformation is the polluted baths. As Thomas ponders the pollution menacing his society it metamorphoses from the discovery of the bacteria swarming in the spa water, to the discovery of polluted spiritual streams feeding into human society and its culture.

id: 283
Title: Anatol
Author: Arthur Schnitzler
ISBN: 9781575254982
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Arthur Schnitzler, Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 7
Synopsis: Anatol is a series of seven one-acts united by the eponymous character of the young fin de siècle Viennese sensualist Anatol. Together these seven short, episodic plays present a picture of Vienna that stresses the nostalgia of a tired and fading society attempting to find escape in an eternal round of erotic encounters. Contrary to Schnitzler’s La Ronde, Anatol’s eroticism is light and uncomplicated, romantic in a distinctly late nineteenth century Viennese manner. Sex is more implied than outright; it will happen, to be sure, but sweetly, never grossly, off stage, never on. Sex in Anatol is also infused with humor and gentility; something that will happen, and then fade, and, when it fades, there will be another episode to take its place after a little time to recover. The play’s central interest is in characterization of a highly refined and sophisticated sort. The so-called battle of the sexes is here shown to be more a game than anything else: a fencing match with rapiers blunted so no one really gets hurt. Though each of the seven vignettes presents a different female love interest, all but two of the vignettes are balanced by Max, Anatol’s subtly caustic, cynical friend, whose much less romantic, more realist attitude to life tends to keep Anatol in relatively safe waters. Throughout the seven episodes, Anatol, like men always and forever, has a profound need to believe that he is the motivating factor in each of his affairs of the heart. Schnitzler, however, being a wise sensualist himself, makes it very clear that it is generally Anatol’s women who come out ahead when the accounts are finally reckoned.

id: 284
Title: Andromache
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 1575255383
Translator: Carl R. Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 5, Boys: 1, Extras: Chorus of Phthian women, male slave attendants, female slave servants
Synopsis: The Trojan War is over, and Andromachê, widow of the slain Trojan hero Hêktor, is now the slave and concubine of Neoptolemos, the son of Achilles. Neoptolemos is away at Delphi, and his lawful wife Hermionê is intent on killing Andromachê and the young son she had with Neoptolemos, while she, Hermionê remains barren. In partnership with her father Menelaos, Andromachê and her son are lured from the protection of a shrine to Thetis, using her son’s life as bait. Unexpectedly, Neoptolemos’ old grandfather Pêleus appears and puts an end to the slayings, taking charge of the protection of Andromachê and the boy. Hermionê, now terrified of Neoptolemos’ reaction upon his return to her attempted murders, begs the visiting Orestês to take her away with him, which he does. A messenger arrives to narrate the death of Neoptolemos at the hands of the citizens of Delphi, and during Pêleus’s lamentation over his grandson’s death, Thetis, Pêleus’ former wife, appears to console him and promises him eternal life with her.

id: 285
Title: Antigone
Author: Sophokles
ISBN: 9781575255026
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Sophokles, The Complete Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5: Women: 3, Boy: 1, Extras: Guards, attendants, servants, chorus
Synopsis: The war against Thebes led on by Oedipus’s son Polyneikês is over, and both brothers, Polyneikês and Eteoklês, have killed each other in fulfillment of their father Oedipus’s curse. Kreon is now king of Thebes, and he rewards Eteoklês, who defended Thebes, with a state burial. Polyneikês he condemns to no burial, but to rot outside the walls of the city. Their sisters, Antigonê and Ismenê, discuss the matter. Antigonê will defy Kreon and bury her brother. Ismenê sympathizes with her sister but is afraid of breaking the law laid out by Kreon. Antigonê openly buries her brother, is apprehended by soldiers guarding the body, and is brought before Kreon. She admits to her act, questions Kreon’s right to defy the unwritten law of the gods that all will be buried, including the enemy. In her case, however, he is also family. She is condemned to being buried alive in a cave. Her fiancé Haimon, learning of this enters to challenge his father, threatening to commit suicide if Antigonê dies. The blind prophet Teiresias enters and warns Kreon of the consequences of his tyrannical actions. Kreon reconsiders and goes out to right his wrongs. Instead of first going to Antigonê, he first goes to bury the body of Polyneikês, and when he arrives at Antigonê’s burial cave, he finds her hanged body, and sees his son threaten him and then kill himself. Returning to his palace, his son’s body in his arms, Kreon learns that his wife, having heard of Haimon’s death, has stabbed herself. Alone and destroyed in spirit, Kreon is taken into his house.

id: 286
Title: Bakkhai
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255507
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume IV
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 1, Extras, Chorus of Asian Bakkhai, band of Theban maenards, soldiers, guards, attendants
Synopsis: Dionysos, in disguise, returns home to his birthplace in Thebes. The son of Zeus and the mortal woman Semelê, his mother’s sisters have never believed in his divine origins, and he has returned with his chorus of Asian women to repay them for their denial of him and his divinity. King Pentheus, scarcely eighteen years old, has inherited the throne of Thebes from his father, and he is adamant in his rejection and repression of Dionysos and his cult because he believes them to be obscene. Upon his arrival, Dionysos inspires in the women of Thebes an ecstatic frenzy and drives them out onto the slopes of Mt. Kithairon to celebrate his rites. As it happens, Pentheus’ grandfather Kadmos, and the blind seer Teiresias believe in the god (or at least think it politic to do so), and have joined in the revels in the mountains. Pentheus imprisons some of the women and seeks to imprison the god himself, which soon happens. But the women are mysteriously freed from their imprisonment, and Dionysos frees himself with bringing about the destruction of Pentheus’ palace. A shepherd comes to report to Pentheus the peaceful beauty of the worship of the women on the mountain, telling him very clearly that what he, Pentheus, imagines regarding the obscenity of their rites is all wrong. Dionysos takes possession of Pentheus’ mind, drives him to hallucinate him, Dionysos, as a bull, as well as to see multiple suns in the sky. Once Pentheus is thus caught in Dionysos’ net he tempts the youthful king to dress in women’s clothes and allow himself to spy voyeuristically on the women in the mountains, a suggestion which Pentheus eagerly embraces. Once out there, Dionysos announces with a voice that emanates from the skies that voyeur now spying on them is the one who mocked their sacred rites. This drives the women into a frenzy and they pull him from his tree lookout and tear him to pieces with their hands. His mother Agavê sees him as a lion cub and rips off as a trophy his head which she places on a pole and returns to Thebes in an ecstatic state, proud of her conquest. Kadmos, having gathered the dismembered limbs of Pentheus from the mountainside, brings then onto the scene, then slowly brings Agavê back to reality to recognize the head she cradles in her arm as that of her son. Dionysos arrives, fully revealed, no longer in disguise, and banishes all those remaining of Kadmos’ line.

id: 287
Title: Children of Hearkles
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255361
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume I
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women 4, Extras: attendant, moderator/chorus, children
Synopsis: It was a hectic time in Athens and the hectic structure of Children of Heraklês, as well as the rushed and fragmented nature of its characterizations would seem to be a mirror image of its time. This decay, then, of value, of honor, of simple honesty is the real subject of Euripides’ play and not its characters who are largely undeveloped because their author chose to use them (if not exclusively, then largely) as signs, as indicators of a devastating catastrophe that he saw his country inextricably caught up in as in a trammel net of history.

id: 288
Title: Creditors
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255187
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 3
Synopsis: Strindberg was strongly interested in the power of suggestion as a dramatic tool. In an essay on Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, he describes Rebekka West as "an unconscious cannibal, who has devoured the dead wife’s soul." The "suggester" as cannibal Strindberg had already utilized a year earlier in The Father, but he made even more of it in Creditors, where it is virtually the stuff on the play’s action, played out for all to see—a vivisection. As in many Strindberg plays, the action of Creditors closely parallels Strindberg’s own marriage experience, this time with his first wife. The role of Adolf in the play is the Strindberg character, and the role of Thekla that of Siri von Essen. In Creditors, then, we see two of Strindberg’s archetypal characters: the superior (Gustav), Tekla’s former husband, and the inferior (Tekla). Tekla "feeds" off of Adolf, she sucks his lifeblood by draining him of words and ideas; it is the only means she has to exist as an intellectual being. She is the vampire. It is by that means that she has the "strength" to wear him down finally till he expires. It has been said that "accretion, not development, is the process that nourishes the vampire." Tekla, the inferior type, acts unconsciously, as a parasite, and it is her parasitic draining him of words, ideas and volition in the past that has weakened him and makes Adolf an easy prey for the undermining superiority of Gustav’s intelligence.

id: 289
Title: Cyclops
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255477
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume III
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women 0, Extras: chorus of young satyrs, shipmates of Odysseus, slaves of the Cyclops
Synopsis: The only surviving satyr play of the Greek theater, Cyclops, like all satyr plays, was performed after a series of three tragedies and was related in subject matter to the tragedies themselves, except that it was a comic or farcical treatment of the tragedies’ theme. The one thing the satyr play always has is a chorus of randy satyrs—singers, dancers, drunken revelers, and always sporting their ubiquitous phalluses. The satyrs and their leader Silênos arrived in Sicily as a result of being shipwrecked on the cliffs of Mt. Aitna and were subsequently taken prisoner by Polyphêmos the one-eyed giant cyclops who lives in a cave. As the play begins, Odysseus, on his way home from the Trojan War, stops off at Sicily to replenish his ship’s food and water supply. He bribes Silênos with wine to get what he needs, sheep are slaughtered, but before the feast can begin they are interrupted by the return to his cave of Polyphêmos. Silênos tries to lie his way out of the situation, saying that the sheep were taken from him by force. Polyphêmos wastes no time in driving Odysseus and his men into the cave. Settling down for his dinner, the Cyclops whets his appetite by devouring whole a sampling of Odysseus’ sailors. Odysseus counters by offering the cyclops wine as dessert till he is drunk and falls into a stupor. Then, with his remaining men, he sharpens a large stake, gets it red hot and glowing, and rams it into the solitary eye of Polyphêmos. As the Cyclops rages blindly about, Odysseus and his men make off for their ship, taking with them Silênos and his band satyrs to another, better life.

id: 290
Title: Cyrano de Bergerac
Author: Edmond Rostand
ISBN: 1880399687
Translator: Charles Marowitz
Editor: Cyrano de Bergerac
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown:
Synopsis: A brilliant poet, a peerless swordsman, a cryptic lover, Cyrano de Bergerac shot across the theatrical firmament the end of the 19th century and has been blazing brightly for almost a hundred years. A touching love story, a swaggering tale of adventure and a portrait of one of the most colorful characters in the dramatic repertoire.

