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In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen places his main characters, Dr. Thomas Stockman, in the role of an enlightened and persecuted minority of one confronting an ignorant, powerful majority. When the physician learns that the famous and financially successful baths in his hometown are contaminated, he insists they be shut down for expensive repairs. For his honesty, he is persecuted, ridiculed, and declared an "enemy of the people" by the townspeople, included some who have been his closest allies.

This group of dramas by some of the finest established American writers of one-act plays will be a stimulating and enriching experience whether they are read privately, by informal groups or in classrooms. Each is an outstanding example of storytelling in play form. Some are tragic, some comic, some melodramatic, some fantasies. They represent a wide variety in locales and a great diversity in characters. Each, in its own way, shows how a gifted author has transformed his point of view, his attitudes toward life, his experiences and his observations into an effective dramatization.

The patriarch of the family is dying and James, his estranged son, appears unexpectedly. He can remember nothing about a mysterious moment that occurred in the family's potting shed when he was 14-years-old. Family members who recall the event are unwilling to describe it to him. With the help of a psychoanalyst, James tries to recall just what happened that day that left him rejected by his father, alienated from his family, and alone in the world.

Maggie is a newly single, junk-food-binging shoplifter looking to change her life and her self-hating ways. Paul is her passionately convicted, formerly four-hundred-pound compulsive-overeating sponsor in a twelve-step program for recovering thieves. Maggie's jealous ex-boyfriend is a charismatic wannabe Puerto Rican small-time thief of uncertain ancestry named Flaco who spins a grammatically challenged but persuasive yarn about seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in unprotected drug money sitting in a safe in a downtown disco guarded by an easily distracted crackhead. This dubious and ragtag would-be criminal crew is rounded out by Flaco's new girlfriend, the fabulous Boochie—a malaprop-slinging topless dancer who refuses to let her troubled childhood or her third-grade reading level stand in the way of her inevitable path to fame, fortune and fur. When things don't quite go according to plan, this bickering quartet of hapless thieves finds themselves at the mercy of Louie "The Little Tuna" Pescatore, a reluctant, donut-ingesting heir to the criminal empire run by his father—"The Big Tuna"—who has left him in charge for the weekend. The penalty for stealing from the Tuna is death—"Ba Da Bing, Ba Da Boom." But Louie offers them a break: "I need one body and three thumbs, you can choose the who, whys and wherefores among yourselves." Tied to chairs and able to move only their mouths, they must now fight for their lives by out-arguing each other as to who deserves to live. Verbal gymnastics and the struggle for self-awareness, self-acceptance and self-love produce a high-octane battle for survival that's not resolved until the last donut falls.

The brilliant, promising Emma Joseph proudly carries the torch of her family's Marxist tradition, devoting her life to the memory of her blacklisted grandfather. But when history reveals a shocking truth about the man himself, the entire family is forced to confront questions of honesty and allegiance they thought had been resolved. AFTER THE REVOLUTION is a bold and moving portrait of an American family, thrown into an intergenerational tailspin, forced to reconcile a thorny and delicate legacy.

The White Liars depicts a fateful encounter between a down-and-out fortune teller, a rock musician, and his agent. The agent bribes Baroness Lemberg to fake some hocus-pocus over a crystal ball, ostensibly to discourage the musician from pursuing his girlfriend. The trickery entangles each of them in a dense web of mendacity.

Two dozen classic dramas by some of the finest and most famous playwrights of the last hundred years--Anton Chekhov, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, and A.A. Milne.

In these three plays, Federico García Lorca’s acknowledged masterpieces, he searched for a contemporary mode of tragedy and reminded his audience that dramatic poetry—or poetic drama—depends less on formal convention that on an elemental, radical outlook on human life. His images are beautiful and exact, but until now no translator had ever been able to make his characters speak unaffectedly on the American stage. Michael Dewell of the National Repertory Theatre and Carmen Zapata of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts have created these versions expressly for the stage. The results, both performable and readable, have been thoroughly revised for this edition, which has an introduction by Christopher Maurer, the general editor of the Complete Poetical Works of García Lorca.

He's just like you, except worse. He is trying to save his life, to save your life—in that order. In his quest for salvation, he'll stop at nothing, be distracted by nothing, except maybe a piece of lint, or the woman in the second row.

An absurdist masterpiece in the Touchstone Theatre. A fading ruler at the helm of a world in decline, King Berenger is having some trouble accepting his fate. His first wife, Marguerite, is intent on forcing him to face his mortality, while his second wife, Marie, wants to shield him from the bad news.

Two cops. Three crooks. Eight doors. Go. In a cheap motel room, an embezzling mayor is supposed to meet with his female accountant, while in the room next-door, two undercover cops wait to catch the meeting on videotape. But there's some confusion as to who's in which room, who's being videotaped, who's taken the money, who's hired a hit man, and why the accountant keeps taking off her clothes.

This volume contains Ibsen's two most famous and frequently read, studied and performed plays about women: A Doll's House (1879), his first international success, which 'exploded like a bomb into contemporary life', and Hedda Gabler (1890), now one of his most popular plays, but greeted at first with bewilderment and outrage ('The play is simply a bad escape of moral sewage-gas' Pictorial World). Also included is An Enemy of the People (1883), whose central character was the actor Konstantin Stanislavski's favourite role.