Brilliant, prolific, uniquely American, Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Sam Separd is a major voice in contemporary theatre. And here are seven of his very best. "One of the most original, prolific and gifted dramatists at work today."--"The New Yorker" "The greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft, [he] is the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes...

The theatre of Tennessee Williams presents, in matching format, the plays of one of America's most consistently influential and innovative dramatists. The first five volumes of this ongoing series contain Williams' full-length plays through 1975 and, in addition to the texts themselves, include original cast listings and production notes. Volumes VI and VII contain Williams' collected shorter plays. Now available as a paperbook, Volume VIII adds...

""A born storyteller with perfect pitch."--The New York Times "Greatly and bilaterally talented. spiky, stinging, caustic without cauterizing. And funny."--New York One of America's premier performers and most innovative and provocative artists offers his two newest plays: Skunkweed details the culture clash between a Los Angeles screenwriter and a working-class girl and her rural Florida clan in a hotel room, and 1+1 explores desire, greed, and responsibility...

The settings range from a native-ruled island in the west Indies to a university town in New England, but the theme is universal--the eternal tragedy of man caught in passionate conflict between aspiration and frustration. O'Neill's plays explore man's continuing need to give the conflict of his life some meaning beyond itself, to find some justification for the importance which it has for him; the plays themselves are efforts to achieve a self-justifying...

Presents fourteen short and experimental plays from Sam Shepard's early career, including "The Unseen Hand"; "The Rock Garden"; "Chicago"; "Red Cross"; and "Killer's Head."

Six acclaimed plays by Lillian Hellman span nearly twenty years of the American theater from 1934 to 1951.

When it was first produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for that season and hailed as a watershed in American drama. A pioneering work by an African-American playwright, the play was a radically new representation of black life. "A play that changed American theater forever." The story tells of a Black family's experiences in south Chicago, as they attempt to improve their financial circumstances...

The scene is the living room/kitchen of 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 a 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. At first...