id: 291
Title: Death and Devil
Author: Frank Wedekind
ISBN: 1575255243
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Frank Wedekind, Four Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 5
Synopsis: Something profoundly disturbing comes into focus in the course of Death and Devil, the last of the so-called “Lulu” plays, even though Lulu herself does not appear. In Death and Devil of 1905, subtitled “a dance of death in three scenes,” we have what may be a fictionalized but nonetheless a true representation of Wedekind’s final thoughts on the life represented in not only the original 1894 “monster tragedy” (see Lulu above), but also in Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Casti-Piani, who appears in Pandora’s Box as a man of twenty-five or so, is seen here as a man of sixty or more. Like Wedekind, he has preached the life of sexual freedom. He is a white-female-slave trader who believes that his profession has helped innumerable women to find and fulfill their natures in free sexual expression. His view of the life force is total sensual pleasure as the height of all of life’s gifts. He is nothing short of a “romantic” moralist who rejects everything but total liberation of the senses. Without this belief, he says, he would have committed suicide fifty years ago. And yet, what happens in the course of Death and Devil? Two conversations are brought about. The prim and respectable virginal opponent of Casti-Piani’s views, Elfriede von Malcus, is converted to the side of Casti-Piani, for she is brought to see what she interprets as the truly sacrificial nature of prostitution; whereas Casti-Piani has revealed to him the delusion regarding prostitution that he has suffered under his entire life. Midway in the play, in order to convince Elfriede of the nobility of the life he has fostered all these years, he arranges for the two of them to overhear a meeting between a male customer and one of Casti-Piani’s girls. In the course of this overheard conversation the tables for both Casti-Piani and Elfriede turn a dramatic 180 degrees. Casti-Piani learns of the terrible burden and torment suffered as a result of the self-sacrificing nobility of the profession. Casti-Piani’s life is destroyed. His life has been wasted he announces in a profound delirium; he should, says he, have shot himself fifty years ago. He does so now, mourned over by the grieving Elfriede and three of the girls in his establishment.

id: 292
Title: Earth Spirit
Author: Frank Wedekind
ISBN: 9781575255163
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Frank Wedekind, Four Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 11, Women: 3
Synopsis: Given the censorship that prevented the publication and stage production of Wedekind’s original Lulu of 1894, the author immediately set about revising that enormously long text into two plays of conventional length, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. His aim was to make them acceptable to the taste of the time and its moral standards. To do so he was forced to bowdlerize his own original work. Which is not to say he destroyed his original effort. The fact is, he pushed as close to the limit of the unacceptable as possible. Lulu is first presented in the prologue in the costume of a snake brought in writhing seductively by an Animal Trainer. It is a metaphor for what Lulu is: a totally instinctual being. Just as the original Lulu (which see) , Earth Spirit is a hymn to the untrammeled, instinctual life glorified in that mystery that is Lulu on the rise to her personal zenith. In the play, however, her final action is to perform what may well be the first action in her life. She takes life into her hands and voluntarily extinguishes it when she deliberately shoots and kills her third husband, Dr. Schön. As she says to herself, he is the only man she ever loved, and we may well take this to be a true statement, for he was a taskmaster who ruled her with a whip. Yet this is the man she kills, the only man who ever stood up to her, at least for a time, and gave her a hard time; and for this she respected him.

id: 294
Title: Elecktra
Author: Sophokles
ISBN: 9781575255057
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Sophokles, The Complete Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 3, Extras: Attendants, female chorus
Synopsis: Orestês, son of Agamemnon and Klytaimnêstra, and brother to Êlektra, returns home accompanied by his Tutor and his friend Pylades. His aim is to wreak vengeance on Klytaimnêstra for the murder of his father. To gain entrance to the house, the Tutor is sent ahead with the false news that Orestês is dead. Klytaimnêstra rejoices at the news, for it relieves her of the fear of vengeance; but Êlektra is devastated. It has long been her hope that Orestês would return to take revenge for them both and right the wrong done to their father. Orestês himself, disguised as a messenger, now enters the court bearing an urn purported to contain the ashes of the dead prince. The first one he meets is Êlektra. Orestês, having been gone since early childhood, neither recognize the other. Learning what is in the urn, she asks to hold it, and with it in her embrace she mourns and keens over her loss. So intense is her grief that Orestês deduces that she must be his sister. They are movingly reunited, and without delay they set out to do the deed. Orestês kills his mother inside the palace, with Êlektra poised tensely outside. When Klytaimnêstra’s lover Aigisthos enters, he asks to see the supposed corpse of Orestês. However, it is Klytaimnêstra’s covered body that is brought in for him to discover. He, too, is taken into the palace by Orestês and killed.

id: 295
Title: Emperor and Galilean
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575251943
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor: Emperor and Galilean
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown:
Synopsis: Ibsen always insisted Emperor and Galilean was his greatest work and the cornerstone of his entire dramatic output. Constantinople in the fourth century is the treacherous setting, depicting Western Civilization at its most critical turning point. It is a time of murderous court intrigues, of the unholy combination of religious and sexual passions out of which the hero, Julian the Apostate struggles to break through to truth and freedom. Julian himself is the most complex psychological portrait Ibsen has created – one of the most complex in all drama – and his situation is presented in gripping emotional and dramatic episodes on which the fate of empires and the future of civilization hangs in the balance. The drama is conceived on an epic scale, with many of the most brilliant and vivid scenes in all of Ibsen’s writing. The notable Shakespearean scholar, G. Wilson Knight wrote of the play,

id: 296
Title: Eumenides
Author: Aeschylus
ISBN: 9781575254678
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Aeschylus, Complete Plays, Volume I
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 3, Extras: Jury of 12 men, female chorus, escort of Athenian women, herald, trumpeter, Athenian citizens
Synopsis: Orestês has taken refuge at Apollo’s temple at Delphi, pursued by the Furies at Klytaimnêstra’s ghost’s command. They complain that Apollo prevents them from taking Orestês, an acknowledged criminal, and in doing so violates their primeval right. For a resolution to the conflict, Orestês is sent by Apollo to the Areopagos, the court of Athens overseen by the goddess Athêna. It is there where the second scene takes place. Orestês has again been pursued by the Furies. The case is tried, with Apollo as witness, and the vote is evenly divided, leaving Athêna to break the tie. She does, and Orestês is acquitted and relieved of his guilt. The Furies are disgruntled and Athêna mollifies them by transforming them into the guardians of Athens to be known henceforth as Eumenides. The play, and the trilogy, ends in general rejoicing and song.

id: 297
Title: Faust
Author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
ISBN: 1575253607
Translator: Carl R. Mueller
Editor: Faust: Part One and Part Two
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown:
Synopsis: Faust is the spiritual quest of a soul determined to explore the very nature of Reality, a revolutionary work that refuses to accept limitations, but, like Romanticism itself, embraces all, the natural world of everyday life, as well as the Great World of university experience, the macrocosm as well as the microcosm.

id: 298
Title: Ghosts
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254807
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor: Ibsen, Volume I: Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 2
Synopsis: In Ghosts, Ibsen presents us with a familiar-seeming image of our reality: a drawing room, characters dressed and acting like the people we know, moving among objects with which we are familiar. Then this reality gradually begins to dissolve. The scene, characters, action, dialogue, though like 'everyday life' reveal that what is 'going on' is something bigger than an everyday conflict. From the opening, we are on haunted ground. Mrs. Alving's speech "I think we are all ghosts....." is just the most sustained passage in a play where the visual and verbal imagery continually evokes the presence of the still living past that breaks through the reduced image of modern nineteenth century reality. Ghosts caused perhaps the greatest outcry of horror of any play in the history of drama and was actually banned from public performance in England for over thirty years. It's action, concluding in the annihilation of all our cultural comforts and illusions as the indifferent sun rises over a human devastation, can still be an unnerving experience for the modern reader or theatergoer.

id: 299
Title: Hedda Gabler
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254821
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor: Ibsen, Volume I: Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 4, Extras
Synopsis: In Hedda Gabler, Tesman, the aunts and Thea Elvsted, abetted by the ambiguous Judge Brack, seem, as Ibsen once explained, like “a strange and hostile power” threatening the heroine Against this respectable bourgeois world, Hedda enlists the scandalous Eilert Løvborg, whom she envisages with "vine leaves in his hair." Eilert’s activities, however, involve the disreputable milieu of Miss Diana and her ladies who inhabit the disreputable, night world of sexual orgy. The two worlds alarmingly collide when Løvborg accuses Diana of the crime " killing the child" committed by Hedda. He is shot in Diana's apartment with Hedda's pistol, and Judge Brack threatens Hedda with the possibility of her appearing, along with Diana, in court. Hedda, with her military discipline and restraint is the Apollonian counterpart of the wildly Dionysian Løvborg Such design throughout the play does not detract from its human urgency and appeal: but we get only a fraction of Ibsen's plays if we read them as photographic realism. Ibsen's realist scene is also occult, haunted ground, providing a more adequate space than strict realism for his poetic imagination; and a more adequate portrait of our human identity. "Art." wrote Ibsen's son, Sigurd, "gives liberty of action to forces and possibilities to which life does not grant the chance of coming into their rights." Even in so blasé a production as Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's stage is haunted by archetypal forces and powers, the reproachful and half-forgotten ghosts that have shaped our modern identities.

id: 300
Title: Hekabe
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255392
Translator: Carl R. Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 3, Boys: 2, Extras: Chorus of captive Trojan women, slave attendants, armed guards
Synopsis: Hêkabê, the former queen of Troy and now the slave of Odysseus, learns that the Greek victors, waiting for a wind to return home, have determined at the behest of the ghost of Achilles, to sacrifice on his burial mound Polyxenê the daughter of Hêkabê. Hêkabê pleads with Odysseus to countermand the order. She reminds him that she once saved his life when he was on a spy mission to Troy. But her plea is useless. He agrees to spare Hêkabê’s life but cannot save that of her daughter. The execution is carried out and while Hêkabê is preparing to bury Polyxenê the body of her youngest child, her son Polydoros, is carried in from the seashore. During the Trojan War he had been placed in the safekeeping of King Polymêstor of Thrace. Polymêstor, however, at the war’s end, brutally killed Polydoros and threw his body out to sea in order to keep for himself the treasure that accompanied the boy upon his arrival in Thrace. Enraged, Hêkabê pleads with Agamemnon to summon Polymêstor to the Trojan women’s camp under the pretence of once again seeing her old friend.. Polymêstor arrives with his two young sons, and pretends that Polydoros is alive and well. He and his sons are lured into the tent under the pretext of getting more gold, and in there his eyes are torn out by Hêkabê’s women, and his two sons murdered. Agamemnon is called in to judge the justification of the deed, and since he holds Polymêstor guilty of violating the stringent ethic of hospitality, he declares the action just. In retaliation, Polymêstor, blind, foretells the death of Hêkabê at sea and the murder of Kassandra, Hêkabê’s daughter in Greece. The sacrifice of Polyxenê to Achilles has brought the hoped for winds, and Agamemnon prepares to set out to sea.

