Hippies and Bolsheviks and Other Plays collects three works by Amiel Gladstone, introducing a wide range of fascinating characters and a formidable new voice in Canadian drama. In The Wedding Pool, three single friends in unsatisfactory jobs decide to place a bet on who will marry first. The friends – waitress and wannabe dancer Sylvia, rock critic Miles and inventory manager Dave – open a joint account to which they each contribute $50 a month, the final sum to be collected by the first to tie the knot. But when Miles starts dating the bank teller who opens their account, the friends realize much more is at stake and are forced to consider their individual fears and failings. In Lena’s Car, a woman whose marriage has stalled reflects on how it got to that point, harkening back to her youth, when she was just a Young Girl in a Small Town Looking for Trouble. Picking over the memories of her adolescence, she attempts to figure out why she ended up in a disintegrating relationship and just when her life became like everyone else's. Hippies and Bolsheviks set in 1970s British Columbia, a hotbed of hippie idealism, is a comedy based on the big ideas of the long-haired revolution. Star stumbles home from a Led Zeppelin concert with a draft dodger. A bizarre love triangle develops the next morning as Allan (Green Tree), a defector from the same commune Star fled, shows up on her doorstep. As The Establishment gains more ground, three dropouts struggle to hold on to their ideals.
Newly published as a stand-alone edition, Vogel’s widely celebrated masterpiece How I Learned to Drive was the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Obie and Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Play, and other honors. Known for its dark subject matter, the play examines the effects of child abuse on identity and the discovery of strength through trauma.
The premise of this witty and insightful "play on history" is that Karl Marx has agitated with the authorities of the afterlife for a chance to clear his name. Through a bureaucratic error, though, Marx is sent to Soho in New York, rather than his old stomping ground in London, to make his case.<br><br>Zinn introduces us to Marx's wife, Jenny, his children, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and a host of other characters.<br><br>Marx in Soho is a brilliant introduction to Marx's life, his analysis of society, and his passion for radical change. Zinn also shows how relevant Marx's ideas are for today's world.
A play in two acts about Emma Goldman, American Anarchist. In this play, historian and playwright Howard Zinn dramatizes the life of Emma Goldman, the anarchist, feminist, and free-spirited thinker<br>who was exiled from the United States because of her outspoken views, including her opposition to WWI. With his wit and ability to illuminate history from below, Zinn reveals the life of this remarkable woman.
This is a book of short stories that deals mainly with the Western part of the United States.
Edited and introduced by Cairns Craig and Randall Stevenson. Ever since the major revival of dramatic writing and production in the 1970s, the style and the subject matter of Scottish writing for stage and screen has been a continuing influence on our contemporary culture, exciting, offending and challenging audiences in equal measure. Yet modern Scottish drama has a history of controversy, conflict and entertainment going back to the 1920s, notable at every turn for the vigour of its language and its direct confrontation with telling issues. The plays in this anthology offer a unique chance to grasp the different topics and also the recurrent themes of Scottish drama in the twentieth century. Gathered together in a single omnibus volume, there is the poetic eeriness of Barrie and the political commitment of Joe Corrie and Sue Glover; there is the Brechtian debate of Bridie and the verbal brilliance of John Byrne and Liz Lochhead; there is working-class experience and feminist insight; broad Scots and existential anxiety; street realism and a meeting with the devil; social injustice and raucous humour; historical comedy and tragic loss. Here is both the breadth and the continuity of the modern Scottish tradition in a single volume.
A companion to UEP’s Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (now in its third reprint). A genre that has left more of a mark on British and American culture than we may imagine” (Gothic Studies). London’s Grand Guignol was established in the early 1920s at the Little Theatre in the West End. It was a high-profile venture that enjoyed popular success as much as critical controversy. On its side were some of the finest actors on the English stage, in the shape of Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, and a team of extremely able writers, including Noël Coward. London's Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror considers the importance and influence of the English Grand Guignol within its social, cultural and historical contexts. It also presents a selection of ten remakarble English-language Grand Guignol plays, some of which were banned by the Lord Chamberlain, the censor of the day, and have never been published or publicly performed. Among the plays in the book is a previously unpublished work by Noël Coward, The Better Half , first performed at the Little Theatre in 1922. The reviewer in the journal Gothic Studies wrote, of the authors’ previous book: “having recently taught a module on Grand Guignol with third year drama students, it is also worth noting that this book captured their imaginations in a way that few other set texts seem to manage.”
Relationships in their comic and dramatic variety are at the core of this collection of what playwright Victor L. Cahn calls «chamber plays.» All dramatize relationships between two people: sometimes to find love, sometimes to find self-assurance or power. All are also distinguished by an elegant wit and stylistic sophistication that makes these works literary as well as theatrical delights.
The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd , written immediately after Sons and Lovers, is one of D. H. Lawrence's most significant early works. The play, Lawrence's first, is the alter ego of the story «Odour of Chrysanthemums» and, like the short story, deals with a catastrophe in the lives of a coal mining family. Drawing upon the intensity of events that unfold in the miner's kitchen, the play explores a marriage bowed under the weight of a husband's drinking and infidelity and peers into the strange, burgeoning relationship between the neglected wife, Mrs. Holroyd, and the young electrician in whom she seeks emotional refuge. First published in 1914, The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd is a bare tracing of the ways in which a marriage has gone wrong.