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The powerful collection of stories, set in the Northwest among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection went on to become one of the most influential pieces of literary fiction.

"Let the things that happen on stage be just as complex yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up." Thus Chekhov summed up the credo that finds expression in the subtle construction and electrically charged atmosphere of his plays. In these portrayals of human beings trapped in a stultifying weakness as by the greed of others, the most casual words and everyday actions assume the import of acts of destiny. Tragedy is mingled with farce, protest wars with a resignation, in a moral affirmation - an affirmation that stands as the final mark and measure of Chekhov's art. As Robert Brustein declares: "...in the modern theater...there are none who bring the drama to a higher realization of its human role."

This compassionate play reveals friendship and fear in the age of AIDS. Jody is in his forties and runs a map store. Not one for the outside world, he stays in his store all the time. His friend, Carl is in his late thirties and has been bringing home chairs of dead friends into Jody's store and leaving them there. When Jody has to take an AIDS test, Carl tries to convince him it is not only okay to leave the store, but that he must also take responsibility for his life. If he doesn't, he will join the set of chairs that Carl has taken great pains to place in the right spots around the store. Through their interaction, the two realize how lucky they are to have such a strong lasting friendship. Jody finally leaves the map store to take the HIV test and returns to find Carl sitting in a chair of his own. With this gesture, we know that Carl has joined the many of their friends who have died, but now Jody must take Carl's place as the caretaker.

Sigourney Weaver plays a woman who has been subjected to torture and rape under a previous government regime. One day, by chance, her husband (Stuart Wilson) brings home a man she is sure was her torturer - even though she was blindfolded and only ever heard his voice. Faced with her husband's incredulity she takes the situation into her own hands and holds the man hostage, demanding his confession. Ben Kingsley plays the mild-mannered doctor who may or may not have been guilty of these terrible crimes.

"Laughing wild amid severe woe." perfectly describes the fiercely ironic comedy of Christopher Durang's most recent play (which takes its title from this Thomas Gray quotation via Samuel Beckett) and the previously unpublished Baby with the Bathwater. In Laughing Wild, two comic monologues evolve into a man's and a woman's shared nightmare of modern life and the isolation it creates. From her turf battles at the supermarket to the desperate clichés of self-affirmation he learns at his "personality workshop," they run the gamut of everyday life's small brutalizations until they meet, with disastrous inevitability, at the Harmonic Convergence in Central Park.

Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned scholar and professor of English who has spent years and years studying and teaching the brilliant and difficult metaphysical sonnets of John Donne, has been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. Her approach to the study of Donne has been aggressively probing and intensely rational. But during the course of her illness - and her stint as a prize patient in an experimental chemotherapy program at a major teaching hospital - Vivian comes to reassess her life and her work with a profundity and humor that are transformative both for her and the audience.

The Tony Award-winning play that soars at the intersection of science and art, Copenhagen is an explosive reimagining of the mysterious wartime between two Nobel laureates to discuss the atomic bomb. In 1941 the German physicist Werner Heisenberg made a strange trip to see his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr. They were old friends and close colleagues, and they had revolutionized atomic physics in the 1920s with their work together on quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle. But now the world had changed, and the two men were on opposite sides in a world war. The meeting was fraught with danger and embarrassment; it ended in disaster.

Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

It is Christmas of 1183, and Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine are, for once, together in the drafty castle at Chinon. For all their regal status, they are much like any long-estranged but inseparably married couple: Henry flaunts his new mistress, Eleanor plots against him with their sons. They will do anything they can to hurt each other. And they love each other to distraction.

Without William Shakespeare, we wouldn't have literary masterpieces like Romeo and Juliet. But without Henry Codell and John Heminges, we would have lost half of Shakespeare's plays forever! After the death of their friend and mentor, the two actors are determined to compile the First Folio and preserve the words that shaped their lives. They'll just have to borrow, beg, and band together to get it done. Amidst the noise and color of Elizabethan London, THE BOOK OF WILL finds an unforgettable true story of love, loss, and laughter, and sheds new light on a man you may think you know.

Sex Diary of an Infidel weaves a cunning web of truth, lies, self-delusion and depravity, set against the backgrounds of Manila and Melbourne. Jean, an award-winning journalist, travels to the Philippines to write an exposé of Australian sex tours. Blackmail and revolution were not in the original brief, but as the lives of the six infidels mesh together, there are no rules and many surprises.

These six plays span nearly twenty years of theatre and display the range of Lillian Hellman's dramatic gifts. The Children's Hour (1934), her first play, was considered shocking at the time; it concerns the devastating effects of a child's malicious charge of lesbianism against two of her teachers. Days to Come (1936) is about the tragic consequences of strike-breaking in a small Midwestern community. The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1946) together constitute a chilling study of the financial and psychological conflicts within the Hubbards, a wealthy and rapacious Southern family. Watch on the Rhine (1941), the story of how fascism affects an American family and the refugees they harbor, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The Autumn Garden (1951) is a poignant yet humorous drama set at a summer resort near New Orleans.