id: 301
Title: Helen
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255460
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume III
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 3, Extras: Chorus of Greek slave women, attendants, servants
Synopsis: Helen, it seems, never went to Troy after all, and so had nothing to do with the Trojan War. Or better yet, the Helen that Paris abducted and carried off to Troy was not Helen at all, but a phantom fashioned by Hera out of a cloud, and the real Helen is alive and well and living in Egypt (spirited there by Hermês) where old King Proteus, before his death, was keeping her safe (and virtuous) for her husband, Menelaos. Proteus, unfortunately was claimed by age and went the way of all men: he died. His son, King Theoklymenos, has other ideas for Helen, and wants to marry her. To that end he has all Greeks who are unfortunate enough to happen onto Egyptian shores killed. One day, however, Menelaos arrives, and not in the best condition. He has been shipwrecked and scarcely has rags enough to cover his nakedness. He has also been at sail for the last seven years in an attempt to get back to Sparta after the Greek victory at Troy. He and Helen—the real Helen—are reunited, and through the cleverness of Helen and Theoklymenos’ sister concoct a ruse to escape Theoklymenos. They fabricate a story of the death of Menelaos and the need to conduct a mock funeral for him at sea. Theoklymenos falls for the story and lends them a ship. Helen and Menelaos sail out to perform the service, and, of course, sail off back home to Sparta. Kastor and Polydeukês (Helen’s twin brothers, now enshrined in the sky as a constellation) appear on high and tell the disgruntled that Theoklymenos that their sister Helen wasn’t destined to live forever in his kingdom, and that he should be satisfied. Theoklymenos accepts the decision and the play ends on a note of praise for the virtuous Helen.

id: 302
Title: Henry IV
Author: Luigi Pirandello
ISBN: 9781575254968
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Luigi Pirandello, Three Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 11, Women: 2
Synopsis: Since we cannot know truth, says Pirandello, it is incumbent on us to find solace in the balm of illusion. Illusion, then, to Pirandello is the humanitarian alternative to having to endure and suffer the deprivations and indignities of a cruel and wretched world. It is a sine qua non. It is also the choice made by Henry IV in the play of the same name. A head injury—suffered twenty years ago during a historical carnival cavalcade in which he wore the costume of the German Emperor Henry IV—left him fixated on the idea that he was that Henry. For the eight years that follow the accident, he lives as Henry IV, in a villa that is outfitted in the manner of an eleventh-century castle, with servants in historical costume living out his fantasy for him (while in his presence, that is); he “rules” as the emperor. Eight years later he wakens from his fixation, and choosing not to live again in the harsh external world “as it is,” he decides to continue the charade—to continue “being” Henry IV, and to continue the pretense/illusion even to his servants. But, implies Pirandello, is all this to be believed? It is not impossible even to ask oneself whether he was ever insane? Not to question is, perhaps, to be intellectually lazy. But the question will never find an answer even if Henry himself gives testimony, because is he to be believed? Henry IV is a quintessential Pirandello play in which reality and illusion battle it out, only to end up without an answer and no certainty whatever; an existential situation with which Pirandello plays infinitely witting, but also passionate, games.

id: 303
Title: Hippolytos
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255378
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume I
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 4, Extras: Chorus of huntsmen, chorus of women of Troizen, male and female slaves, attendants, people
Synopsis: In the prologue Aphroditê, goddess of sexual love, denounces the eighteen year old Hippolytos for renouncing her in favor of Artemis, goddess of chastity and the hunt. She announces that, in order to punish him, she will impose on Phaidra, his stepmother, an overpowering lust for him. Phaidra is duly stricken and driven to frenzy, starving herself almost to death, until she is coaxed by her nurse to reveal the secret that is destroying her. The nurse, in an attempt to help matters, naively, and without telling her mistress, conveys Phaidra’s secret to Hippolytos. So stunned is Hippolytos that his violent condemnatory tirade against all women is overheard by Phaidra. Shamed beyond recovery, Phaidra determines that only death will save her honor, but she will also be the instrument to destroy her stepson. She writes a farewell note to Thêseus, her husband, accusing Hippolytos of raping her. Upon his return from abroad, Thêseus, learning of Phaidra’s confession, refuses Hippolytos’ denials of guilt, irrationally places him under a curse and condemns him to exile. The curse is soon fulfilled when Poseidon, god of the sea, sends a monster up from the deep to destroy the boy. His mangled body is brought onto the scene immediately after the appearance of Artemis, who has just before told Thêseus that his son is innocent of any wrong. The final scene sees the reconciliation of father and son.

id: 304
Title: Ion
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255453
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume III
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women 3, Extras: Chorus of Kreousa's female attendants, male slave attendant, female slave attendant, Delphians
Synopsis: Ion, a tragicomedy, is one of Euripides’ lighter plays. Years ago, Kreousa, the daughter of the Athenian King Erechtheus, had a son by the god Apollo, and abandoned it. Apollo, however, unknown to the mother, had the child rescued and sent to his temple in Delphi, where he grew to young manhood under the name Ion, and served as Apollo’s temple attendant. The play begins years after the child’s rescue. Kreousa is now married to Xouthos, but they have had no children. They come to Delphi to inquire of Apollo how to rectify the situation. Xouthos is advised by Apollo’s oracle to accept as his son the next man he meets. On leaving the temple, the first one he meets is Ion. Kreousa, upon learning of this, assumes that Ion is the illegitimate offspring of Xouthos, and is troubled that he will supplant any child that she may produce with her husband. She consequently contrives to poison him. Her plot is discovered and she is condemned to death. She is on the verge of suffering her fate when Apollo’s priestess, the Pythia, produces artifacts, among them the cradle in which the infant Ion was discovered. Kreousa recognizes them and accepts Ion as her son. Athêna appears and orders Ion to return to Athens with his mother and stepfather and reign as king of Athens

id: 305
Title: Iphigeneia In Aulis
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255514
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume IV
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 6, Women: 2, Extras: Chorus of young women of Chalkis, soldiers, guards, slave attendants
Synopsis: The play opens with Agamemnon gravely troubled by a decision he has to make. The Greek fleet is waiting at Aulis for favorable winds to make possible their departure for Troy. Agamemnon has learned from a prophet that favorable winds will come only when Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia. Urged on by his brother Menelaos, Helen’s husband, he has written to his wife Klytaimnêstra to bring Iphigeneia to Aulis to be married to the hero Achilles. Now, however, Agamemnon regrets that decision and has written another letter telling his wife to disregard the first and return in Argos. Agamemnon’s old servant is given the letter to deliver to Klytaimnêstra whom he will intercept on her voyage to Aulis. Unfortunately Menelaos intercepts the old man and takes the letter back to Agamemnon. The two brothers argue, in the course of which Menelaos has a change of heart; but Agamemnon has one, too. He is convinced of the need to sacrifice his daughter for the sake of the country and the army. Klytaimnêstra and Iphigeneia arrive, and soon learn that the marriage has been a ruse to get Iphigeneia to Aulis. A servant tell them of Agamemnon’s plan. Achilles is angered and promises to prevent the sacrifice. Husband and wife argue intensely and Agamemnon is torn by the conflict of his duty to Menelaos and the country and his fear of the army. Achilles, in a less than heroic mode, announces that he met with the threat of severe abuse and violence from the army while pleading Iphigeneia’s cause. To untangle the stalemate situation, Iphigeneia decides that to die for her country is only her duty and she offers to do so willingly and joyfully

id: 306
Title: Iphigeneia in Tauris
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255446
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume III
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 6, Extras: Chorus of Captive Greek women, slave attendants, temple slaves, guards
Synopsis: (Iphigeneia he en Taurois, ca. 414-413 B.C.) Preceding the onset of the Trojan War the Greek fleet was stalled at Aulis waiting for a wind to sail to Troy. Agamemnon is told by his seer that a wind will come if he sacrifices the thing most precious to him, which turns out to be his daughter Iphigeneia. At the sacrifice, the goddess Artemis substitutes a sheep for the girl and whisks her off mysteriously to the barbarian land of Tauris to serve as her temple priestess. As such, Iphigeneia is required to sacrifice any Greek who lands on Taurian soil. This is where the play begins. Iphigeneia’s brother Orestês, whom she has not seen since he was a baby, arrives with his friend Pyladês. Apollo has ordered Orestês to bring back to Athens the wooden statue of Artemis which will cleanse him of the guilt of his matricide and end the fits of madness that plague him. Eventually brother and sister are revealed to each other. When King Thoas of Tauris arrives to speed up the sacrifice of the Greeks, Iphigeneia pretends that the statue of Artemis must first be purified in the sea, and she claims that the two Greeks must accompany her. They do and consequently manage to escape in Orestês’ ship. When Thoas insists on retrieving them, Athêna appears and tells him not to attempt a pursuit.

id: 307
Title: Ivanov
Author: Anton Chekhov
ISBN: 9781575254739
Translator: Carol Rocamora
Editor: Chekhov, The Early Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 4
Synopsis:

id: 308
Title: John Gabriel Borkman
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254890
Translator: Brian Johnston, Rick Davis
Editor: Ibsen, Volume III: Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 5
Synopsis: John Gabriel Borkman is the most strangely 'Gothic' of Ibsen's realist plays while also one of his most 'classic' in structure. It is set in winter, in the north, where the vital passions of the characters are locked in a lethal coldness of the soul.. This is a world of the living dead, the Borkman family, in which life impulses have been so vehemently and long repressed, that the elder trio in the play, Borkman, Gunnhild and Ella, actually have created norms out of the condition of insanity; living at a level of manic resentment which keeps a husband and wife, who inhabit the same house, unable to speak to each other for over eight years; and two sisters, locked in fierce mutual hatred, willing to fight to the death to possess the son of the man they both loved but who destroyed them both. In a desperate bid to prolong their deadly drama into the future, these ghostly elders seek to entrap young Erhart Borkman; to continue to live through him to prolong their spiritually deadly condition. Erhart, however, is rescued by the divorcée, Mrs. Wilton, who awakens him to sexual and emotional liberation. Between them, they affirm life impulses that fight back and ultimately break free of the entrapment of the elders. As George Bernard Shaw wrote of the play: "This melancholy household of the dead crumbles to dust at the knock of the younger generation at the door.... The fresh air and the light break into the tomb; and its inhabitants crumble into dust."

