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Readers and audiences have long greeted As You Like It with delight. Its characters are brilliant conversationalists, including the princesses Rosalind and Celia and their Fool, Touchstone. Soon after Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall in love, the princesses and Touchstone go into exile in the Forest of Arden, where they find new conversational partners. Duke Frederick, younger brother to Duke Senior, has overthrown his brother and forced him to live homeless in the forest with his courtiers, including the cynical Jaques. Orlando, whose older brother Oliver plotted his death, has fled there, too. Recent scholars have also grounded the play in the issues of its time. These include primogeniture, passing property from a father to his oldest son. As You Like It depicts intense conflict between brothers, exposing the human suffering that primogeniture entails. Another perspective concerns cross-dressing. Most of Orlando’s courtship of Rosalind takes place while Rosalind is disguised as a man, “Ganymede.” At her urging, Orlando pretends that Ganymede is his beloved Rosalind. But as the epilogue reveals, the sixteenth-century actor playing Rosalind was male, following the practice of the time. In other words, a boy played a girl playing a boy pretending to be a girl.

Porcelain is an examination of a young man's crime of passion. Triply scorned - as an Asian, a homosexual, and now a murderer - nineteen-year-old John Lee has confessed to shooting his lover in a public lavatory in London. Porcelain dissects the crime through a prism of conflicting voices: newscasts, flashbacks, and John's recollections to a prison psychiatrist. A Language of Their Own is a lyrical and dramatic meditation on the nature of desire and sexuality as four men - three Asian and one white - come together and drift apart in a series of interconnecting stories.

The celebrated play that draws from historical events in the Norman conquest of England to create a profound portrait of a man's soul—and a transcendent vision of the human spirit From its powerful opening scene, of a naked King Henry II praying at the tomb of Thomas Becket, to the final wrenching act of ultimate self-sacrifice, Jean Anouilh's Becket remains a towering achievement in the history of the theatre. Winner of the Antoinette Perry Award for Best Play of the Season, Anouilh's monumental work—introduced in this edition by the acclaimed writer and critic Andre Aciman—draws from historical events in the Norman conquest of England to paint a profound and enduring portrait of the saint and martyr.

Peter Harness’ Mongoose: “A darkly charming fairytale.”—The Times (London). Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas: “About a boozy, rancorous Irish theatre critic who finds himself working for a group of vampires . . . wholly compelling.”—Sunday Telegraph. Ronan O’Donnell’s Brazil: “Like Mark O’Rowe and Enda Walsh, the Scottish O’Donnell has an ear for dialect—intoxicated writing larded with cynicism.”—The Times(London)

Renowned as Shakespeare's most boisterous comedy, The Taming of the Shrew is the tale of two young men, the hopeful Lucentio and the worldly Petruchio, and the two sisters they meet in Padua. Lucentio falls in love with Bianca, the apparently ideal younger daughter of the wealthy Baptista Minola. But before they can marry, Bianca's formidable elder sister, Katherine, must be wed. Petruchio, interested only in the huge dowry, arranges to marry Katherine -against her will- and enters into a battle of the sexes that has endured as one of Shakespeare's most enjoyable works.

The thirteen ten-minute plays in this collection--comedies of various ilk--are the best of the scripts written for Gardner-Webb University's "24 HOURS," a bi-annual play festival in which the entire event is created in just twenty-four hours. "24 HOURS" is an initiative of the theater program at GWU dedicated to developing new plays and training undergraduates in the craft of play production. The plays in this collection were created by students for students and express the worldview of a generation coming of age.

The eighth annual collection of new plays.

