Theatre

Never before, the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage, observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959. Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black America--and changed American theater forever. The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem Harlem, which warns that a dream deferred might dry up/like a raisin in the sun. The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun, said The New York Times. It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic. This Modern Library edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.

THE STORY: During the war Joe Keller and Steve Deever ran a machine shop which made airplane parts. Deever was sent to prison because the firm turned out defective parts, causing the deaths of many men. Keller went free and made a lot of money. The

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From legendary playwright August Wilson comes the powerful, stunning dramatic bestseller that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize. Troy Maxson is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black is to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation in the 1960s, a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can, a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. This is a modern classic, a book that deals with the impossibly difficult themes of race in America, set during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.  Now an Academy Award-winning film directed by and starring Denzel Washington, along with Academy Award and Golden Globe winner Viola Davis.

Mary Todd Lincoln is tired of Washington, DC. The nation's capital is so boring; she would much rather be onstage, where she belongs, starring in a cabaret. And if she can't do that, she might as well drink. Or push her chaperone down the stairs. Or drink. The entire White House is fed up with Mary's antics, most of all her bore of a husband, who can't focus on anything except his silly Civil War. To get her out of his hair, Abe hires a handsome, up-and-coming actor to give Mary acting lessons, hoping to keep her busy and out of trouble, but the distraction ends up working a little too well. A riotous, campy, outrageous comedy that dares to ask: What won't Mary Todd Lincoln do to be a star?

The Collected Plays of Edward Albee, Volume 1 includes eight plays from 1958-1965 by "a major American playwright who helped change the shape of drama here and abroad" (New York Times).   Edward Albee's plays featured here range from the four brilliant one-act plays with which he exploded on the New York theater scene--The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith, The Sandbox, and The American Dream--to his early masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Also included are two adaptations from notable American novels The Ballad of the Sad Café and Malcolm and Albee's mysteriously fascinating Tiny Alice.   This book represents one of the most exciting and bold periods in the career of one of America's most popular and imaginative playwrights.

Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical play Long Day's Journey into Night is regarded as his finest work. First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. This edition, which includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom, coincides with a new production of the play starring Brian Dennehy, which opens in Chicago in January 2002 and in New York in April.

Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, James Ijames's play Fat Ham reinvents Shakespeare's Hamlet in startling and hilarious ways against the backdrop of a family barbecue in the American South. Juicy - a young, queer, Southern man, who is grappling with questions of identity - is visited by the ghost of his father (Pap) at his mother's wedding/family barbecue. Pap demands that Juicy avenge his recent murder. How will Juicy, a sensitive and self-aware young Black man, trying to break a cycle of trauma and toxic masculinity, avenge his father's premature death? Fat Ham was first staged in a filmed production for the Wilma Theater, Philadelphia, in April 2021. It made its Off-Broadway debut at The Public Theater in May 2022, transferring to Broadway in 2023. It was nominated for five Tony Awards, including Best Play and Best Director of a Play, and won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

A small house on an isolated country road, which is shared by Jessie and her mother. Jessie's father is dead; her loveless marriage ended in divorce; her absent son is a petty thief and ne'er-do-well; her last job didn't work out and, in general, her life is stale and unprofitable. As the play begins Jessie asks for her father's service revolver and calmly announces that she intends to kill herself.

Winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Water by the Spoonful is "a rich, brilliant montage of American urban life that is as dazzling to watch as it is difficult to look away from" (Associated Press). Somewhere in Philadelphia, Elliot has returned from Iraq and is struggling to find his place in the world. Somewhere in a chat room, recovering addicts forge an unbreakable bond of support and love. The boundaries of family and community are stretched across continents and cyberspace as birth families splinter and online families collide. Water by the Spoonful is a heartfelt and poetic meditation on lives on the brink of redemption and self-discovery during a time of heightened uncertainty, "as startling and innovative and human on the page as on the stage" (Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author). Hudes's cycle of three plays began with Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue (Pulitzer Prize finalist) and concludes with The Happiest Song Plays Last. Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Water by the Spoonful, the Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue. Her other works include Barrio Grrrl!, a children's musical; 26 Miles; Yemaya's Belly and The Happiest Song Plays Last, the third piece in her acclaimed trilogy. Hudes is on the board of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which produced her first play in the tenth grade. She now lives in New York with her husband and children.

It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared--57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as that of Elia Kazan as the greatest American stage director of the '40s and '50s. Who better than America's elder statesman of the theater, Williams' contemporary Arthur Miller, to write as a witness to the lightning that struck American culture in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire? Miller's rich perspective on Williams' singular style of poetic dialogue, sensitive characters, and dramatic violence makes this a unique and valuable new edition of A Streetcar Named Desire. This definitive new edition will also include Williams' essay "The World I Live In," and a brief chronology of the author's life.

"[Our Town] leaves us with a sense of blessing, and the unspoken but palpable command to achieve gratitude in what remains of our days on earth."-- New Yorker Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of life in the mythical village of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire--an allegorical representation of all life--is an American classic. It is the simple story of a love affair that asks timeless questions about the meaning of love, life, and death. Our Town explores the relationship between two young neighbors, George Gibbs and Emily Webb, whose childhood friendship blossoms into romance, and then culminates in marriage. When Emily loses her life in childbirth, the circle of life portrayed in each of the three acts--childhood, adulthood, and death--is fully realized. Often considered one of the greatest American plays of all time, Our Town is also Wilder's most frequently staged play. It debuted on Broadway in 1938 and continues to be performed daily on stages all around the world.