id: 309
Title: La Ronde
Author: Arthur Schnitzler
ISBN: 9781575254975
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Arthur Schnitzler, Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 5
Synopsis: La Ronde, Schnitzler’s most popular play, is a comedy in ten more or less independent scenes (“dialogues”) each of which depicts a sexual encounter and seduction of a different tone and social stratum. The first scene is between a Prostitute and a Soldier, the second between the same Soldier and a Chamber Maid, the third between the Chamber Maid and a Young Gentleman. In other words, each scene passes on to the next scene the character of the next higher social class, until in the final scene between a Count and the Prostitute of scene one the two extremes of society meet. Unlike the nostalgic, romantic temper of Schnitzler’s Anatol, La Ronde is hard-hitting and cynical. Sex is a game, but it is a cruel one. It is also frequently a search for escape from the despair of a society that is crumbling, the end of an era that was Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The tone of each scene is unique, and the shading of the sexual encounter (which occurs onstage in blackout, but needn’t necessarily in a contemporary production) varies according to the social station of each of the partners. By design, character is given short shrift in this ten-play sequence, its place taken by the observation of sexual behaviors in 1890s Vienna at the time when Freud was developing his own theories of sex.

id: 310
Title: Libation Bearers
Author: Aeschylus
ISBN: 9781575254661
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Aeschylus, Complete Plays, Volume I
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 3, Extras: Male and female slaves, female chorus
Synopsis: Libation Bearers is the second part of the Oresteia trilogy. Orestês, son of Agamemnon, returns home after being gone since early childhood. His mission is to wreak vengeance on his mother Klytaimnêstra for her murder of his father. In honor of the dead Agamemnon he places a lock of his hair on his father’s tomb. Êlektra discovers the lock and Orestês reveals himself to her, after which they plot the murder of Klytaimnêstra and Aigisthos. Orestês and his friend Pyladês disguise themselves and approach the palace as messengers bringing news of the “death” of Orestês. Klytaimnêstra sends for Aigisthos to share in the good news, but upon his arrival he is killed, after which, despite her pleading, Klytaimnêstra is also taken inside the palace and killed by Orestês. It is not long before Orestês senses that he is pursued by the Furies, avengers of his matricide.

id: 311
Title: Little Eyolf
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254883
Translator: Brian Johnston, Rick Davis
Editor: Ibsen, Volume III: Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 2, Women: 3, Boy: 1
Synopsis: In Little Eyolf, Alfred and Rita Allmers first lose their crippled child who is lured to his death after the visit of an uncanny figure from folk-legend, the Rat Wife; the parents then descend into a hell of mutual recrimination and estrangement, realizing they neither loved their child nor each other. A drama set in the spring or early summer, the play starkly depicts sexual passion and its consequences. The drama of emotional and psychological desolation is accompanied by a rich visual and verbal imagery that explores powers within the natural world into which the human drama extends. The traditional four elements of the cosmos seem actively involved in the human drama: the earth to which Allmers and Rita are 'bound', with its gold and green forests, its lavish presence of plants and trees of every scene; the water (fjord and sea) as the agent of loss, with the 'undertow' that takes the drowned child out into its immensities, and sends up the water lilies that shoot up from the depths; the air that carries the distant sounds of ships bells, and children's' voices and especially the heartrending cry, "the crutch is floating" and, beyond the peaks of the earth, the fires of the stars that look down like eyes upon the desolate Allmers and Rita. The mysterious and beautiful play concludes invoking the 'spirits' of this cosmos, as if all human elements finally dissolve into it. Little Eyolf has, again and again, proved a memorable experience in the theatre.

id: 312
Title: Love's Comedy
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575257631
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor:
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 5, 8 little girls, students, guests, relatives, an engaged couple, 4 aunts, a housekeeper, a manservant, servant girls
Synopsis: Mrs. Halm’s lodging house has launched a succession of marriages of her daughters with student lodgers. Two students and two daughters yet remain. The theological student Lind, early in Act One reveals he has succumbed to the charms of Anna Halm. The other, the rebellious poet Falk, while pouring scorn on all forms of conventional love, secretly loves Anna’s independent-minded sister, Svanhild. As the play opens, the Halm residence hosts a gathering of couples whose past, present and future attachments meet with social approval. Falk and Svanhild at first seem sparring, mutually hostile combatants, like Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedict but, after declaring his love for her Falk enlists Svanhild her as an ally and attacks the whole company for variously betraying the ideal of love. For this, in Act Two, he is banished from the gathering and, encouraged by Svanhild, determines on a lifetime’s rebellion against the deep-rooted falsehoods of society. In a rhapsodic ‘duet’ they affirm a Love that will reject the compromises the world insists upon and will sustain itself in uncompromising integrity.

id: 313
Title: Medeia
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255354
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume I
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women 3, Boys: 2, Extras: Chorus of Korinthian women, guards, slaves, attendants
Synopsis: Some years prior to the play’s opening the Barbarian princess Mêdeia deceived her father and killed her brother in helping the hero Jason to steal the Golden Fleece. Mêdeia and Jason are now married and living in Korinth with their two young sons. Jason, however, has higher aspirations, namely to wed a new wife, the young daughter of King Kreon. Kreon, fearing that Mêdeia will be ruled by jealousy and take revenge, exiles her. When she fails to mollify his fears, she begs for one day to prepare for her departure. She uses the time, however, to send her two young sons with a wedding gift for the young princess, the gift being a poisoned gold crown and garment given to her by the god of the sun. The princess puts on the gifts and is immediately set afire and burned to death along with her father who tries to aid her. In her desire to hurt Jason the most possible, she determines to kill their two young sons. Their screams are heard from inside the house. Jason arrives and Mêdeia appears on the roof in a dragon chariot laden with the bodies of the children. She refuses to let him bury them, and flies off to Athens where earlier in the play the arrival of King Aigeus of Athens had agreed to give her shelter.

id: 314
Title: Miss Julie
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255095
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 1, Women: 2, Extras: Several for a song and dance, which can also be done offstage
Synopsis: Miss Julie, a fifty minute one-act play, is a Strindberg’s best known play. It’s action centers on a dual conflict, one internal, one external, and both of them sexual. Miss Julie, a neurasthenic young woman of twenty-five, is the product of a commoner mother, an ardent feminist who taught her daughter to hate the male sex, and an aristocratic but weak-willed father who taught her to hate her own sex.

id: 315
Title: Oedipus at Kolonos
Author: Sophokles
ISBN: 9781575255071
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Sophokles, The Complete Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 6, Women: 2, Extras: Guards, attendants, bodyguards, chorus
Synopsis: Burdened with the guilt of having killed his father and married his mother, the blinded old Oedipus has been wandering about for years in exile, accompanied by one of his daughters, Antigonê. They stop to rest at a grove sacred to the Eumenides near Kolonos where it has been prophesied that he will at last find rest. Oedipus’s other daughter Ismenê arrives to report that Kreon, king of Thebes, is coming to demand the return of Oedipus to Thebes. It has been prophesied that the place where Oedipus dies will be forever sacred. Kreon arrives, Oedipus refuses to return, and Kreon orders his men to take the two daughters as hostage, which they do. King Thêseus of Athens, who promised to protect Oedipus, enters, prevents Oedipus being taken by force, and sends his soldiers off to rescue the daughters. Polyneikês, one of Oedipus’s two sons, enters on his way with an army to recapture the city of Thebes. He begs his father’s forgiveness for his earlier treatment of him, and asks his blessing on the battle for Thebes. Oedipus refuses, cursing his son, and Polyneikês goes off to his death. A mighty storm arrives, announcing the approaching death of Oedipus, at the end of which he finds his way unaided into the sacred grove and the spot where he will die in peace and glory.

id: 316
Title: Oedipus Tyrannos
Author: Sophokles
ISBN: 9781575255071
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Sophokles, The Complete Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 1, Boy: 1, Girls: 2, Extras: Soldiers, suppliants, guards, attendants, priests, chorus
Synopsis: The city of Thebes is under siege by the Sphinx. Its people, animals, and crops are dying. Oedipus, king of Thebes, has sent Kreon to Delphi to learn from Apollo how to save the city from ruin. Kreon reports that only with the removal of the killer of King Laïos will Thebes be relieved of the plague. Oedipus does all in his power to discover the killer, though his wife Iokastê begs him not to. Oedipus consults the blind seer Teiresias, who tells him that not only is Oedipus the murderer, but that he is guilty of parricide and incest as well. Enraged at this audacity, Oedipus charges Kreon of plotting against him with Teiresias in order to discredit him. He is saved from further rashness only by the entrance of his wife Iokastê. Alone together, he tells her that Apollo once prophesied that he, Oedipus, would one day kill his father and marry his mother, to avoid which he left Korinth and his (supposed) parents in order to avoid the prophecy’s fulfillment. He also tells her that he once killed an old man in a roadside incident as he left the oracle’s shrine at Delphi. He fears that the man might have been Laïos. Iokastê calms him by saying that the report was that Laïos was killed by a band of robbers. To ascertain this she sends for an old shepherd who was the only witness to the crime. Word comes through a Korinthian Messenger that Oedipus’s father, the king of Korinth, has died. It is also learned from that Oedipus was not the son of his Korinthian “parents,” but a foundling, having been put out on a mountainside soon after birth by Laïos to die, in order to thwart the prophecy that Laïos would be killed by his son. The Theban shepherd took pity and gave the child to the Korinthian herdsman, who gave him to the childless king and queen of Korinth. When Iokastê learns, she hangs herself and Oedipus stabs out his eyes, then, coming before the public, begs to be exiled.

id: 317
Title: Orestes
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255491
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume IV
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 3, Extras: Chorus of noble Argive women, Argive citizens, armored hoplites, attendants, slaves
Synopsis: The play opens with Orestês on a pallet outside the palace of Agamemnon in Argos, tended to by his sister Êlektra. He has only recently, urged on by his sister, murdered their mother Klytaimnêstra and her lover Aigisthos as retaliation for their murder of his father Agamemnon. Orestês has been driven mad by the Furies in retaliation for Klytaimnêstra’s death. At that same moment the Argive assembly is convened to decide what will be the fate of the matricides. Menelaos, their uncle and Agamemnon’s brother, arrives returning from the Trojan War, and promises to stand by them. When, however, Tyndareos, Klytaimnêstra’s father, arrives and denounces the matricides, Menelaos deserts them. Word comes that the assembly has voted death for Orestês and Êlektra. But Orestês’ best friend Pyladês arrives and helps them plot a means of escape. They will kill Helen and take Hermionê, her and Menelaos’ daughter, hostage to cover their escape. But their plans are foiled when Apollo appears and Helen, instead of dying, is deified and transported up to the heavens; when Apollo orders the release of Orestês who is to stand trial in Athens and be acquitted; when Êlektra and Pyladês are told to marry; and when Orestês is informed that he will marry Hermionê instead of killing her. Menelaos, finally, is told to return home to Sparta to rule there, and to allow Orestês, upon his acquittal, to rule from his father’s throne in Argos.