No one I think can disagree that the theatrical season 2007-2008 was one of the strongest in terms of new plays in recent memory. Amazingly, more than a handful escaped the critics' clutches, though some fine new plays deserved better than the drubbing they received. One thinks of Theresa Rebeck's Mauritius, Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Little Flower of East Orange, and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's Good Boys and True-though none of these excellent plays would have made this book, as none are by new playwrights. Of the plays included herein, only one was produced outside New York. Usually, I try to include at least three plays produced by regional theaters. This year I read several, but I just couldn't get as worked up about them as I did the plays I selected. It was also a good year for comedy, lately generally unwelcome on our stages unless it's dark, satiric, and cynical. It is hard for me, usually, to find comedies worthy of inclusion in my new playwrights book. Not this year! The Butcher of Baraboo, Election Day, and Spain are comedies. The first two plays were produced by Second Stage as part of their summer series. The Butcher of Baraboo is about a small-town woman whose husband has disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and the town gossips suspect that she done it. Election Day is about a local mayoral election and examines with amusing dexterity why we vote the way we do. Spain was produced Off Broadway by MCC at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. It's about a young woman who believes that there's a sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador in her living room. Harvest is a touching drama about a farmer who refuses to give up his farm, even ashe is going under. He manages to hold onto his farm but not his wife, who didn't bargain for a life of poverty and struggle. Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom is a drama about a group of teenagers in a suburban neighborhood obsessed with an online video game set in their community, who come to believe that they are being invaded by aliens from outer space-who look suspiciously like their parents. It was produced to acclaim by Actors Theatre of Louisville at their 2008 Humana Festival and subsequently at the 2008 Summer Play Festival in New York. 100 Saints You Should Know comes to us from Playwrights Horizons and is about a single mom looking for something to believe in and a Catholic priest who has decided to leave the church as he has lost his faith. Unconditional was produced by LAByrinth Theater Company at The Public Theater. Of its three disparate stories, the central one is about a human resources worker who becomes enraged when he is laid off after many years on the job and just a short while from retirement and the pension he was counting on. All these plays represent the best of American playwriting. I hope you like them as much as I do, but more important, I hope you produce them! -Lawrence Harbison Brooklyn, New York

These plays represent three phases in the career of the dramatist Girish Karnad, all three are classics of the Indian stage. The first play, Tughlaq, is a historical play in the manner of nineteenth-century Parsee theater. The second, Hayavadana was one of the first modern Indian plays to employ traditional theatrical techniques. In Naga-Mandala, the third play, Karnad turns to oral tales, usually narrated by women. This selected work of one of India's best known playwrights should attract the attention of students and scholars of comparative literature, or any reader interested in South Asian literature.

The Humana Festival, now in its 18th year, has to date produced 170 new works. The writers who have begun or burnished their careers in this venue read like the Who's Who of American playwriting, and the plays themselves are peformed every day of every week of every year somewhere in the world.

Keeper by Frederick Bailey, Misreadings by Neena Beber, Under Lubianka Square by Constance Congdon, Head On by Elizabeth Dewberry, Courting Prometheus by Charles Forbes, A New Life by Corinne Jacker, Off the Rack by Robert D. Kemnitz and Jennifer McMaster, Reverse Transcription by Tony Kushner, Waterbabies by Adam LeFevre, Just One Night by Kim Levin, Compatible by Anna Li, Stars by Romulus Linney, What I Meant Was by Craig Lucas, Making the Call by Jane Martin, The Sin-Eater by Don Nigro, August Afternoon by Rich Orloff, 187 by José Rivera, If Susan Smith Could Talk by Elaine Romero, Gave Her the Eye by Mayo Simon, The League of Semi-Super Heroes by Valerie Smith and Michael Bigelow Dixon, The Unintended Video by Dale Griffiths Stamos, Median by John Stinson, The Guest of Honor by Richard Strand, Token to the Moon by Brian Christopher Williams, and Contract With Jackie by Jimmy Breslin.

Nothing is quite what it seems in David Mamet's latest work. With a nod to his mentor, Harold Pinter, Mamet once again employs his signature verbal jousting in this battle of two women over freedom, power, money, religion—and the lack thereof. Broadway premiere, under the direction of the playwright, in fall 2012 starring Patti LuPone and Debra Winger.