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Editor Craig Pospisil has drawn exclusively from Dramatists Play Service publications to compile this collection, which features over fifty monologues. You will find an enormous range of voices and subject matter, characters from their teens to their seve
"Comedy nirvana . . . satisfyingly mean and funny."—New York Post "Without sacrificing his mordant wit or bleak worldview, this distinctive dramatist shows a new maturity and empathy in."?The New York Times "Nicky Silver's terrific play is filled with moments when you can't stop laughing even though the circumstances indicate you really shouldn't. . . . A wonderful little riff on family dysfunction."?Associated Press "Silver finds plenty of fresh bite, and the sheer savagery of his observation here is breathtaking. Watching it brings the dueling sensations of wicked mirth and squirming discomfort at being trapped in the hell of someone else's family horrors. That these are exaggerations of...
THE STORY: THE ALTRUISTS revolves around a dedicated, if disorganized and demented, group of young radicals. These are the kids who protest. They protest arts funding and arms funding. They protest school cutbacks and AIDS cutbacks and welfare cutbacks. T
With sharp comic turns and absurdist twists, Raised in Captivity explores the guilt, self-punishment, and redemption in the lives of two estranged and equally odd siblings when they reunite at the funeral of their mother--whose demise was caused by nothing less than an errant showerhead.
THE STORY: After their plane crashes, Phyllis, and her son, Bishop, are stranded on a desert island for five years. During their stay, Bishop is transformed from a stuttering, Katherine Hepburn-obsessed little boy, in to a feral savage who eventual
THE STORY: Amanda, an anorexic poet of some pretensions, has been married for three weeks, but her husband, Ford, has been missing for two. She calls a crisis hot line and reaches Bea, a volunteer. Bea's answer to Amanda's problems is to diminish t
THE STORY: An absurdist black comedy about the demise of the Duncan family, and, by extension, the species. Emma Duncan, a hypochondriac with memory problems, and her orphaned fiancé, Tommy, confront her mother, Grace, with the news of their intend
Contemporary Scenes for Actors: Women collects scenes from the most acclaimed and award-winning playwrights of the 1990s. It contains over 40 two-character scenes (for women/women and women/men), with the selection of scenes encompassing the widest range of styles from serious to comic and shades in between. A fuller appreciation of the dramatic context of the scenes is enhanced by the editors' introductions and commentaries. Each of the scenes offers the actor the opportunity to develop and explore the vital, dynamic and unique challenge of working with a partner on stage.
The “villainous homosexual” has long stalked America’s cultural imagination, most explicitly in the figure of the queer murderer, a character in dozens of plays. But as society’s understanding of homosexuality has changed, so has the significance of these controversial characters, especially when employed by LGBT theater artists themselves to explore darker fears and desires. Murder Most Queer examines the shifting meanings of murderous LGBT characters in American theater over a century, showing how these representations wrestle with and ultimately subvert notions of gay villainy. Murder Most Queer works to expose the forces that create the homophobic paradigm that imagines sexual an...
THE STORIES: CLAIRE, the first piece, finds a beautiful matron who might have walked out of a Noel Coward play. Claire is trying to recover from an incident that occurred in the morning, an incident that brought home, all too painfully, the reality