id: 318
Title: Pandora's Box
Author: Frank Wedekind
ISBN: 1575255235
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Frank Wedekind, Four Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 14, Women: 6
Synopsis: At the end of the previous play, Earth Spirit, Lulu performs an action, the death of Schön, that does not violate merely the law, but also causes her to lose control of her being. She is now at the mercy of others whereas before they were at her mercy. In Pandora’s Box we see the working out of the tragic error that propels her beyond the limits of her existence. She is steadily, act by act, seen to be on the decline. She is open to being used by her fellows but is unable any longer to use them. She might be blackmailed any moment as a result of her escape from prison (for the murder of Schön). Rodrigo, the seedy acrobat, is planning to turn her into a fabulous trapeze artist and become a wealthy man as a result; Casti-Piani is going to sell her to an expensive house of prostitution in Cairo; and, in the final act of the play, in the filthy, dismal London attic, damp with rain dripping in through the skylight, Schigolch and Alwa, her third husband, suffering from a venereal disease, actually do prostitute her services in order to bring in the little they need to stay alive. In submitting, she violates both her nature and her judgment, and this leads to the only alternative for her: death, which, as it happens, is at the hands of Jack the Ripper who takes away her vulva as a memento of the occasion. Only Lulu’s friend, the lesbian Countess Geschwitz, is left at the end—the only one in the entire Lulu saga who is genuinely able to love—and she dies, too, of a blow delivered by Jack, with love for Lulu on her lips.

id: 319
Title: Persians
Author: Aeschylus
ISBN: 9781575254685
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Aeschylus, Complete Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 1, Extras: Chorus of elderly men, male and female slave attendants, soldiers
Synopsis: The Persian invasion of Greece under King Xerxes in 490 B.C. was thoroughly routed by the Athenians. Xerxes is now, in 480, engaged in another invasion of Greece as reprisal for his earlier defeat. The play opens outside the Persian royal palace at Susa. The chorus of elderly councilors tells of Xerxes’ massive military deployment. They are anxious and long for news of the campaign. Xerxes’ mother, the dowager queen Atossa, enters telling of a troublesome dream she has had. A Messenger arrives with news of the defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis, and the devastation wreaked upon the Persian land forces during their retreat to Asia. Atossa offers a libation to the ghost of her husband Dareios, while the chorus begs him to rise from his tomb and counsel them. His ghost rises and he castigates his son for being headstrong and vain and because of this impiety having brought about the fall of his army. He also foretells the final defeat of the remnants of the Persians army a few months later at Plataia. The ghost descends, and Xerxes enters, defeated, in rags, along with a few ragged remains of his once great army. The play ends amid general lamentation and Xerxes’ reproach of himself and his failed mission.

id: 320
Title: Philoktetes
Author: Sophokles
ISBN: 9781575255064
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Sophokles, The Complete Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Extras: Male chorus
Synopsis: It has been prophesied that only with the aid of Philoktêtês and his magic bow and arrows can the Trojan War be won by the Greeks. But because of a festering foot wound, the smell of which is unbearable to his military colleagues, Philoktêtês was abandoned nine years ago on the island of Lemnos off the coast of Troy. Odysseus and the son of Achilles, Neoptolemos, are dispatched to Lemnos to bring the wounded Philoktêtês back to Troy. Knowing that the hardened, bitter warrior will never agree to return, Neoptolemos is ordered by Odysseus to use any means of deception to win him over into giving up his weapons. Neoptolemos succeeds by promising that he will take Philoktêtês back to his homeland. Philoktêtês agrees and hands over his weapon. But it is not long before Neoptolemos regrets his deception, tells Philoktêtês that it is not his homeland that they will set out for, but Troy, and he returns to him his bow and arrows. So greatly is he devoted to helping the desperate man, that Neoptolemos decides to abandon the Trojan War and indeed take Philoktêtês back to his homeland. As they start on their way, the demi-god Heraklês appears on high and orders all three men back to Troy where Philoktêtês will be healed and become a great hero, and the Trojan War be won by the Greeks as foretold.

id: 321
Title: Phoenician Women
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255484
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume IV
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 9,Women: 2, Girls: 1, Extras: Chorus of young Phoenician women, attendants, servants, soldiers
Synopsis: The scene is Thebes, and it is under attack by the Argive army led on by seven leaders, the so-called Seven against Thebes. Polyneikês, the son of Oedipus, is fighting to win back his inheritance, namely his share in the rule of Thebes: to serve as Thebes’ king every other year in alternation with his brother Eteoklês, the current king who will not share his throne. Iokastê, wife of Oedipus, and mother of Eteoklês and Polyneikês, meets with Polyneikês to try to prevent the battle that is immanent, but in vain. The blind prophet Teiresias announces to Kreon that the only way Thebes can be saved is if his son Menoikeus is sacrificed. Kreon, Iokastê’s brother, refuses, but Menoikeus sacrifices himself for the city’s safety. Thebes wins the battle, but Oedipus’s curse is fulfilled when the brothers die at each other’s hands, Iokastê kills herself over their dead bodies, and Kreon, now king of Thebes, exiles the blind Oedipus and, in keeping with Eteoklês’ decree, refuses burial to Polyneikês. The play ends with the exit into exile of the ancient Oedipus with his daughter Antigonê leading him.

id: 322
Title: Pillars of Society
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254838
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor: Ibsen, Volume II: Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 9, Women: 8, Boy: 1(13 years old, Girl: 1 young, Extras
Synopsis: Pillars of Society, inaugurates Ibsen's Realist Cycle. The play anticipates the themes that will be developed further in the plays that follow. The social world of Karsten Bernick, like our own, is governed by rampant materialism, where morality and spirituality are acosmetic masking of far less ideal motives: until, that is, the astonishing entry of Lona Hessel. (Her name derives from Apollo, the god of the Delphic injunction, 'Know thyself and she enters with a Dionysian circus of animals and music). With her spirited entry from the local and the archetypal Past, the careful superstructure of self deceit and hypocrisy this moralizing community has built up over the years, ruthlessly persecuting its victims and smugly congratulating itself, collapses with devastating effect. But this collapse might lay the foundation of a spiritual renewal. The themes and metaphors of the play take the form of vivid scenes, characters, actions, and metaphors - all the elements of a vital artwork. We are invited to enjoy this art as art, seeing its bold metaphoric design and form, its complex counterpoint of thematic cross-references and dialectical oppositions and conflicts. Productions, such as the recent National Theatre in London, reveal how immensely enjoyable the play can be.

id: 323
Title: Platonov
Author: Anton Chekhov
ISBN: 9781575254722
Translator: Carol Rocamora
Editor: Chekhov, The Early Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 8, Women: 4
Synopsis:

id: 324
Title: Playing with Fire
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255170
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 3
Synopsis: Playing with Fire, a one-act play, has the distinction of being one of only three comedies written by Strindberg. It must be said, however, that it has, nonetheless, a decidedly bitter taste. In any case, it is Strindberg in his best form, though it is no easy play to perform. It can too easily be mistaken for farce, despite the fact that its basis is very serious indeed. The atmosphere is one of Chekhovian boredom and wasted lives. Its characters are caught in a permanent stasis, a situation that they refuse to change because they are not aware of it, or, perhaps, because they choose not to be aware of it. They live out their upper-middle-class bourgeois lives as comfortably as possible on the way to their eventual demise. As one character says: “We’ve woven our own nets and now we’re caught in them.” A fairly perceptive statement for these people to make, but it leads nowhere but back to square one. Playing with Fire is a play in which every character but one lusts after a sexual partner that is other than his or her own.  Playing with Fire is a brittle, sophisticated comedy that has had considerable success in the world’s theaters.

id: 325
Title: Prometheus Bound
Author: Aeschylus
ISBN: 9781575254715
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Aeschylus, Complete Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 6, Women: 1, Extras: Chorus of the Daughters of Oceanos
Synopsis: Promêtheus Bound is set somewhere near the beginning of time and at the farthest reaches of earth, Skythia, on a desolate mountain crag of the Kaukasos. Power and Violence, functionaries of a tyrannical Zeus, enter dragging the rebel Titan god Promêtheus. With them is the fire-god Hêphaistos who at the brutal insistence of Power chains Promêtheus to the mountain crag. Isolated, he is visited by a Chorus of the Daughters of Oceanos, to whom he reveals his “crimes” against Zeus that have brought him to his present condition. This exposition is interrupted by a visit from another Titan, Oceanos, father of the Chorus, who offers to serve as intermediary between Promêtheus and Zeus, an offer that Promêtheus rejects. Then Io enters, a human victim of Zeus’s cruel lust, half-girl, half-cow, forced to wander the earth, driven on, frenzied, by a gadfly—a vivid testimony of Zeus’s cruelty to the despised race of mortals. With Io’s departure Promêtheus reveals that he knows the secret that will allow Zeus to escape overthrow if only he possesses it, an occurrence that is possible only upon Promêtheus’s release. Then Hermês, Zeus’s messenger, appears and tells Promêtheus that unless he gives up the secret he will be plunged into the bowels of earth, only to be brought back to light so that Zeus’s eagle can eat at his liver. Promêtheus refuses and at the play’s conclusion the earth opens in a cataclysmic storm of earth and sky and he is engulfed.

id: 326
Title: Rhesos
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255521
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume IV
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 9, Women: 2, Extras: Chorus of Trojan sentries, Trojan soldiers, attendants, guards
Synopsis: Though believed by some that Rhesos is not by Euripides, it is nonetheless a more than capable play with many beautiful aspects to it: exquisite lyrics, as in the morning song of the guards, and the authentic and effective picture of life in the Trojan camp somewhere between Troy itself and the Greek encampment. It is the story of how the Trojans send the young soldier Dolon to spy on the Greeks, at the same time that Diomêdes and Odysseus are sent out on a counter mission, to spy on the Trojans. They meet the young Dolon, kill him, and then, with the very helpful assistance of Athêna, are prompted to forego their attempt to kill the Trojan Hêktor and kill instead the just arrived Trojan ally Rhesos and his troops, for if he lives till morning nothing can stop him from charging and destroying the Greek fleet.

id: 327
Title: Right You Are (If You Think You Are)
Author: Luigi Pirandello
ISBN: 9781575254944
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Luigi Pirandello, Three Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 7, Extras: several of both sexes
Synopsis: Signora Frola, an elderly woman, is denied by her son-in-law, Ponza, the right to see his wife, whom Signora Frola maintains is her daughter. Ponza, however, insists that the Signora’s daughter was his first wife, now deceased, and that his current wife bears no relation to the old woman. According to Ponza, the Signora refuses to accept that fact because it is too painful. As it happens, an earthquake has destroyed all records that might put an end to the controversy, and so, whatever the truth may be, if any, it is literally beyond proof. It is out of this investigation of “truth” that the stuff of Pirandello’s play evolves, the upshot being that truth cannot be known, or—even more incisively—that truth, objective knowledge, does not exist. In place of the anxiety that rises out of this existential condition, humankind, like Signora Frola, clings to the balm of illusion. It is the struggle between illusion and reality that is at the core of Pirandello’s art. Life, says Pirandello, is difficult enough with the balm of illusion to help one survive; to be denied that balm is to invite disaster. The play might well be termed a comedy of the human condition.

id: 328
Title: Rosmersholm
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254852
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor: Ibsen, Volume II: Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 3
Synopsis: In Rosmersholm, the heroine, the illegitimate Rebecca West, sees herself as an agent of enlightenment in combat with a world of entrenched traditions, superstitions and social repression. Yet she also is associated with social and sexual transgression. Possibly her father and teacher, Dr. West also was her lover. Her allies in the cause of the Enlightenment, are Peter Mortensgaard, a convicted adulterer, and Ulrik Brendel a social outcast. Her ‘enlightenment’ agenda, therefore, is associated with sexual and social transgression. The world Rebecca West seeks to combat is traditional, conservative and Christian. To defeat this world Rebecca began to work what seems a kind of pagan magic spell on its inhabitants: she ‘bewitched’ Kroll, the autocratic schoolmaster, ‘infatuated’ his sister; then, while luring the sister to her death - she set to work on the husband, until he, too, is in her power. Like a witch, she seems to call up her distinctly louche colleagues, Brendel and Mortensgaard, to lead the attack on the citadel of orthodoxy, Rosmersholm.

id: 329
Title: Seven Against Thebes
Author: Aeschylus
ISBN: 9781575254692
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Aeschylus, Complete Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 8, Women: 0, Extras: Chorus of women, men of Thebes, Theban soldiers, slave attendants
Synopsis: Thebes is in a state of panic resulting from the immanent attack of an Argive army led by Polyneikês, brother of Eteoklês and king of Thebes, both of them the sons of Oedipus. Eteoklês rebukes his people for their fearful display, and then names six of his generals to six of the seven gates of Thebes, each appointment made according to the Argive commander already assigned to each of the gates. When it is announced that Polyneikês will attack the seventh gate, Eteoklês assigns himself to that location. A Messenger recounts the battle won by the Thebans, and describes the encounter of the two brothers in which each killed the other according to the curse put upon them by their father Oedipus. The bodies of the two brothers are brought in and the play ends with a highly theatrical scene of lamentation.

id: 330
Title: Six Characters in Search of an Author
Author: Luigi Pirandello
ISBN: 9781575254951
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Luigi Pirandello, Three Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 11, Women: 6, Boy: 1, Girl: 1, Extras: other actors, stagehands, backstage workers
Synopsis: The play begins on an empty stage soon populated by a company of actors who are rehearsing a play by Pirandello. In the course of the rehearsal, a group of six characters enters the theater and disrupts the rehearsal process. We learn that they are characters created by a playwright who, as it happened, never utilized them in a play. They are rootless, they are not being “used,” and they are determined to find a playwright to put them in a play so that they can live the lives they were created to live in a piece of fiction. That might be easy enough, but there are complications. As one critic has it: “Each character, by virtue of his independence from his creator, is driven by his own motivations into actions never conceived of by his author.” For all the play’s intellectual superstructure, there is no shortage of visceral analysis of character; it is self-analysis carried out not at a distance, but lacerating by the characters themselves, with all the pain of flesh and blood characters. No academic, textbook intellectualization, no dabbling in philosophical speculation; rather, torment, pain, brutal honesty that arises out of a suffering that is the product of a ruthless displacement: from an author’s mind into the oblivion of a rootless existence. For all its seriousness, the play is a series of scenes alternating serious and comic.

id: 331
Title: Spring's Awakening
Author: Frank Wedekind
ISBN: 9781575255132
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Frank Wedekind, Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 22, Women: 3, Boys: 8, Girls: 4, Extras: Numerous
Synopsis: Spring’s Awakening is the story of adolescence at the inception of puberty, when it is still mysterious and frightening—and wonderful—confusion and elation inexplicably intermingled in an inevitable paradox. The crux of the play is the opposition the child meets from its elders at the moment when openness and understanding are the vital, life-giving factors which will determine its future course. Wedekind’s children in the play are naïve; and it is from this naïveté that much of the play’s beauty and strength derive.

id: 332
Title: Storm
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255217
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 8, Women: 4
Synopsis: Storm was one of five long one-act plays written by Strindberg for his so-called Intimate Theater, plays which as a unit he called Chamber Plays, and of which A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata are a part. The Intimate Theater was a place the size of which (161 seats) encouraged acting of a very discrete sort, a space in which nuance, a small gesture, the flick of an eyelash, could be perceived and understood. In Storm this subtlety of approach was utilized to the fullest. Plot is virtually nonexistent. Characterization is minimal and thus left to suggestion. It is an ensemble piece with no star roles, but in which each character is central to the piece and contributes to the central theme of human loneliness. Last but not least in the demands made upon the chamber play are atmosphere and mood. The mood of Storm almost immediately suggests that of The Ghost Sonata. Life is in a holding pattern. There is a silence so profound that it can be heard. The people in the apartment house live apart, in isolation from their neighbors whom they don’t even know and aren’t curious to know. Time seems stopped and life hangs in abeyance. Strindberg, in fact, toyed with calling the play The Silent House. And it is no accident that the play is set in the dwindling time of the day. It is neither day nor night, but somewhere indefinably in between. As are many of his plays, Storm is a particularly personal play based largely on his own experience. Storm is a reflection of that fear and the pain it caused its author.

id: 333
Title: Suppliant Women
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255408
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 3, Boys: 7, Extras: Chorus of Argive mothers, female slave attendants of the mother, temple priests, attendants, slaves
Synopsis: The suppliant women of the play’s title are the mother of the Argive soldiers, the Seven against Thebes, who were killed in the war against Thebes They have come with King Adrastos of Argos to implore King Thêseus of Athens to intercede for them with the Thebans to release to them the bodies of their sons for burial. Thêseus rejects Adrastos’ plea, but agrees to that of the mothers. The Thebans refuse his intercession, and Thêseus leads the forces of Athens against Thebes, wins the conflict, and returns to the mothers the ashes of the decayed remains of their sons. The end of the play is a long lament over the men’s ashes, and the widow of one of them, Evadnê, throws herself onto the burning pyre of her husband Kapaneus.

id: 334
Title: Suppliants
Author: Aeschylus
ISBN: 9781575254708
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Aeschylus, Complete Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 0, Extras: Chorus of the Daughters of Danaos, chorus of Argive women, chorus of Egyptian soldiers
Synopsis: The fifty daughters of Danaös are in flight from their fifty Egyptian cousins who are determined to marry them. The daughters have just landed in Argos, their original place of origin, only slightly ahead of the pursuing sons of Aigyptos. Pelasgos, the king of Argos, listens to their plea, and finds himself in a dilemma. If he accepts the daughters as new citizens of Argos, he threatens his land with war with the Egyptians; if he rejects them, he risks offending Zeus for inhospitality. He therefore, along with Danaös, consults with the people of Argos and wins their support to accept them as citizens. A herald from Aigyptos demands the daughters’ release or suffer an encounter with the Egyptians. Pelasgos refuses and invites the new Argive citizens to their new home.

id: 335
Title: The Broken Jug
Author: Heinrich Kleist
ISBN: 9781575254920
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Heinrich von Kleist, Three Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 6, Women: 5
Synopsis: The Broken Jug, a full-length play in one act, is considered one of the finest of the few great comedies of the classic German stage. Farcical by nature, it is also a play of enormous subtlety and underlying seriousness. The play takes place in a provincial village in Holland in the eighteenth century. The problem of the play is the withholding of truth and the detection and revelation of deceit and duplicity. It is also a version of the Garden of Eden story, in which the original sin is not the eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but the refusal to acknowledge what they, Adam and Eve, know.

id: 336
Title: The Cherry Orchard
Author: Anton Chekhov
ISBN: 9781575254784
Translator: Carol Rocamora
Editor: Chekhov, Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 7, Women: 5, Extras: tramp, station-master, post office clerk, guests, a servant
Synopsis: The Cherry Orchard (1904) is considered Chekhov's dramatic masterpiece.  The last of the four great plays (The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, The Cherry Orchard), he wrote it at the age of forty-four, as he was dying of consumption.  He subtitled it a comedy -- even though Stanislavsky, the director of the premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre, thought otherwise.  This lovely, lyrical work is set on the estate of Lyubov Andreeva Ranevskaya, an impoverished landowner who is unable to face the necessity of selling her estate in order to avoid bankruptcy.  Tenaciously, she clings to the images of the past and her idyllic childhood, evoked by the beauty of the estate, the charm of the nursery where she and her brother spent happy early days, the loveliness of the grounds and the river, and -- above all --the magic of the cherry orchard.   In the end, inevitably, the estate is auctioned off to the Lopakhin, son of a serf who had once served in Ranevskaya's household, and Lyubov and her family depart, scattererd to various destinations and to uncertain futures.   This haunting, beautiful play is set against the backdrop of the enormous changes in Russian history at the time (the 1890s and early 1900s), when the landed gentry was fading, the forces of industrialism were on the rise, the peasants and emancipated serfs were migrating off the land and into the cities, the seeds of anarchy and revolution were growing among the intelligentsia --  indeed, a time when the entire society was eroded.  Written in 1904, one year before the first Russian Revolution, The Cherry Orchard contains Chekhov's stunning vision of Russia's past, present and future, and prophesizes the cataclysmic changes to come.

id: 337
Title: The Dance of Death, Part I
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255194
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 3
Synopsis: The Dance of Death, Part I has had a wider international currency than any other Strindberg play. It is constantly revived in the professional theater and has drawn some of the world’s greatest actors. It has also served as one of the modern theater’s most influential plays, having spawned such works as Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Anouilh’s Waltz of the Toreadors, and possibly even Beckett’s Endgame, as well as some of Ionesco’s plays. It is a play about marriage, a dissection of what has been called “a marriage of hell.” The play’s location is in a round gray-stone fortress on an island off the coast of Sweden named, appropriately, Little Hell.  In most productions it is generally only Part I that is played, it being a complete work in itself.

id: 338
Title: The Dance of Death, Part II
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255200
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 2
Synopsis: The Dance of Death, Part II was an attempt by Strindberg to lighten the negative mood that disturbed contemporary critics at the early performances of Part I. It takes place during the summer following Part I in an oval living room decorated in white and gold, a far cry from the earlier gray stone of the fortress of Part I Acrimony, however, being Strindberg’s thing, he only partially succeeded in lightening the mood. The Captain carries out a bitter vendetta against Kurt. Allan, Kurt’s son, is in love with the Captain’s daughter, Judith, but Judith torments him by flirting with other men. The Captain wants to marry Judith to the old Colonel, to get Allan out of the way has him transferred to a remote military post in Lapland. In addition to which, the Captain is maneuvering for Kurt to loose his house. Judith, finally, in opposition to the Captain’s machinations, reciprocates Allan’s love, swearing she will follow him to the ends of the earth. She also sends an insolent telegram to the old Colonel. The Captain, upon learning of the curtailment of his plans, has a final stroke and dies, while Alice triumphs over his demise, only, at the end, to realize that, for all her hatred of him, she once truly loved him.

id: 339
Title: The Father
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255088
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 3
Synopsis: As with so many of his plays and novels, Strindberg used his work as a means of exorcizing private demons. In The Father he relies on his disastrous first marriage to supply material, and, as in much of his work, it is the battle of the sexes that determines the action of the play Father. Another aspect of Strindberg’s arsenal of themes is the power of will, in which he obsessively believed. In The Father it is the Captain’s wife Laura who, by power of will, and the Darwinian survival of the fittest, establishes her primal position as the dominant factor in their marriage, who, by willing, brings about her husband’s insanity and death. The seed is planted when she hints to him that he is not the father of their daughter Bertha. This is a violent blow to the Captain’s masculinity; it also denies him immortality, inasmuch as immortality to him is not of the religious sort, but consists of life in his progeny. This thorn in the Captain’s mind goads him, at Laura’s relentless instigation, into a violent act, namely throwing at her a lighted paraffin lamp, which in turn gives credibility to her accusation that he is insane. At his lowest and most vulnerable, he is cajolingly lured into a straightjacket by his old nurse, after which he dies of a stroke. Strindberg believed profoundly that the society would transform into a matriarchal institution; in The Father he displays that fear in action. Why, however, does the Captain endure this eternally antagonistic relationship for twenty years of marriage? The answer is quintessentially Strindbergian: Sex. Strindberg himself was the least qualified candidate for marriage, yet he engaged in it time and again, and for the same reason. To Strindberg Sex is the great leveler. Despite certain melodramatic aspects of The Father it is a play of such searing intensity as to put down any objections regarding the believability of the action or the larger-than-life aspect of its characters. It has become a major staple of the contemporary stage.

id: 340
Title: The Ghost Sonata
Author: August Strindberg
ISBN: 9781575255125
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men:7, Women: 8, Extras: Beggers
Synopsis: The themes of The Ghost Sonata are two: the life-giving idealism represented by the young student Arkenholz, and the vampirism of Hummel, the old man in the wheelchair. It is the tension generated by these two opposites that animates the play at every turn. There is some evil force in every life, Strindberg maintains, that eats at the very core of our being, that sucks our energy, and destroys our will—and will is a major element in The Ghost Sonata, for it is the raison d’etre of Hummel, and from the opening tableau of the play it is his power of will that gives him possession of the idealistic Arkenholz. Will is here a powerful and evil force. Like A Dream Play, The Ghost Sonata is a play of despair over the misery of the human condition. Hummel is out to destroy, to metaphorically suck the blood of his victims. Even the idealistic, life-giving student Arkenholz cannot combat the corrosive forces of life in defense of the young Daughter with whom he has fallen in love—those forces being symbolized in the play by a grotesque cook who sucks the nourishment from the household’s food supply and serves the leftovers. In the play’s final sentences, Arkenholz apostrophizes in the dead young Daughter the whole of humanity and the impossibility of human compassion. “Poor, dear child, child of this world of delusion, of guilt, suffering, and of death; this world of eternal change, of disappointment, and of pain! May the Lord of Heaven be merciful to you on your journey.” The Ghost Sonata, for all of its negativity, is one of the most powerful pieces of theater in the modern repertory, and the effect it can exert on an audience (even one out of sympathy with Strindberg’s view of life) is riveting.

id: 341
Title: The Green Cockatoo
Author: Arthur Schnitzler
ISBN: 9781575254999
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Arthur Schnitzler, Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 16, Women: 5
Synopsis: The Green Cockatoo, a play in one act, is a prime example of Schnitzler playing with the Pirandellian factor of illusion and reality. The play takes place in a sordid Paris tavern in 1789, on the night of the storming of the Bastille. Various actors from local theaters are performing impromptu scenes of crime for the debased delectation of the slumming Parisian aristocracy. One actor, whom they believe to be pursued, tells of pickpockets at work outside; another relates how he set fire to a house; a third tells how he came upon a murder. The host of the tavern derides his noble guests as rogues and pigs and says he hopes they are next in line for extinction by the citizens. No one knows whether he is acting for the gentry’s delight or if he is serious. Henri, a good-natured actor, reveals to the shuddering guests how he has just murdered a nobleman who was his wife’s lover. The host of the tavern knows this affair to be a true fact; what he does not know is whether Henri is acting or telling the truth. As it happens, Henri is only acting, but not for long. For he soon learns the truth, and when that same nobleman enters the tavern, Henri stabs him to death. Havoc breaks loose and is further amplified by the stormers of the Bastille rushing in, causing the frightened gentry to flee for their lives. The Green Cockatoo is one of Schnitzler’s most skillful and effective pieces, particularly because of the tension generated through the fluctuating uncertainty between reality and illusion and the fact that in the end illusion, true or otherwise, bursts out into blood reality.

id: 342
Title: The Lady from the Sea
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254876
Translator: Brian Johnston, Rick Davis
Editor: Ibsen, Volume III: Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 3, Extras
Synopsis: The Lady from the Sea explores a cosmic space: of mountain ranges, of the sea, fjord, sky and stars. From these immensities emerges a mysterious figure, the Stranger, as if from another planet.. He has been drowned in the "depths of the sea" and now returns to life and to the land in order to claim his faithless wife, Ellida, the heroine of the play. He forces a decision upon her that splits apart the world of the play and threatens to drive the schizophrenic mind of the heroine into madness. After an immense struggle, Ellida retreats from the abyss - or from a future of superhuman possibilities - that opens before her. The play’s conclusion is highly ambiguous and players have debated it ever since. Om the one hand, unlike Nolra of A Doll House, she returns to a familiar human world of obligations and rewards where her reassuring identity will be sustained. On the other, she has turned her back on a fearful but perhaps liberating future.. The play ends as ambiguous comedy, the sense of immense danger narrowly escaped being mixed with a sense of immense opportunities and vistas forever lost.

id: 343
Title: The Madness of Herkles
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255422
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 3, Boys: 3, Extras: Chorus of old men of Thebes, guards and slave attendants of Lykos
Synopsis: Heraklês is on a mission to subdue and bring up to the light of day Kerberos the three-headed dog and guardian of the gates of Hades. No man having ever returned from that region, Heraklês’ old father Amphitryon believes his son to be dead, though he dearly hopes for his reappearance. The death of Heraklês allows Lykos, the usurping king of Thebes, to kill Heraklês’ wife, Megara, his three young sons, as well as his old father Amphitryon. Lykos, in a self-justifying scene, states that their deaths will secure his throne inasmuch as he killed Heraklês’ father-in-law Kreon to attain it, and he does not want Heraklês’ sons to grow to manhood and then move to avenge their grandfather’s murder. Lykos, impervious to their pleading, allows them to prepare for a decent death, and they go offstage to do so. After a choral ode, and the reappearance of father, wife, and sons, Heraklês returns to rescue them and to kill Lykos in the palace. The goddess Hera, however, the inveterate pursuer of Heraklês throughout his life (she put upon his the famous twelve labors), sends Madness to alight on the palace and make Heraklês insane. In that state he proceeds bloodily to kill his wife and each of his sons. Only Amphitryon remains unharmed. Eventually Heraklês, now bound, awakens from his madness to discover the horror he has brought about, and wants to kill himself. His friend King Thêseus of Athens, however, arrives—Thêseus whom once Heraklês had saved from the underworld—and convinces his friend that it is more heroic for him to survive than to kill himself. In the play’s closing action, Thêseus leads Heraklês off to Athens where he will atone for his action and be revered.

id: 344
Title: The Marquis of Keith
Author: Frank Wedekind
ISBN: 9781575255163
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Frank Wedekind, Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 14, Women: 13
Synopsis: The Marquis of Keith is rightly considered Wedekind’s masterpiece of dramatic construction—even he thought so. It concerns the dealings of a would-be entrepreneur who is caught between two ethical premises: the life of the pleasure-seeking sensualist and that of the idealistic moralist. Keith, the free-and-easy, light-hearted insouciant, is done in by a system and a bourgeois society of ambiguous morality that is corrupt to the core. He is, of course, no angel himself; rather, he is as unscrupulous a schemer as is to be found, gulling highly regarded, albeit morally vague, Munich industrialists into putting up the money for a fabulous project: the construction of the Fairyland Palace to showcase the talents of a Wagnerian singer female friend of his. His modus operandi is, of course, unrelenting ruthlessness. He is, alas, also an imposter; and, his philistine industrialist friends being better businessmen than he, his fraudulent fleecing scheme to line his own pockets is revealed and duly taken over by the bourgeois industrialists. The play is a biting indictment of a hypocritical social order.

id: 345
Title: The Master Builder
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254869
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor: Ibsen, Volume II: Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 4, Women: 3, Extras: ladies, a crowd in the street
Synopsis: The action of The Master Builder, which takes place in the fall, seems both shocking and extraordinarily simple: a young woman enters the household of a successful architect with the claim that, ten years to the day, he once made love to her when she was 12-13 year old, promising her a 'kingdom' on this very date. A strictly literalist interpretation of the play might haul in rich catches for Freudian trawlers of the psychopathological. Visions of a more transcendent past, present and future however, ferment the fertile and subversive imaginations of the audacious pair. An action in which 'youth' from Lysanger ('lys' = light) invades the retreat of an aging figure named after the sun (Sol-ness), at the time of the autumnal equinox (September 19th) and, the next evening get that figure to ascend and fall against a sun-streaked sky, already is revealing less a sexually pathological and more an archetypal supertext.. The scenic progression of increasing light and spatial freedom from Act One's windowless space; to the light-filled, bay-windowed room of Act Two; to the final open air and splendid sunset of Act Three should encourage us to extend the dimensions of the play's action. The diurnal and seasonal rhythms of the sun's rising and setting; the biological and contrast between generations, old and young; the wasteland theme of energies atrophied and sickly where, in a reversal of the Sleeping Beauty legend, the young 'princess' enters the enchanted realm, frees the young lovers, (Ragnar and Kaja) while releasing the old hero from his torment, to take his leave splendidly, like a superb setting of the sun demand that we see the play imaginatively. The texture of the play has the glancing, shifting quality of shot silk as the action moves through many dimensions of reality at the same time to its unnervingly ambiguous climax.

id: 346
Title: The Prince of Homburg
Author: Heinrich Kleist
ISBN: 9781575254913
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Heinrich von Kleist, Three Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 16, Women: 3, Extras: Numerous soldiers, courtiers, pages, etc.
Synopsis: The Prince of Homburg is generally considered the finest of Kleist’s six completed full-length plays. Its central problem is one that tormented Kleist during his entire life: Is self-mastery in reality a denial of self? The Prince, who is the general of the cavalry of the Elector of Brandenburg, is warned by the Elector to control his natural impulsiveness in combat during the next day’s battle against the invading Swedes. But the Prince is a dreamer and an idealist: he wants personal glory as well as the hand of Princess Natalia of Orange; and so he allows himself to be swayed by a dream he had the night before in which he won glory in battle as well as her hand. The next day, however, he leads a charge before he has been specifically instructed to enter the battle. And though his action is a resounding success and he wins the battle for the Elector, he is condemned to death by the Elector for disobeying orders. Prussia, he is told, is a state of obedience, and to disregard that imperative is to undermine the authority of the state. The Prince is eventually reprieved when he acknowledges his error and freely determines that he deserves the death penalty. When all is said and done, the question is: Is the Prince’s admission of guilt a hoax or is it an honest submission? Does the state display a human side, or is the Prince now a true defender of the authoritarian state, a condition that entails the loss of his ideal of self? It is a moot point that every director must answer in the direction of this extraordinary play.

id: 347
Title: The Seagull
Author: Anton Chekhov
ISBN: 9781575254753
Translator: Carol Rocamora
Editor: Chekhov, Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 8, Women: 5
Synopsis:

id: 348
Title: The Solar Spectrum
Author: Frank Wedekind
ISBN: 1575255251
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Frank Wedekind, Four Plays, Volume II
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 11, Women: 9
Synopsis: In 1894 (the same year in which Wedekind completed the original “monster tragedy”) he also planned a four-act drama that was to be called The Solar Spectrum and subtitled “an idyll from modern life.” As it is, he completed only the first act, with the remaining three acts surviving only in outline. The structure of the play was anything but conventional. Rather than a single action that develops act by act, each act was to be self-contained, four individual actions that together presented a series of “impressions.” In effect, the structure of each act was to have been “musical,” by which he most likely meant that each would have a different tone and structure, just as a four movement symphony will have for each movement its own key and structure. The planned four-act Solar Spectrum was to have taken place in a bordello. Act One (the act here presented), titled “The Garden of Love,” takes place on the spacious grounds outside the bordello. It serves more as introduction to the whole and centers around the initiation of a new girl to the profession. It is a quiet, amusing, sometimes moving, and always disciplined mood piece (“idyll” does it justice) of considerable beauty—a view almost certainly not designed to please the bourgeois moralists of the time.

id: 349
Title: The Stronger
Author: August Stindberg
ISBN: 9781575255101
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: August Strindberg, Five Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Women: 3
Synopsis: A one-act play of scarcely half a dozen pages, The Stronger is universally considered the quintessential short play and a superb monologue of great psychological profundity. The play represents a triangular situation in which two actresses—one married, Mrs. X, and one unmarried, Miss Y—meet accidentally at a café while Christmas shopping and begin considering their past rivalry in love for Mrs. X’s husband. The play is unique in that the subject of the discussion, the husband, never appears, and for the fact that only one of the women, Mrs. X, speaks, while the other, Miss Y, merely reacts. To say “merely” is, however, to minimize unjustly the silent role, for it presents challenges every bit as great as those offered to the silent Mrs. X. In The Stronger Strindberg demonstrates what a keen insight and capacity for observation he possessed in regard to human nature and its machinations. There is, of course, the fairly open question of which of the two women is the stronger, the married actress who takes all in stride, bends with the winds, and survives in the dog-eat-dog world, or the taciturn Miss Y who, as Mrs. X says, has failed to bend and broken like a dry reed. But is her observation correct or is it wishful thinking, for near the end she observes that Miss Y, rather than going after her prey aggressively, merely sits like a cat at the rat hole and outwaits it. Mrs. X may in fact be announcing her own eventual loss of her husband to Miss Y—except that she is currently so secure in her marriage and family that she is unaware of her unconscious premonition. Like all great works, The Stronger has built-in ambiguities.

id: 350
Title: The Tenor: A Farce in One Act
Author: Frank Wedekind
ISBN: 9781575255132
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Frank Wedekind, Four Major Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 6, Women: 2
Synopsis: Subtitled “A Farce in One Act,” The Tenor is unquestionably one of the great farces in dramatic literature. Its hero Gerardo is the epitome of the self-serving egocentric matinee idol of the age (any age), the great Wagner Singer of his generation, whom women of all sizes and shapes and ages pursue with a single intent : to bed him no matter what. The play is a tour-de-force of brilliant dialogue, wit, and situation, and it has successfully held the stage since the time of its first production. It is Wedekind in absolutely top form.

id: 351
Title: The Three Sisters
Author: Anton Chekhov
ISBN: 9781575254777
Translator: Carol Rocamora
Editor: Chekhov, Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 9, Women: 5
Synopsis:

id: 352
Title: The Vaudevilles
Author: Anton Chekhov
ISBN: 1575251272
Translator: Carol Rocamora
Editor: Chekhov, "The Vaudevilles" and other short works
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown:
Synopsis:

id: 353
Title: The Wild Duck
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254845
Translator: Brian Johnston
Editor: Ibsen, Volume II: Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 12, Women: 9
Synopsis: The Wild Duck is as mysterious as any of Ibsen's plays. It resembles those paintings, which seem to offer two alternative images of the subject at the same time. One image is the realistic domestic tragedy of the Ekdal family: it's retreat from reality and the sorrow it suffers when that retreat is invaded by a clumsy truth-bringer. In the other a Son descends to redeem a fallen humanity suffering from the dominion of his Father. He must combat a Deceiver who lives below, with a 'demonic' companion. Redeemer and Deceiver battle for the fallen Ekdals, one attempting to raise it higher, to the 'Ideal'; the other, to drag it lower into a swamp of self-deception: and the fallen family buckles under the strain. After the catastrophe, the Son and the Deceiver continue to quarrel over whether the truth can set humanity free. This counterpoint of 'everyday' and 'archetypal' realities, which is Ibsen's procedure throughout the Cycle, is discovered in the structure of the play's action and within the texture of the dialogue.

id: 354
Title: The Women of Trachis
Author: Sophokles
ISBN: 9781575255033
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Sophokles, The Complete Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 3, Extras: Women captives, bearers, servants, attendants, female chorus
Synopsis: In her loneliness, Dêianeira, wife of Heraklês, awaits the return of her long gone husband, away completing the last of his obligatory labors imposed by the goddess Hêra. She is anxious because of an oracle that Heraklês will now either die or live out the rest of his life in peace and quiet. Word comes that he is alive and returning home. Lichas, one of Heraklês’ men, enters bringing a train of female captives, among whom is the beautiful young princess Iolê whom Heraklês has taken as his mistress. The distraught Dêianeira, to prevent loss of her husband’s love, sends him a garment which she anoints with what she believes to be a love potion. It is an ointment given her by the dying centaur Nessos whom Heraklês had shot with an arrow. The fact is, the ointment is a deadly poison. The garment on its way, Dêianeira wonders whether she has done right, the ointment having been given her by a deadly enemy of Heraklês. Her son Hyllos returns, cursing her for her deed, and telling her that Heraklês has been poisoned by the garment and is dying. Absorbed in grief, Dêianeira goes off and kills herself. Heraklês is brought in on a pallet in agony, is convinced of Dêianeira’s innocence, and readies himself to ascend his own funeral pyre.

id: 355
Title: The Wood Demon
Author: Anton Chekhov
ISBN: 9781575254746
Translator: Carol Rocamora
Editor: Chekhov, The Early Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 9, Women: 4, Extras
Synopsis:

id: 356
Title: Trojan Women
Author: Euripides
ISBN: 9781575255439
Translator: Carl Mueller
Editor: Euripides, The Complete Plays, Volume III
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 5, Extras: Chorus of Trojan women, Greek soldiers
Synopsis: The basic action of the play is the disposing of the Trojan women taken captive by the Greeks who exhibit toward them every cruelty imaginable. Hêkabê’s young daughter Polyxenê is killed as a sacrifice to the funeral mound of the dead Achilles. Her prophetess daughter Kassandra is assigned to the brutal Agamemnon as his slave and concubine, and rejoices deliriously in her prophecy of the Greeks’ suffering during their homecoming, of Agamemnon’s death, and of the adversity Odysseus will endure on his way home to Ithaka. Andromachê, widow of the dead Trojan hero Hêktor, will serve as slave-mistress to the son of Achilles, Neoptolemos, son of her husband’s slayer; but even more cruel is the death of Andromachê’s small son Astyanax who will be thrown from the battlements of Troy. As for the aged Hêkabê herself, former queen of the now conquered Troy, she will serve as slave to Odysseus whom she hates above all mortals alive. In a scene with Menelaos, Hêkabê pleads that he take revenge on the evil of his wife Helen and kill her who caused the terrible conflict of the war. Menelaos agrees, and the army has given him that right, but when he faces Helen and hears her self-defense, and under the spell of her beauty, he weakens and agrees to punisher her upon their return home to Sparta. The mangled body of Astyanax is brought in, but Andromachê’s ship is ready to depart and the burial of the boy’s body is left to Hêkabê who wraps it in a winding sheet and adorns it with offerings from her women, as the citadel of Troy is torched in the background and the women of Troy are led away to the ships that will transport them into the life of slavery.

id: 357
Title: Uncle Vanya
Author: Anton Chekhov
ISBN: 9781575254760
Translator: Carol Rocamora
Editor: Chekhov, Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Comedy
Character Breakdown: Men: 5, Women: 4, Extra; Workman
Synopsis:

id: 358
Title: When We Dead Awaken
Author: Henrik Ibsen
ISBN: 9781575254906
Translator: Brian Johnston, Rick Davis
Editor: Ibsen, Volume III, Four Plays
Type: Translation
Genre: Drama
Character Breakdown: Men: 3, Women: 3, Extras
Synopsis: Ibsen called When We Dead Awaken an 'Epilogue'. The play is filled with echoes from the earlier plays. Set in summer, and ending "at dawn, before the sunrise" it concludes the Realist Cycle. Its opening mage of humanity convalescing at a sanatorium, supervised by a bland and controlling 'Spa Manager', anticipates The Magic Mountain of Thomas Mann (who wrote an admiring account of the play) and of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. The physical action of the play is as simple, and as resonant, as that of Sophokles' Oedipus at Kolonos. A married couple, an elderly artist and his young wife, arrives at a sanatorium. The artist meets a former model whom he once loved and abandoned The wife meets a 'bear hunter' to whom she is immensely but fearfully attracted. As in some extraordinary adulterous dance movement, the foursome now divided into two new couples. The scene of the play gradually ascends, act by act, finally to a deadly, storm-ridden mountain height. One couple descends to live; the other ascends to die. Every word and gesture of the play seems haunted by the previous plays, as the action searches into the heart of loss. James Joyce, reviewing the play, proclaimed: " On the whole, When We Dead Awaken may rank with the greatest of the author's works - if, indeed, it be not the greatest. It is described as the last of the series...a grand epilogue... Than these dramas, excellent alike in dramaturgical skill, characterization and supreme interest, the long roll of drama, ancient or modern, has few things better to show."